Why no eBook kiosks?

[yvanleterrible]

Wi-Fi ? I can already see Spam all over that. Thanks to the movie "Minority Report".

We really need "solid state ebooks".

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by yvanleterrible

Thanks to the movie "Minority Report".

Wasn't that more "Eye-Fi?"


These kiosks could serve up solid state ebooks -- just dispense them on a low-capacity card, 2Mb ought to do it.

[nekokami]

Originally Posted by NatCh

Copy the file? Go ahead but it won't open anywhere but on that SD card. I still think this could work.

You're probably right. But I don't see this as much of an advantage over restricting use to a specific machine (desktop or reader), which I think is absurd. Using some kind of account number (bank/credit card or purchasing account for an online eBook store) is acceptable, even if it does assume that I'm a thief when I'm not. I won't be wanting to give my CC number or store account number out and have other people running up a bill in my name. But any system which restricts my use to only one piece of hardware of any type is evil. There will come a time when CF cards won't be readable any more, because the industry will have moved on to some new format. Paper has a track record of hundreds or thousands of years of "backward compatability." Why should I give that up to have my books locked into a temporary format?

The only exception to this problem that I can readily think of is newspapers. That's pretty ephemeral stuff, and I could accept only being able to download it to a preregistered CF card or similar. You should still be able to copy a couple of articles out of the whole paper into some other storage format, though.

[NatCh]

The idea is that you could sell, lend, give away your book if you wanted to. Basically everything you can do with a paper book

The reason that paper has hung around so long is that, yes it's extremely versitile, but it's also in very wide usage.

If SD cards, for instance, were to become the de facto standard (due to wide usage) for a solid state ebook, then that very standardness would enforce a certain amount of longevity on the format. Think about it, how much is now still on paper because it's always been on paper?

Books don't typically need that much actual storage space, so there's not really much pressure to upgrade to a denser format, 2Mb would do for most books, and there are 4Gb cards out there -- we wouldn't outgrow the media's capacity for a while with just books.

I'm not saying that this is a perfect solution, only that it seems to have enough merit for further consideration.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

I agree. And if the transaction is limited to downloading it onto your storage card, it can be left up to you what you read it on. Even let someone else read it via copy-paste (does the newspaper care who you give your paper to, once you've bought it?). If the card has your account info, you won't give it away, and you'll only share it with close acquaintences. And if you want to save it, you can store the file elsewhere, like on your hard drive, in whatever format you choose.

[Bob Russell]

Isn't the issue the DRM protection that publishers require? (If there's no DRM, then we can already put one book per card pretty cheaply. I think some people have even said that they prefer that tactile benefit for organizing e-books. I suppose it also adds more importance to each book compared to just a file on a CD-ROM or hard drive with many more books.)

But once you enable devices to read it, you enable them to copy it. So if you don't want to allow them to copy from it, then you have to tie it to specific devices and/or reader software. But we can do that without tying it to a physical card.

There must be some advantage, because many people seem to want this, and it keeps coming up. I just don't get it. Why would we gain by tying an e-book to a physical storage card?

[yvanleterrible]

For those who missed it, there was a previous discussion on the subject of "solid state ebooks"

I really believe that ebooks sold this way would calm many of the issues that e-publishers have with the actual distribution ways.

A few years back,(many few ) before the popularity of internet, or even before cdroms for that matter, one could go in a computer store and buy disquettes containing games or software. This is what I envision for those who do not have computers. You buy ebooks burned on cheap 2 mb SDs. Sure you can't browse the book. But this is trade off for the practicalities of a reader.

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by Bob Russell

Why would we gain by tying an e-book to a physical storage card?

Well, I apparently haven't been terribly successfull at explaining this before, but I'll give it another shot.

Keep in mind that I'm answering mostly from my own perspective, so salt to taste.

Part of it is that it would keep a book a "thing," allowing selling lending and such. To me, I like the idea of having that physical token to match to the book, the file on disk ... lacks something, somehow. Purely a psycological issue, I know.

Another part is to try and take the DRM out of the file itself, and tie it to a physical thing of some sort, like the old security dongles.

If you could set up a card that allowed reading a file, but not wholesale copying, then you'd get the security of DRM, without a lot of its more burdensome limitations.

The idea I mentioned about ecrypting the file to the card's (notional) serial number would give you a file that could only be decrypted from the card it was legitimately placed on to begin with. It would require that the file be encapsulated as well, I suppose, in some sort of controller app that would go find that card SN, decrypt the file, and then serve the text up in chunks.

The file itself could be copied off wholesale, but it could only be read by activating the decrypter app, which would only work if it found the correct card SN in the expected place. (A lot of this is based on conjecture, as I don't even know if such a SN exists, per se).

Could someone write a program to simply query the encapsulating app for "servings" of text, and then recombine them into a complete, unencrypted file? Sure they could, but if the situation is such that you can already do what you want to with the file in terms of reading, lending, selling (burning ), in the first place, the pressure to do that would be pretty small, and the interest in using it would fall to that fringe of society that isn't going to pay for their books in the first place.

I suppose at its root, the idea of a solid state e-book is just another avenue of exploration in search of a Holy Grail of DRM, one that discourages casual piracy down to the level of diminishing returns, but stays out of the way of honest users (the vast majority, after all), as much as a paper book does, while still protecting the intellectual propery's owners' rights to a reasonable degree. I'm not suggesting that it's the only way that will work, nor even that it will work, just that it ought to be looked at.

And of course, there's the factor that lots of SciFi refers to future readers popping a "book tape" into their reading devices. Shouldn't we respect the oracles of our future?

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Well... I'm mainly thinking of newspapers here, something that would allow a fresh download onto a storage card every day.

Actually, given the small storage capacity needed for newspapers or e-books, I'm not sure an SD card is the appropriate storage medium. Maybe it should be something more like a credit card sized card, with about 5-10MB of memory on a data chip or strip, and capable of being scanned or input into a slot. A CC-storage device will be easier to handle, and to brand, and won't seem wasteful compared to SD cards holding a few MB of files.

For a daily newspaper, I think that would be more ideal than an SD card. But that's probably opening up a whole new can of worms...

[yvanleterrible]

Completely agree!

There is an other way of preventing copy that may at first look stupid but that may work. Make them way cheap! An e-book sold at 3bucks a pop makes it too difficult to distribute for a pirate, maybe not book traders (they are not the ones who hurt the most), but those who want to make money off of piracy.

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

For a daily newspaper, I think that would be more ideal than an SD card. But that's probably opening up a whole new can of worms...

Nah, I'm not stuck on the SD cards, particularly, they're just the most obvious to me, due to availabilith and existing acceptance. If something else is a better choice, I'm good with that.

[nekokami]

I think I see the physical appeal of one card per book, but I actually want to be able to search through book text from all my books, which is harder to do if they're not all in one storage bucket. Sometimes I can't remember where I read some particular little snippet of prose, and I want to try to find it. (Kind of like when you get a bit of a tune in your head and you're trying to remember the rest of the song... well, it may not happen to you, but it happens to me, anyway.)

Now, if I had WiFi that worked everywhere, I could use Google Book Search to find those books, I suppose. At least, for those books in Google, which isn't all the books I own. (Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age isn't there, for example, which strikes me as particularly ironic.)

Also, I own thousands of books. Each has distinctive cover art and spine text, so it's not too terribily difficult to find them if I know what I'm looking for, but I think it would be harder with something like a CF card. I remember flipping through large collections of 3.5 hardshell "floppies" having trouble finding what I was looking for. Credit style cards, memory sticks, etc. would be no easier. I'd rather have searchable nested folders and a good "find" function.

Bottom line, I really think publishers of all kinds need to get over this DRM nonsense. The music industry has not collapsed since the consumerization of the CD burner or the MP3 player. If you have good content, people will pay for it. I'm with yvanleterrible on this. But that's an old argument, and I guess we all have our opinions on it, which are probably not those of the publishers.

[yvanleterrible]

Originally Posted by nekokami

I think I see the physical appeal of one card per book, but I actually want to be able to search through book text from all my books, which is harder to do if they're not all in one storage bucket. Sometimes I can't remember where I read some particular little snippet of prose, and I want to try to find it. (Kind of like when you get a bit of a tune in your head and you're trying to remember the rest of the song... well, it may not happen to you, but it happens to me, anyway.)

Now, if I had WiFi that worked everywhere, I could use Google Book Search to find those books, I suppose. At least, for those books in Google, which isn't all the books I own. (Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age isn't there, for example, which strikes me as particularly ironic.)

Also, I own thousands of books. Each has distinctive cover art and spine text, so it's not too terribily difficult to find them if I know what I'm looking for, but I think it would be harder with something like a CF card. I remember flipping through large collections of 3.5 hardshell "floppies" having trouble finding what I was looking for. Credit style cards, memory sticks, etc. would be no easier. I'd rather have searchable nested folders and a good "find" function.

Bottom line, I really think publishers of all kinds need to get over this DRM nonsense. The music industry has not collapsed since the consumerization of the CD burner or the MP3 player. If you have good content, people will pay for it. I'm with yvanleterrible on this. But that's an old argument, and I guess we all have our opinions on it, which are probably not those of the publishers.

As I've mentioned in an other thread, books could be on micro SD. If you've seen them, they are no bigger than a dime and are read, piggybacked, in a regular SD slot. It would be very easy to build (not for me ) a jukebox, no bigger than the reader itself, with at least 50 micro SD slots.

[nekokami]

Originally Posted by yvanleterrible

As I've mentioned in an other thread, books could be on micro SD. If you've seen them, they are no bigger than a dime and are read, piggybacked, in a regular SD slot. It would be very easy to build (not for me ) a jukebox, no bigger than the reader itself, with at least 50 micro SD slots.

Ok, this is good, but at one book per micro SD, I could still only have 50 books in my "library" at once. Not enough.

[yvanleterrible]

Still is better than fumbling with tiny devices in an awkward place... in the dark. You can at least have what you need in a time period. Also it beats having 50 paper books in your pockets!