you make some great points and I agree with you, the whole eBooks vs paper books argument is getting us nowhere and frankly it’s pointless. Paper books have their place and advantages, as do eBooks… and as technologies continue to evolve some of the advantages currently held by paper books have will move over to eBooks, but paper will always have it place.

as to DRM, I personally believe it will eventually disappear, the same way it did in the music industry (you only have to look at iTunes and the majority of other online music providers to see that)… the same will happen in the movie and TV industries, and it’s likely to be a lot sooner than we imagine (let’s face it, BluRay was the winner of the “last” physical format war). VHS tapes and recordable DVD’s didn’t kill the Movie industry, the same way recordable CD’s didn’t kill the music industry, it’s still going and making plenty of money. Yes those industries have transformed in recent years and they will continue to evolve, but they’re still going… the publishing industry will go the same way, and as you say, those that embrace the changes will prosper, while those that resist won’t.

“It’s not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change” Charles Darwin may have been writing about a different subject, but it’s easy to apply the same principle to business… publishing houses that bury their heads in the sand or live in denial will become extinct.

as I posted on my personal blog only a few days ago “If a competitor is hell bent on pushing forwards when you’re content to sit still, don’t be surprised when they win”

thanks again, I look forward to reading your future posts and will search through your blog for other nuggets
Brendan Mitchell

You touch on some really valid points regarding permanence on the web. I thought it would be worthwhile to touch on the concept with a few concepts:

1. Citation – Most academic citation formats for electronic materials now include some form of “Accessed on” date to somewhat establish a canonical version of the cited resource. Since the person using that resource for their research is relying on it at that moment, the burden of proof lies with them. As such, it’s good practice to keep an archived copy of the work.

2. Revision Control – Since sites do change, it’s become common practice to maintain a database of not only the current version, but revisions as well. Sometimes this information is internal-only, but other times it’s publicly-accessible. The best-known example of this is Wikipedia. If you were relying on a quote or fact from Wikipedia, it might be a good idea to link to a revision from the history rather than a base article URL.

3. Metadata – Some revision control is less formal. Bloggers often just add a little update section to the bottom of the post to indicate edits. This is also quite common in the News industry. I haven’t looked at the ePub spec in any detail, but it would seem pretty straightforward to extend the spec or create a new standard for eBook revisions. Rather than maintaining entire versions, the book’s edits could be stored within the work as Git-like changes. This could be facilitated with the del and ins html tags, for instance.

4. Uniform Resources – As with the linking-to-a-revision Wikipedia example, resources should have a uniform means to name or locate them in their namespace. Since an edited edition is intrinsically different than the edition prior edits, it is a different resources and should therefore have some means of differentiating it. The web, and many other things (such as books with ISBNs), are based on the concept of URIs, be they URLs or URNs.

You make a very good, interesting point about online phone databases. I wonder whether (and if so, when) providers might start providing legacy data. I have a feeling that if they’re not explicitly designing their systems to be capable of such a thing that at least they have backups in place to make it possible.

Textual Fixity – A printed book of a specific edition can be referenced and will ALWAYS say the same thing, but an electronic book doesn’t have the same permenance –if you reference an electronic work, there’s nothing to prevent it from being changed (corrections made, etc.) and therefore no longer supporting your own work. Much scholarship is built on the work of others, but it becomes more difficult to build on a shifting foundation –and electronic work doesn’t have the permanence and unchangability of the printed word.

An example – Bowker’s Books in Print was a book published every year showing the books that were in-print for that year. This and a lot of reference items are now only produced electronically. In the future, someone doing research may want that information for certain years –prior to 2000, there would be no problem, but after that, they would have to rely electronic information which may or may not be accessable. For example, is the data constantly updated –future researchers will not be able to get a snapshot in time. Or maybe the previous editions are only on CD-ROMs –but in twenty years, that may be as hard to read as a 5 1/4″ floppy disk is today –or maybe harder. Also, how long does electronic information remain uncorrupted?

Geneaologists often use city directories and phone books –but if they stop being printed, what will be used in 100 years. We may have several decades at the beginning of the 21st century that will be harder to do research on than the previous 150 years.

I see the e-books in libraries situation a little differently. Publishers don’t want libraries to lend things they can otherwise profit from. Libraries shouldn’t necessarily want to enter that arena, either.

Also important is the nature of the publishing industry. We’ve switched in most other respects from media companies deciding what we should consume for us to having infinite and free choice. Good content finds its audience. As you’ve noted, the price of e-books is low compared to a hardcover book. But does that price reflect the fair market value, given the licensing restrictions and middle-man fees?

The future of e-books, in my mind, has fewer big players, more one-man shops, and Free-and/or-ad-supported-to-$5 prices. Netflix-like “streaming” subscriptions could also be popular. An open marketplace of e-books would better facilitate this, but open web technologies could pick up slack in that arena.

Additionally, the distinction between things like books, magazines, blogs, and other formats will be further blurred, since they’re often consumed from one device; sometimes all within one app. This is a big driver for the pricing changes I envision: people have free or ad-supported substitutes to e-books that are currently more convenient.

Those were the first things that came to mind. Thank you for the thought-provoking post!