Week 11: Puddle Jumping into the Past

As soon as I read this week's blogging question, I quickly thought of a period of time that would benefit from some warning about the future of the book. If I had a TARDIS, DeLorean DMC-12 with a flux capacitor, or a time-travelling magic carpet, I would travel to 1990. That's right. Only twenty-six years into the past. 

I've chosen this date for several reasons. Let me point out some granular reasons that are relevant for selection, but are not particularly related to the blog question at hand:

1. I think it would be very, very challenging to explain to people in the distant past the concept of devices that can contain hundreds and thousands of texts, but take up the space of a stack of papers. With my luck, I would transport into the past only to be declared a witch, weighed against a duck, and executed. No, thank you.
2. It is my opinion that nature should take its course. While the blogging question told us that travelling to the past would not muddle up the future timeline, I am not willing to take that risk.
3. I'm not certain that people of the past would benefit from knowing about the future of the book. Why would someone participating in the French Revolution care about the multitude of electronic devices used to house many, many works? I'm sure they have other things to worry about.

Aside from all that, I would come armed with my message: there is a future for books.

Throughout my childhood, especially with the rise of reading platforms for youth such as Leap Frog, I have been told that soon books won't be around. Common rhetoric included phrases such as, "Computers will take over how we read, and by the mid-twenty-first century, there will be fewer and fewer print books released". It was a countdown on the life span of books! It sounded like some terrible George Orwell future!

I would let those poor schmucks in the early 1990s know that the future of books not only exists, but expands to become more accessible, more available, and more celebrated. (The number of blogs, Instagram accounts, and Twitters dedicated to books and book-related paraphernalia is astounding!) Books can be purchased and enjoyed in a variety of formats: they can be hoarded and stored while taking up little physical space, or continue to fill rooms, nooks, and crannies.

This message would be important to those lamenting the technological advancements and the dismissal of analogue materials. Perhaps parents and teachers could appreciate and more readily embrace reading aids for children, especially those that struggle with literacy, comprehension, challenges, and disabilities. In fact, the future of the book comes with new and improving ways to make books more readable and accessible to a greater mass. I would hope that a little early warning or heads up would allow people to more readily accept books in their many formats, and not attach a prejudice to something they quickly recognize as different. 

Don't worry, people of the 1990s; books will remain and in many forms.

Week 10: Ownership

My experience with ownership in the digital world has mostly been towards eschewing the print or any physical copies of digital materials (such as DVDs) in favour of cloud-based solutions (e.g. e-books or TV or movies via iTunes) or streaming services.  The distinction between purchasing content via a cloud-based service and subscribing to streaming service are two leading alternatives to owning a physical print copy or copy a digital copy via a material mean (such as DVDs or CDs). I’ll explore these both in my blog post.

If I’m purchasing the music, movies, and TV that I consume, and increasingly when it comes to books, I prefer to purchase licence through a service like iTunes rather than to own a physical copy (and what being able to do with the physical copy entails). Purchasing content as licences, through a service like iTunes, offers me a better solution for managing my collections, all the while meeting my expectations to access this content (easily searchable on my computer or mobile devices). This line of thought for me is partially based on practicality and convenience.  Over the past six years, I’ve lived in six different cities/towns. Having less stuff is simply easier to move around. I’ve abandoned many DVDs in my life! I’ve haven’t felt too torn about abandoning DVDs, as my personal experience with TV or movies is to simply watch them once. This isn’t always the case, but holds true for the most part. Moreover, I find that I’ve never had a strong desire to “own” movies or music, so I don’t long for the sentimentality of physically owning copies, and what comes with that such as being able to touch or display the album or cover art.

For this reason, owning my forms of entertainment almost becomes irrelevant in lots of cases, and in large part this is due to the ease of access. Although one-time use or a time limited access have long existed in the public library setting, I view streaming services, such as Netflix or Spotify, as an enhancement of one-time or limited period use. With Spotify and other music subscription services in particular, playlists can be build, and include many of the current popular songs. I find this particular advantageous, because I like to listen to many of the “Top 40” for the few weeks that I want to and then move on to something else. It allows me to spend less money than continuously buying my current favourites, which are often no longer my favourites a few months later.  Streaming services have reduced my need own licences or physical copies to digital content. Unsurprisingly, as streaming services develop technologically and gain more users, they improve and reduce the need to “own,” either through iTunes like services or possessing a physical copy. This is definitely changing the way that we consume media, shifting approaches to copyright, and affects the socio-economic consumption of entertainment.

When it comes to music, I listen mostly to a really weird alternative-indie-folk mix (we can chat if you're interested.) But first I want to tell you about me "discovering" music.

When I was 15, I actually started listening to music. By which I mean, I started paying attention to the lyrics, and to my own tastes. Then suddenly, for the first time in my life, I wanted access to music in a way that hadn't mattered before.

The first thing I did was download everything I had on hard-copy disks to my computer and stick it in iTunes. Then, when I realized that it would be useless to own everything both in hard copy and digitally, I moved on to the iTunes store. And that was great except that at this point I am not financially independent. And believe me, I could easily have blown $100 on albums I was interested in.

Then I put two and two together: the public library has a lot of music to borrow. It's free. It's not that fast when I have to get stuff delivered from other libraries, but the anticipation is actually kind of fun.

I figured there was a chance I wouldn't be allowed to download music from TPL CDs. I thought they might be blocked or protected, but as it turns out, they aren't. I somehow doubt I'm the only person to come up with this idea.

Here's what got me thinking: I don't own that music. But does iTunes? Does the library? Who makes money off this stuff? So I did a little research.

Not that the internet is necessarily the most reliable source, but here's what I found out:

"Right off the top, Apple takes ~$0.30 from that $0.99 sale. Of the $0.69 left, half goes to the label. The other half goes to the publisher once the label's initial investment in the artist has been recouped. Generally speaking, a label invests somewhere in the neighborhood of $300-500k for artists. And with digital sales being what they are these days, that means an artist really only starts getting paid after they've sold nearly half a million downloads." (Quora)

So in theory, yes, by using iTunes I would be "buying" a song and that would be more ethically correct than ripping that song from Youtube or importing a CD from the library. But mostly I would be paying Apple and the record label. In my mind, that's not really okay either. 

I'm not trying to justify my CD-borrowing practices, but at least I know that someone, somewhere, bought that physical object and some of that money went back to the artists. 

This problem doesn't get any simpler the further I wade into the digital world. Let's say I have music in my iTunes library and I use it to make a playlist, which I then burn onto a hard copy disk. Do I have any creative rights to that content? Not really. Even though I am technically in possession of those songs, and I put them on a disk that I can hold in my hands. 

And for the record, the library doesn't have everything I'm looking for, so I will eventually be forced onto iTunes or take up some other illegal measures in order to get my hands on any Anais Mitchell albums other than Child Ballads. 

Sources:
https://www.quora.com/Do-artists-bands-get-the-money-I-spend-on-iTunes

Week 10: The Meaning of Ownership

I don't buy e-books very often. In fact, I think I've only ever bought two (the rest I have either borrowed or, um, obtained in other ways). One of these books was the most recent Outlander novel (I swear, I have decent taste in books, I just also...really like Scottish time traveling romance novels??). I just had to read it, and I couldn't find it in a library or in a bookstore. So I went on Amazon, and bought the e-book.

Of course, as Professor Galey has pointed out, Amazon made me download their Kindle reader for Mac. And then that meant that I had to remember what my Amazon account was, and whether I had updated my credit card on it from the last time I used it, etc etc. Then the book had to download, which took forever, and then when I opened it, some of the features (including family trees) were wonky; we've all discussed this song and dance of the e-book to death. Nevertheless, I read it, and then went back to re-read it.

The problem was when I went to buy my second ever e-book (...a book written by the authors of my favorite snarky fashion website, Go Fug Yourself, I know, I'm not doing my reputation any favors here) I totally forgot which Amazon account I had downloaded the first e-book from. On top of that, I somehow managed to download one as an actual e-book, and the other for use in the Kindle web interface. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get the web interface book into the Kindle app, or the Kindle book into the web interface app.

Eventually, my computer went kaput and I had to get a new one. I have yet to download the Kindle reader app, probably because I haven't had the desire or time to read the 8th Outlander book (it's like 8 billion pages long.) I haven't logged into my Amazon account in a while to read the Go Fug Yourself book. So, it's almost as if I don't own these books anymore--I don't have access, which is just about as good as not actually having them. I'm sure legally I have the right to access some bits of code that translate into a book if I actually remembered my password, and the interface I was using, but it's not at all the same as being able to take a book, and then pop it in a suitcase and then move it to another house or another country. It's not like the format of the book will change--my novel won't suddenly morph into a picture book, for example. I'm not going to suddenly lose the ability to read, or  the ability to turn the pages of the book, or lose access by putting it on the wrong bookshelf that I can't reach.

The annoying part is, I'm probably going to have to re-download both books if I would like to read them, and really, if I'm going to be reading a book online at all, I'd rather read it in the iBooks app (I like things to be tidy.) Why does it have to be so complicated? I'm sure Amazon's web interface is there in the name of accessibility (so if you don't have the app, you can still reach the content, presumably), but it just made things worse for me.

Week 10: Ebook double standards

When we think of the library we don’t typically think of book ownership, but instead the act of borrowing. Libraries, do of course, have to purchase the books they lend, however, I was surprised when I found out that ebook ownership was becoming a problem for public libraries at last year’s TRY conference. Now, when I think of ebooks and the library, I think of the ebook’s ability to break down physical barriers between people and the library (this of course comes with its own technological hardware/software barriers). However, the library faces its own issues with acquiring ebooks – and those issues have to do with the economics of ownership and access.

As individual ebook consumers, part of the draw of purchasing an ebook is the low cover cost. For libraries however, the opposite is true. While ebooks may be less expensive for us, they are much more expensive for the library (roughly 1.5 the price, and sometimes higher according to Lou (2015)). This heightened cost also comes with much greater use restrictions which bring the idea of “ownership” into question. For example, ebooks can be restricted by the number of patrons who can use them at a time and the number of uses allowed in a single year (Lou, 2015). When a library purchases an ebook, they may not even own it at all, but in fact be licensing it for a given period (such as a year), after which they have to purchase the ebook again in order to continue lending it. In stark contrast, Lou (2015) highlights how such “Usage restrictions and price differentials do not exist for physical books, which libraries sometimes can buy for up to 40 per cent off their shelf prices.” By implementing strict restrictions on sharing and use for ebooks, publishers are seen as “imping[ing] on the fundamental mechanisms by which libraries make information available to patrons” (Walter, 2013, p. 90).

Retrieved from http://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/hardly-anyone-knows-their-library-loans-out-e-books

Thinking back to Bobby Glushko’s lecture this week, we can see how publishers attempt to maintain the ebook’s status as a rivalrous good – only one person can access an ebook at a time, thereby depriving other people of the ability to read the book. This is, of course, how libraries have always functioned – they have a limited number of books that can only go out to one reader at a time. However, typically when a physical book has more than 6 readers waiting to read it, the library will purchase another copy of the book (Lou, 2015). The same approach cannot always be taken with ebooks – libraries are less likely to purchase an additional copy because of the high cost (Lou, 2015). My own experience with accessing ebooks through the library also highlights some of the negative features associated with ebook “lending.” Not only do libraries have to pay exorbitantly high costs to get their readers access to ebooks, but this access can itself be rather restrictive. These kind of restrictions usually present themselves as page limits (such as the ability to download or print a specific number of pages), reading platform restrictions (the need to download a specific reading platform to your device, such as Adobe Reader), as well as limits on the readers ability to annotate and save annotations made in a text. I even sometimes encounter books where DRM features have been enabled so that you can`t annotate a book and you cannot highlight or copy the text. Together, I think the ownership hurdles placed on libraries, in addition to the usage restrictions placed on ebook readers, highlights a major issue with the sales model and design of ebooks for libraries. Why are libraries being charged more for a digital copy of a book when that book does not allow for some of the key benefits that come with digital reading (such as portability, annotation, copy and paste)?  Are publishers price gouging because there is a high demand for ebooks among library users? It occurs to me as I write this that it may be the case that there are some library users that only experience ebooks by borrowing them. How then are these users' understanding of, and experience with ebooks shaped by the restrictive DRM controls placed on these ebooks? I don’t currently have all the answers, but I definitely think this is an area that needs addressing if the benefits of ebook reading are going to be experienced fully by library users.

References

Lou, Ethan. 2015. “High Ebook Prices ‘unsustainable,’ Says City’s Top Librarian.” The Toronto Star, June 18. http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/06/18/high-ebook-prices-unsustainable-says-citys-top-librarian.html.

Walters, William. 2014. "E-Books in Academic Libraries: Challenges for Sharing and use." Journal of Librarianship and Information Science 46 (2): 85-95 doi:10.1177/0961000612470279. 

http://resolver.scholarsportal.info/resolve/09610006/v46i0002/85_eialcfsau.

Week 10: If it causes financial loss, it's wrong

I find this week's blog question to be very interesting, especially because I have never encountered the problem Prof. Galey describes in this week's question. I have always been able to find a stand alone e-book file that I can download without having to use a specific software. That being said, I don't often go searching for e-books as I am one of those people who prefers the ancient art of reading from a physical book, so I am more than positive that Prof. Galey has more experience with downloading e-books than me, which is why he has probably encountered more problems with downloading e-books than I have.

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My primary assumption is that if someone has lawfully accessed/retrieved/downloaded a file, they don't own the material but are allowed to share it. However, as last semester I took an ethics course and this semester I am taking a legal archives course - both courses in which we discuss copyright extensively, my primary assumption has quickly been deflated, especially as distribution of material which you are not authorized to distribute results in a financial loss to the creator/owner of the content. 

Two examples immediately come to mind: 

(1) Netflix has a variety of packages that allow one account to be used on multiple devices simultaneously. For this reason, I know many people who with a group of family/friends split the cost of a Netflix account and share the account in order to save money, especially as all you need to access these movies is a eligible username and password. I obviously don't own the movies, but as I have purchased the right to access - have I not also purchased the right to share my username and password with my family and friends in order to be financially savvy? From a legal standpoint, I want to say no, I can't legally share the material because I have the ability to share it with an infinite amount of people, therefore causing a loss to the company that holds the material legally.

However, interestingly enough, upon further research, I stumbled upon an article recently published by CNet that discusses that the CEO of Netflix is actually "cool" with account users sharing their account information! The article does mention how many people consider this to be an "online faux pas" and also worry that account sharing may be illegal, which I can understand it can be because Netflix does not give users the right to distribute their content, just the right to access it. So broadly speaking, sharing a Netflix account can easily be considered piracy.

(2) My friend recently downloaded a nutrition plan from a famous fitness blogger; it's a PDF of about 120 pages. The PDF cost her $169 to download and upon downloading, she proceeded to share this with several of her girlfriends who also wanted the plan, but chose not to shell out the money for it. With this example, I can notice several problems. A digital file such as a PDF can be easily multipled by simply sharing it with other people - this causes the creator to lose out of sales of a PDF. Imagine if every girl who downloaded the nutrition plan sent it to 10 people instead of these ten people buying it for themselves - the creator loses out on $1,690 worth of sales! My friend does not own the content but she has accessed the content lawfully by purchasing the materials - however, does she own the right to share it? Again, I want to say no because her actions are essentially causing a loss to the creator. But if this nutrition plan was a part of a book and my friend lent the book to someone, is that wrong?

Essentially, my own notion of access and ownership is not entirely comprised yet and I think this is because of the abrupt and rapid rise of digital texts. Digital texts are far easier to share and multiply than physical texts and more discussions need to take place to determine what exactly is allowed and what isn't. Until then, we have the Copyright Act which is quite conclusive as to what it protects since it does encompass the protection of written works, videos, oral histories, music, etc. Although, my thoughts on the matter are not entirely developed, I am a big supporter of not distributing any content which you are not allowed to distribute. The movies/telly shows I watch are all accessed via my own account from Netflix, and the scholarly journals I access are all thanks to the UofT library catalogue - so I can proudly say I am not causing financial loss to creators of this content. 

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Johns, Adrian (2009). Piracy: the Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. University of Chicago Press. Chicago, Illinois: The Chicago Press. Retrieved from http://books2.scholarsportal.info.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/viewdoc.html?id=/ebooks/ebooks2/ucpbooks/2012-03-30/1/9780226401201&page=26

Macdonald, Loryl (2016). Intellectual Property Laws [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from University of Toronto's Blackboard. 

Nieva, Richard (2016, Jan 6). Netflix is cool with you sharing your account. CNet. Retrieved from http://www.cnet.com/news/netflix-is-cool-with-you-sharing-your-account/

Week 11: The Future of the Book (in the 19th Century)

One of the readings that I've most enjoyed in the last few weeks was Matthew Rubery's "Canned Literature: The Book After Edison". After Thomas Edison recorded sound for the first time in 1878, speculation began over whether an entire novel could be recorded. Even though recorded literature was a decade away and full-length book recordings would only emerge in the 1930s, writes Rubery, "the advent of phonograph technology made it possible to conceive of a recorded book" (216).

Thomas Edison and phonograph
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Edison_and_phonograph_edit1.jpg)

 There have been multiple gamechangers throughout the history of books, including the invention of movable type, but I think if I were to go back in time I would want to go to the late 19th century. According to Rubery, the New York Times was cynically predicting the end of print and the rise of "bottled orations" (218) while quirky academics and writers were imagining books as whispering machines that sound a lot like ipods or smart phones. 

My message about the future of the book would be that it can't be understood as finite paradigm shifts, through which an existing concept dies to make way for a revolutionary one. Rather, the introduction of new forms of the book co-exist to offer us different ways of experiencing text. Audiobooks first appeared as records, then tapes and cds, and now as digital files. Libraries even carry discreet self-contained Playaways (in which you plug in your headphones to each separate 'book').  

playaway.com

This has not led to the eradication of print books, and neither have ebooks or apps. It merely broadens the interactions possible. A few posts ago, I complained about ebooks but said that I do read both print and audiobooks. In class, we tried out interactive apps for The Wasteland and Alice in Wonderland. They were kind of cool, but I saw them as supplements. I personally wouldn't really want to read either of those texts for the first time through the app because it was so externally curated, and kind of distracting. However, I'm going to end on a positive note. I think the future of the book is huge and inclusive and there is as much room for audiobooks and distracting apps as there is for paperbacks and comic books and old weathered tomes. 

Works Cited:

Ruberry, Matthew. "Canned Literature: the Book After Edison." Book History 16 (2013): 215-45.