Listening to Definitely Not the Opera today on CBC I was excited by an interview with Susan Blackmore, a UK writer and professor who began with a PhD in parapsychology and ended up, after years of experiments failed to turn up any evidence that the paranormal has any existence in reality, abandoning her field of study. I went to her website and read “Why I have given up,” a chapter from Skeptical Odysseys: Personal Accounts by the World’s Leading Paranormal Inquirers (edited by P. Kurtz). Her career path is bit like that of a zoologist specializing in a particular creature, only to discover that it doesn’t exist. What’s especially enlightening about Dr. Blackmore’s odyssey is that she could have – like the subjects she has studied – turned her energies into explaining why she wasn’t getting the results she expected, rather than facing the reality of her scientific conclusions. Amazing person. (And I’m always pleased to see another nail in the coffin of superstition.)
A Brain Misspelled
Quibbles and Nibbles
Please Mr. Postman:
How about tucking those blue rubber bands back in your bag and returning them to your pickup point? They may still have some life in ‘em.
Two-wheeled jalopies
Are bikes unreliable? I mean “1930s dustbowl junker full of starving Oakies broken down at the side of the road” unreliable, and compared to the slick, service every 60,000 km cars being made today? I’ve had two flats in the last two months, the first resulting from a complete tire failure and blowout, the second a spontanous leak in an inner tube – which happened in the dark on a paved trail south of Edward’s Gardens and which took over an hour to fix (I broke a tool trying to get the damn tire off).
Recently I had to replace my pannier rack, as one of the welds had broken. Oh, and when I had the tire fixed the second time, the rear wheel also needed to be trued as all the spokes were loose, maintenance which I had performed at the shop in the late spring. And this is a good wheel, a Mavic something or other which replaced the stock wheel when I wore that out after three years. Then there are fender issues, cable problems, brake pads to adjust or replace, tires that need frequent topping up, a chain I grease constantly and have to replace two times per year…the list goes on.
I ride a lot – about 100 km per week – but that’s nothing compared to how far people drive their vehicles each week without incident. Yet it seems I suffer a lot of cycling downtime, which is of special inconvenience because I only have one bike and I use it to commute. Do bikes suck for reliability? Is there going to be a time in 30 years when we look back and smile at what cyclists had to put up with? Or is this simply a byproduct of the simple fact that the weight ratio of rider to vehicle – at least in my case – is 8 to 1. While the ratio for, say, my shameful minivan, is 18 to 1 – vehicle to rider.
Do you think bike manufacturers have gone too far trying to make bicycles light? Or do I need a tougher, heavier bike? I’m curious to know the experience of other riders. Pipe up!
Everything’s Free on Planet E
I’ve got bootleg Harry Potter for my Palm device. And I downloaded it free from a software pirating site on the Internet.
Everyone is feeling the pull of the E. Like a huge planet, the digital format is drawing everything into its orbit: film and video, music, and of course, books. Planet E promises a paradise of cheap and fast methods of production and distribution. When it comes to ePiracy, however, those features are a liability, and though all digital media are at risk, the eBook is most vulnerable because of its inherent portability.
Many blame Napster and its ilk for music piracy, but I saw music on web and FTP sites long before peer-to-peer sharing reached the masses. Music piracy has flourished due to a combination of distribution (Internet) and portability (the MP3 format). The average uncompressed four-minute music file is an unwieldy 40 megabytes; the MP3 algorithm crushes this to one-tenth that size, making the file portable without a significant reduction in quality. Video is even larger and more complex than audio. Text files, on the other hand, require no compression and no special encoding. All ~210,000 words of Moby Dick occupy only 1.2 megabytes of space, small enough to fit on a floppy disk, small enough to transfer via modem in 200 seconds.
Because digital text requires no compression, it suffers no degradation when transported. Certainly the debate rages over the aesthetic experience of reading from computer screens, handheld devices, or even specialized gizmos like the Rocket eBook Reader. But like the tinny speakers once standard on all computers, these limitations are hardware based, and hardware improves. Two things are going to happen: devices will advance, and people – especially children – will grow accustomed to them. And eReaders offer options no book ever will: backlights, text magnification, hot dictionaries, non-destructive annotating, plus the ability to contain many – hundreds, thousands – of concurrent texts. The hard book may not disappear soon, but what fool denies the inevitable steamroller of progress?
Hard books enjoy an excellent system of copy-protection. As anyone who has duplicated and/or read a photocopied book knows, books are both inconvenient to copy and aesthetically disappointing in their duplicate format. It is easier to copy films, video tapes, vinyl records, CDs, and DVDs. The eBook format is uncharted territory for the written word; no one really knows how the public will react to freely-available books.
Will they be freely available? Microsoft – which estimates that it lost a half-billion U.S. dollars in 1999 just in the state of Florida due to software piracy – hosts on its website a series of pages entitled “Protecting Against ePublishing Piracy” [page gone] which trumpet the “Three E’s of Preserving the Value of Online Content”: Education, Encryption, and Enforcement.
Microsoft explains that educating people on “the value of protecting eBooks and other copyrighted electronic materials,” and explaining “the importance of copyright protection on the Internet” will help, but this sounds to me like an appeal to consumers to protect commerce, not the artist’s work. The general public is not sensitive to the labour of the artist. As many as 60 million people have tried Napster; how many are unaware that downloading copyrighted materials is illegal? Yet only legal interference has halted Napster’s swelling popularity. Because electronic duplication leaves the original unmolested, many cannot comprehend the harm in copying. They do not equate duplication with theft in the way that stealing a Mercedes is theft. Bolstering this misconception is a growing sense that intellectual property should be free, a perverse ideology that free music and movies and books equal democracy and liberty. Indeed, groups have appeared on Internet sites and newsgroups whose mission is to liberate texts. The manifesto of RHONDA (Robin Hood – Online Network Distribution Anarchy), states, “We refuse to recognize any copyright claimed on any text. . . . Books come from the minds and mouths of the People so books rightfully belong to the People.”
Encryption is applied to ensure that an eBook will be readable only on a specific, individual device. Consumer software copy protection has gone in and out of style since the earliest days of microcomputing. Floppy disks and CDs have been encrypted, installers require serial numbers, and some software requires a “dongle,” a piece of hardware jacked into the back of the computer, to operate. Nothing has proved completely effective. Somewhere along the line – just before the information reaches the screen in the case of digital text – information must be decrypted, and it is at this point that pirates can scoop the content. The software pirate chants a simple mantra: if you can read it you can copy it. Each escalation of protection has caused increased inconvenience for the legitimate consumer, while providing a more satisfying challenge for the hacker. Stephen King’s eNovella Riding the Bullet was cracked within days of its release.
Enforcement may prove to be the eBook’s best protector. In 1998 the United States legislated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which governs circumvention of digital copyright systems and liability of Internet service providers. But publishers and writers must be vigilant, as the law is not actively enforced. And creators must be willing to prosecute violators aggressively. The software and music industries have waited too long to take action and have lost billions in potential revenue as a result. Most book publishers operate close to the edge of profitability with no such margin for loss.
Even a single incidence of ePiracy must be addressed seriously, because pirated materials are like cockroaches: the appearance of an individual signifies a hidden infestation. The site with the bootleg Harry Potter has vanished, but you can bet its spawn has propagated widely.
These are ePublishing’s formative years. What we do today to educate readers and how we tolerate copyright violators now will determine its entire future.
This piece appeared originally in the October 2001 issue of Quill & Quire. Anyone listening yet?
They are reading what they are told to read
“They are reading what they are told to read by this blurbing world. They are acting on the guidance they get. That guidance originates in a literary and literary-critical world that is amiable, bland, clubby, pious, careerist, relentlessly cheerful, desperate for numbers, suavely relativizing, and awash in worthless praise. A universe of invitations and congratulations, of pals and candidate-pals appreciating and mythologizing each other.”
Risking lives is fine, just don’t cheat us out of revenue
I am perpetually enraged at Toronto’s “Green Hornets,” not for ticketing those who park illegally, but for failing to do anything about vehicles stopping in no stopping zones, specifically in bike lanes. Clearly the City of Toronto considers failure to contribute to city revenue a greater offense than endangering the lives of cyclists.
