There is though another side to the economics of the eBook that I only slightly hinted at in that essay, the issue of (very roughly speaking) everything through 1922, which is to say, the U.S. public domain. Which is a lot, a lot of books.
Many of which are available absolutely free of charge! This is actually pretty amazingly incredible, of course. This entrances me in a way that the prospect of reading Neal Stephenson's latest three and a half pounder without suffering back strain doesn't touch, despite this latter promise being (given my actual historical reading habits) a far more practical argument for my acquiring one of these devices. To hell with Dune, who can complain about free?! Ah, watch me.
The fantasy that dances before my sparkling eyes is of hooking my freshly unwrapped Kindle (I'm sick of carrying water for Amazon but I'm pretty resigned to this being the fact of the eventual matter) and zapping an everloving bolus of data from my computer into it - et voilà - a vertiginous library of classical literature at my fingertips, intellectual fodder for a lifetime, quick and handy access to all those smarty-pants references the erudite continually sneak into their prose.
To be honest, while I do actually read this kind of thing from time to time, what really gets me is the whole library in your pocket thing. It'll doubtless be a matter of zero wonder to the kid, who is learning to read in the basically unexamined assumption that if you want to know anything, Daddy will go to the computer (he will not turn it on, it is always on) and the information will be found readily at hand. But to me - someone who quite literally came of age alongside the personal computer (and Lo, JMH didst attempt to program an adventure game in BASIC on a TRS 80, and verily didst he fail mightily) it is The Future, the stuff of fiction. My great library of human wisdom, in the palm of my hand. Glorious.
The reality of course collides with my fantasy forthwith. Even as my conviction to get on the eReader bandwagon grows, my initial forays into the world of free text rapidly demonstrate I can expect to be regularly tossed between the twin horns of Lack of Curation and Unreliability of Source.
Overabundance. Checking out the statistics page (which has 6 "likes" on Facebook, what does it all mean?!) I learn that first off, I also literally came of age alongside Project Gutenberg - being how the first text was uploaded just the month before I was, er, downloaded... But more relevantly that as of July 2011 some 36,701 books had been uploaded. Surely one to two miles of conventional bookshelf. Too much! As usual the best curating offered on the spot is popularity... handy if I want to know that A Christmas Carol, The Kama Sutra and the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes summarize the rough mindset of the Vox Populi (oh man have I got a fanfic mashup for you... Sherlock Holmes' Kama Sutra Christmas, anyone?).
I thought I was onto something of a start when I stumbled on the Harvard Classics - doubtless a shibboleth of an intellectual mindset, virtually untroubled by any shadow of what we now call multiculturalism, that belongs firmly in the 19th century. Even so! A manageable collection, officially vetted by an Extremely Erudite Gentleman.
Immediately I started running into issues. My dreams of finding this thing neatly packaged as a single one-click zip file vanished in a trice. But that wasn't the start of the end of it. Mainly I discovered (not unsurprisingly) that a free, downloadable file of an electronic book was a bit of a black box. Part of the problem of course is that I don't have a hardware eReader - yet - so I'm trying to simulate the experience with a free desktop reader... which I just discovered got eaten by Amazon at some point in the recent past which explains some stuff... Suffice to say it ain't easy. Some test files wouldn't open. A lot appeared to be just a straight whack of text - not so much as a table of contents. This is non-ideal. The first one I manage to get open at all pops up on my reader with the title Classic_Harvard Classics, and call me shallow if you like but its frontpiece image is this:
That's full size, mind you. Displeasing. But truly, readability is the big pig in this poke. No contents, no chapters, formatting (or more specifically lack thereof) that's hard on the eyes. Clearly the big pile of free text is not going to be so sweet to parse. Maybe my reading technology is to blame (it is surely at least part to blame) but seeing what I see there I find it hard to believe the state of the art will do much better with the source material. Readable in the technical sense of the word, but not nearly up to my standard for what I'd call a book.
Clearly somebody should be doing something about this.
My wild impulses has me quickly thinking about launching the Kickstarter project, you know, I think I could happily spend several years of my life turning these text dumps which represent the (noble, valuable, decent and correct, mind you) output of Project Gutenberg into something you would actually want on your virtual bookshelf. My forays into business tend to suggest I do not have a firm finger on the pulse of the consumer, though, and experience tells me that obvious things that do not end up getting done by friendly volunteers tend to prove more difficult than they seem on face value. Leave that one on the back burner. My virtual, infinite, increasingly cluttered back burner, shouldn't there be an app for that?
Indeed a certain amount of this is ongoing by the looks of things. My researches continue and I suppose my free virtual bookshelf will slowly accrete as I start to save the odd pennies towards the eventual, inevitable (it has started to feel, finally, of late) purchase. But I realize I've distinguished in my mind another gradient of freedom on the as beer/as freedom axis... The well of public domain content is increasingly both those things, but acquiring and consuming it is nothing like free from effort, yet. And my pocket library is still mainly a dream.
