diglib: Corking the e-book

[Robert Felsing <felsing@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU>]

        The message JQ forwarded is quite interesting and worth thinking
about.  I've heard almost the same sentiments and ideas expressed by a
librarian from the British Library and the chair of the Law school at Kyoto
University.  I suppose the big question is why do intelligent publishers
appear to be so clueless?  Could it be that they are too blinded by the
oncoming headlights to move out of the way?  Scared to death, maybe?

        The restrictions both legal and technical on etext (if I change the
obsolete CPU on my home PC, I lose the commercial e-books that I've
purchased) are nonsensical .  Publishers push demands on the online world
that they wouldn't dream of trying to foist upon the print world.  Yet there
are two upsides to this:  the longer big publishing resists, the longer we
have to work over the public domain.  The second upper -- for those of us in
academia -- is that the soft spot in the world of publishing is academic
publishing.  Most academic books never sell 500 copies, and academic
publishers have nothing to lose and everything to gain by going electronic
(plant costs plunge with e-books).  We can, perhaps, encourage academic
e-publishing by making etext look as much like a book as possible.
Familiarity breeds acceptance.


Bob Felsing