E-books and the Digital Future

The article E-Books and the Digital Future is centralized around giving a short history regarding the industry of book publishing and printing in an attempt to connect to the present of the industry. This look extends to the time when publishers first made a public push for book ownership as a symbol of status up to the present when individual book ownership is threatened by book borrowing and e-books. The article argues not for or against the concept of e-books and what they present, rather choosing to argue that “e-books are an emergent technological form by which problems pertaining to the ownership and circulation of printed books are simultaneously posed and resolved”. The article begins with discussing why e-books are looked down upon, namely how they only seem to repeat what a printed book presents without delivering the details many have come to know and appreciate, touching on the subject of piracy as an issue for books, especially with the advent of the Internet as a dominant force, eventually ending with the idea of e-books (and the backlash to them, by extension) being a part of a growing capitalist culture.

The point brought up midway through the article revolves around the book industry’s use of digital rights management as a deterrent from illegal sharing and piracy most catches my attention. Striphas details unique ideas such as a “time-limit license” or “locking [e-books] to the specific computers onto which they were downloaded” and the limits they place on the technology as a whole. This gave pause for thought, as it is an issue one can see elsewhere in other forms of online entertainment as more of the media we take in becomes digital. As e-books grow in use, they join music, movies, games, and other forms of media in working to fix the distribution issues, it continues to grow as an issue between creators, corporations, and consumers.

Gabe Newell, CEO of Valve (an independent company worth at least $3 billion) who have created the service Steam as a digital distribution platform for video games, has said, “We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.” This gives some insight into the mindset one may find in many of those who choose to pirate media. Many times the issue comes not from the price of the media, but the hoops they will be required to jump through in order to access what they have rightfully purchased. While the article comments on the introduction of Amazon’s Kindle, the technology was still early at the time of the book’s publication in 2009. Since then, the e-book industry has grown with the addition of other e-readers born from the Kindle’s success as well as the expanding tablet market. These devices, and the services they use, have worked to solve the issue of service in downloading media by minimizing, or altogether eliminating, the amount of digital rights management a user must work with. These changes in the way of thinking many publishers are accepting has allowed for the e-book market to expand, and while the other problems with e-books continue, as well as piracy as a whole, the issue of publishers restricting and almost discouraging the use of e-books has been reduced, yet not eliminated. It has allowed for a more encouraging “digital future” for the e-book.