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Jason Epstein and Digital Books
Jason Epstein is no Luddite. One of his recent projects is the Espresso Book Machine, a print-on-demand device that produces a library-quality paperback book at the point of sale. Epstein worries about the implications of digital publishing:
That the contents of the world’s libraries will eventually be accessed practically anywhere at the click of a mouse is not an unmixed blessing. Another click might obliterate these same contents and bring civilization to an end: an overwhelming argument, if one is needed, for physical books in the digital age.
Digital books migh facilitate unparalleled central control over content; as Amazon.com recently proved, the end-user never really “owns” a digital text.Physical books are likely to survive, though, if only because authors will require some such artifact in return for months or years of solitary labor. Epstein proposes an interesting revenue model where ebooks would be sold by subscription. Since DRM isn’t going away (writers have to eat), the “lending library” model “more accurately reflects the conditional relationships, enforced by digital rights management software, between content providers and end-users”. Such models were common in the Great Depression and in 19th Century Great Britain. This was posted 5 months ago. It has 0 notes.
