Electronic Bibles Are Burnt Toast I Can't Share
Imagine, if you will, that you bought a cloud-enabled toaster. And that one day, you got a sudden in-home upgrade to three toast slots from two. Then, just as suddenly, the new feature addition was rolled back. So you were left with two slots and some smushed toast. And then your toaster decided it wanted to start serving orange juice...
The quote above is from an article at GigaOM where a Harvard Law professor (Jonathan Zittrain) questioned the value of closed platforms on cloud-enabled services. The article points to cloud computing and some mobile devices, but I want to highlight one area in particular - Bible software - as the closed platform that's more likely to burn people, rather than keep them openly nourished.
I was told once that the current model of Bible software (dedicated readers and an inability to take books from one reader platform to another) is needed for the industry to survive. But I have never believed this. Personally, I think its a cop-out to a model of business that just doesn't fit the intentions of the Internet as a medium for commerce and information sharing. Its a hearken back to the times when there was only one source for learning and others needed to be approved by Rome to carry the scroll... teaching was a whole other certification process.
And yet this is where we are. Logos on desktop and web and mobile. YouVersion web and mobile. Laridian mobile and mobile and mobile some more. Palm Bible+ on one mobile. And on and on. Publishers enable this through collecting licensee fees from developers and users alike (you didn't think you were actually getting the Bible did you; you are purchasing a license to read it, not own it). The market allows this, and we sit by because...
The features within these applications are chosen on the basis of need and market targeting. Some applications are more academic and have features befitting those audiences, others have features more for casual reading, and others still are a hodge-podge of features with no clear audience or goal. Regardless of the feature, they all serve the Bread of the Word. The same bread (content) in most cases. And yet, unlike the bread in your toaster, you can't just go to your neighbor's house and use their open source toaster to read your WordSearch-branded bread. You must toast it by WordSearch's toaster only. To me that's closed, and makes absoutely no sense given the intelligence and innovation that these Bible companies have at their disposal towards creating something... open, innovative, not necessarly free, but definitely sharable.
At some point, Amazon Kindle owners are going to want to move on past Amazon's system of ebooks and use others (Borders, Barnes and Nobles, an independent bookseller, etc.) And it will take all manners of governmental, private, and public pressure to get Amazon to open up. But nothing will change until those who are effected most will want to change it.
Which is why I think that for all the truth in the point that Bible software should be open to any device, any platform, at any time - where users purchase a license and can use it legally anywhere - we aren't going anywhere. At the intersection of faith and mobile technology, developers and users alike have forgotten to leave the cross (chains of locked platforms and marketing models) behind, and resurrect to something shared and usable by all. Nothing at all like how Jesus example was/is, nothing at all like moving forward past a locked intersection.
And that's ok, we have to protect the way things were - its only toast right?
Post-Script:: Eight (8) hours after composing this post, the Wall Street Journal published this article; I'm totally not the only one with these feelings about ebooks. This is a major issue that needs to be addressed by the entire industry, not just in the religious texts realm. The question is really simple though: is the Body going to be a point of innovation in technology here, or are we going to continue to follow the secular world with something we could do a lot better given our spiritual insight? I would hope innovation comes from the Body here, but I've been burnt by that expectation many times before.
posted by Antoine @ 12/02/2009 10:00:00 AM
8 comments
8 Comments:
I would love to see this change. However, you post makes an invalid assumption about purchasing electronic books. The content (the words on the page) is only a small part of why people buy a book. If content was the only reason someone bought an electronic book then a royalty clearing house could be set up and all books could be shared.
Why do people pay for books they can easily and legally get free???
Content, convenience/accessiblity, price. Take away a dedicated reader from the equasion so that a person purchases a license directly and then applications have to make it on merit of improving the user experience, without locking down the content.
In the case of pirating/over-valuation of books; people never have a problem paying for items when there's a definitive value - they will have a problem purchasing when they realize that the value is locked into a platform.
Antoine I won't buy a kindle for the sole reason that I can't share a book with someone. The Nook does allow sharing, but only though the BN software. That's better, but not great. Our library lends out eBooks, but I need the drm-d adobe reader to read them on my mac, which I have no intention of installing. It's a mess.
With eReaders and Bible Software, though, it seems that the problem isn't the developers - but rather the publishers. They fear that they're business would collapse if they allowed books to be published in easily migrate-able formats. In fact, they don't think that you're using the same book when you switch from one program to another - they insist that you're using ANOTHER copy of the book and aren't interested in having it pointed out to them that their metaphor is flawed. I ran into this with the BDAG Greek Lexicon which I purchased through BibleWorks and wanted to move to Accordance. I get the feeling that both companies would love to allow that data to move with the user, but the publishers simply won't allow them to do it. It's to their benefit to keep the platforms locked away from each other and refuse to budge.
I agree that the data is data and needs to be able to migrate freely with the person who purchased it (or the license to use it) - but it's the publishers we need to pressure on this more than the software developers who are essentially being extorted to keeping things sectionalized with the, "Oh you don't agree with this, we'll then you can have it at all for software" argument.
There are some non-analogous analogies going on here. I can lend you a book, but you and I can't read it at the same time. When I lend it to you, you get my copy of the book, not your own copy.
Unfortunately, the technology doesn't exist to enforce the "no-copying" rule for data without binding the data to a program (i.e. reader software).
So publishers license their content to be be viewed by the reader(s) from one vendor because that vendor then has a shot at somehow limiting the amount of unauthorized copying that goes on. It's not perfect, but it's as good as we're going to get with technology that is affordable and available today.
Back in the day I and some of my Bible software buddies invented the STEP data format to try to do this between at least a subset of vendors. We had some degree of success, but it was impossible to agree on a format between more than a small number of vendors.
Open eBook Forum then tried to do this for the general ebook industry back in the late 90's but it quickly morphed into a standard not for sharing data between users as was intended by those of us who launched the effort, but instead as a standard data format for copyright owners to share data with electronic publishers. This derailed set of priorities got set in stone when Microsoft joined the party.
I proposed "universal licensing" at BibleTech 2008, where users would purchase a license for, say, the NIV directly from Zondervan, then take that license (be it an electronic key or piece of paper or whatever) to a particular software vendor, say Laridian, and be able to get Laridian's NIV at a reduced rate because the royalty would have already been paid. Some vendors could even choose to give away their NIV. Others might charge a nominal fee. So far no takers on that idea.
At Laridian we practice universal licensing the best we can. If you buy a Bible for your WinMob phone you can access the same Bible on your Windows desktop or iPhone with no additional fee. You can't take it to Olive Tree or Logos, but you can move around within the Laridian family of products.
I'm not the one throwing a wet blanket on the idea of portable ebooks, I'm just telling you there's already a wet blanket on that fire. It's a good idea that I've been promoting for almost 15 years now, to no avail.
@Craig (thanks for commenting), you said:
...I proposed "universal licensing" at BibleTech 2008, where users would purchase a license for, say, the NIV directly from Zondervan, then take that license (be it an electronic key or piece of paper or whatever) to a particular software vendor, say Laridian, and be able to get Laridian's NIV at a reduced rate because the royalty would have already been paid. Some vendors could even choose to give away their NIV. Others might charge a nominal fee...
What was the response then when you made the recommendation (just curious)?
I agree it is an idea whose time has come. Laridian actually got me thinking about it, and they have the best model out there so far.
I'm looking at migrating from PC to MAC. Well, we all know what that means...
I found out Logos has a MAC version great...but as I read...not so much. Even on the PC, to upgrade from 3 to ver 4 they want me to buy a whole new deal. WHY???? All that has changed is the "reader" program. The NIV is still the NIV, etc, etc. This has really put me off to an otherwise great product.
I think it makes sense to be able to "buy the book" and us it across various reader platforms.
Maybe we need to link the book to some sort of ID...smartcards come to mind because I use them at work. But some similar certificate to keep publishers happy that it's just me buying using the book. The reader developers could be left to create the proper interface.
Really, isn't this just a simple encryption issue? You buy a book encrypted to your public. Your reader uses your private key to decrypt it so you can us it. That technology has been around for years.
Now, this move by Kobo/Borders (via NYTimes) is a lot better and something of a positive step.
Some additional information has been published by the EFF, which also has some relevance to this conversation. Link via MobileRead
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