The Significance of Ebooks
Excerpt from “Why Knot?” Buy the book at Amazon
A book-as-artifact, like an antique, has value based on its rarity. A book-as-content has value only for the words and what they mean. Thanks to ebooks, book-as-artifact has been severed from book-as-content.
Books-as-artifact will be valued forever and will increase astronomically in value as they become more rare. Ebooks have no rarity. If one copy exists, millions of copies can be created instantaneously and distributed around the globe at little or no cost.
Many of the books now available for free or at little cost as ebooks used to be rare. Now they will be readily available forever, barring the possibility of another Dark Age that eliminates the technology that we now take for granted. Book burnings, à la Hitler and Savonarola, are no longer possible in this electronic environment.
At first The Iliad and The Odyssey only existed in mind and memory, and few knew them in their entirety and shared them with others by recitation. Probably hundreds of years later, writing made them more widely available. It was tedious and expensive to make copies, but it could be done. The artifact nature of written books made it possible for books to passed on from generation to generation, independent of faulty human memory. Of course, those artifact books were subject to wear and destruction. But there were always people who valued them enough to make fresh copies or to pay others to do so. Of course, there were mistakes in judgment and there were natural disasters and human disasters, but many books survived for hundreds or thousands of years.
Electronic books free the content from the artifact — like it was before books were written down. The book resides in memory once again, only the memory is electronic instead of human. Today, the content of all the literature of the entire human race can fit on a backup disk drive you can connect to your PC, and soon, with the predictable doubling of computer power, all of literature will fit on a flash drive, and then on a gadget as small as an earring, and then will be available to all devices everywhere instantaneously from cloud storage.
When Michael Hart founded the Gutenberg Project to make public domain books available for free to everyone, he compared the invention of ebooks to the invention of the printing press. But the change was more revolutionary than that. It was comparable to the invention of writing.
