Ebooks, the next revolution. But this time is BIG!

Another revolution is about to happen.

A revolution that is many times in size and importance bigger than the music revolution. I call it the e-book revolution.

In this moment a number of technologies are coming together:

On the one side OCR technologies are reaching a level of sophistication, where it is nearly as easy to photocopy a book as to make an ebook out of it. Do you remember when you would go to a photocopy shop, and ask them to make a copy of the book. Now it is that easy to have the ebook version of it, if you know how to do it. This means that more and more books are available in ebook format.

But the difference between the ebooks now, and the mp3, back then, is that when the mp3s came out, a song (5 minutes of fun) was about 5 MB. And since the internet was slower back then, it would take quite some time to download those 5 minutes of fun. Now a book, is often between 1 and 10 Mega Byte. And it can permit you to read it, study it, but also just to consult it.
More about this later.

I thought there were few ebooks around. That mostly you could find some old classics, but nothing really interesting. I was SO wrong.

Here is a collection available for download from pirate bay with more than 1000 ebooks, all on computer science. Here another with practically all of the ebooks from the “* for dummies” collection.

Those are not just some old classics. Those are good new books.

But why are users going through the whole work of digitalizing a single book to post it online? I guess this text will explain us:

A note to all publishers of books for college level classes:

Myself and all other students are tired of getting raped by you sorry bastards, rearranging chapters every 2yrs while adding nothing meaningful, just so you can sell more of your shit.

We agree that you need to be paid fair money for your work, rather than rape us like a cut-rate bitch. Since you don’t see it that way, we are going to put it into terms you can understand. No more money for you. Your shit is gonna be free now, to anyone who wants it in a digital format.

You are not being fair to students, so we are not going to be fair to you. How you like that dick up your ass? Feels nice, doesn’t it…

And when I remember the cost of university books, I can see their point.

The user who wrote this message has posted so far: 8 books. All college texts.

While some of those college texts files are huge (some 5 to 10 giga, collections with thousands of books inside: for example this one is 23 giga!!), programs to download them (technically bittorren client), like Transmission (for Mac) let you pick and choose among all the various items (books in this case, but can be authors, songs, albums) what to download. Making it possible to downlaod only what you want, and cutting the time by many orders of magnitude.

I, am eternally grateful to the italian police that by censoring piratebay (or at least trying to), has brought it to my attention. If it wasn’t for them I might have gone in blissful ignorance for a few months more.

Piratebay is by no means the only place on the web from where people download ebooks. Another place from where ebooks can be found is gigapedia. There you make an “item Search” as opposed to a “Google ebook search”, or “thread search”, on a title, or an author name, you will very often find the book you are looking for. And if you cannot find that book, you can make a search for the topic (like “politics” or “environment”), and you WILL find tons of books. Sometimes you will not find the actual ebook, but the audiobook. Sometimes books from other authors.

To then download the book you will need to register on gigapedia (for free), and they will give you a link where the file is stored. Those are rapidshare, or ifile links. Links to online, non searchable archives. There downloading the file can be done for free, or for a small sum (like few dollars) you can upload with virtually no limit. Here is what they say (26 Oct 2008):

The security of personal data is very important to us, especially in these times. That’s the reason why we will not spy out the files that our clients faithfully upload onto RapidShare, not now nor in future. We are against upload control and guarantee you that your files are safe with us and will not be opened by anyone else than yourself, unless you distribute the download link. RapidShare, of course, is against the distribution of illegal files and as soon as we are informed about illegal distribution, we delete these files and put them on a filter. But the general control of uploads is out of the question for us, because we think that especially in these times data privacy comes first.

In other words, they are not picking up the data of who uploads what. Note also that those uploads are much faster than the peer to peer, like emule, or Torrent sites.

So we have reached the point where books can be easuly scanned (thanks to OCR), easily collected, found, and distributed. What is missing? Organising them. And here is where new programs are coming out.

Papers from Mekentosj does exactly that. It was not started as a program to catalog ebook, but soon many people are using it in this way. Originally it was, and still is, the best program that I could find to organise, store, retrieve, read, and comment pdf academic papers. It is so good that Nature, the Journal published an article about it (only available if you have a paid subscription).

Papers let you store the articles, and will also retrieve the meta information about it. The author(s), the title, the journal. I can confidently say that it has really totally changed my ability to do academic research. Having all the papers nicely sorted in your computer, means that when you also write an academic paper you will not have to get crazy in trying to recover the bibliography. It is all over there, and Papers nicely prepares for you the BibTeX file.

Since pdf is also one of the format of choise for e-books, many people are using Papers to store their ebooks.

You might think this is a small problem, but with the facility with which ebooks can now be downloaded, it is not difficult for a person to have hundreds if not thousands of ebooks. And as memory gets cheap, storage is also not a problem. But the problem then will be retrieving the information.

And this bring us the next important point. Because most people do not download ebooks to read them. You download ebooks to consult them. An ebook is much better than a normal book, in this. You can search it. In fact you can search your whole library for a certain phrase. Can you see the incredible power that this gives you. This is the future of information retrieval!

And now let us go one step further. Because we all know that reading books on the screen is a pain in the eyes.

A number of ebook readers has come out.

Remember what happened when in the music scene appeared the Ipod. First we had few mp3 readers. They would cost a lot of money, could only store about as much as a CD, and generally sucked. Then the ipod arrived. It was small, portable, easy to use, and it could store thousands of songs. It had gigabytes of space. 20 gigabytes, do you remember how much was that, at the time. And then 40, and 60. And now you have ipods with 160 giga. Right now I have twice as much space in my ipod than in my laptop!

Well, we need the equivalent of the ipod for the ebooks.
It needs to be light, thin, it needs to connect and download the pdf directly from your computer. It needs to store them in a well organized way giving the possibility to search through them. And reading it must not ruin the eyes. So you can read it for hours. Like normal paper.

Right now no product on the market has all those caratteristics.
Kindle, the ebook reader from amazon fails terribly for being unable to download ebooks from your computer. It only works from the US, and it only download books from Amazon itself. I think this is a terrible market strategy.

There is one from sony, another from Hanlin…
but they all seem to be big, clumsy, with little memory. In short none of them gave me the idea to be witnessing the ebook ipod of the future… until:

Until I saw what was being developed by Plastic Logic.

I feel this technology has the ability to carry this revolution onward. If people can download their ebooks on this reader. This reader uses electronic paper made on plastic that does not strain the eye. This because it works on reflected light. Batteries last for long (weeks) because they are only used to change the page, not to see the page.

We need to wait to see what kind of software will it install. How much memory will it have, and how much will the price be. But if they keep the price low enough that we all can buy one (or two, have you ever needed to confront two different texts, or the same text at different page?). If the software is even remotely acceptable (of course the best would be something like Papers, above). If the memory is of a few gigabytes (why not since you can find usb keyrings around for few dollars with 16 gigabytes of memory).

If all this is true, then this reader will sweep across the market, and sell millions. It will become ubiquitous like the Ipod. But if they fail in some sense we might need to wait some more, while someone else picks up the ball, and run for the big one.

And in the meantime?

Well, many devices out there can be used as small ebook readers. Iphone and Itouch. Papers is right now testing a version of the program for IPhone and ITouch. Many Nokia smart phones. Many PDA. I know, they are all too small. The video is generally one quarter of the minimum necessary. They are often also too clumsy. But it is a temporary solution. The revolution is about to happen.

So putting it all together:
OCR makes it easy for books to become Ibooks. E-books are being exchanged in huge collections downloadable through torrents, or in other Peer to peer with aMule, or from gigapedia. All those books are easily stored, searched and retrieved with new programs (we showed here one of them: Papers). Soon there will be real ebook readers around. And by that time the way we conceive culture, knowledge, libraries, information will make another big jump.

And editors? They will be dragged by their feet in this future. Opposing everything, as usual. But they will not be able to prevent it. Just like with music.

FINAL NOTE: I am here sharing what is happening, and what is about to happen. You are responsible in front of the law for what you do. And how do you use the links I provide here.

LATE ADDITION:
On the same topic the webpage: http://pdfse.com/ let you search for pdfs, and ebooks

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