The fascinating thing about this is that most of the technologies that would enable this are inherently adverse to copy protection/drm because they require relinquishing source matter and control over it’s presentation to the end user.

So, it’s not [i]just[/i] about technological barriers, it’s also about societal and behavioral barriers.

And I didn’t even touch the fact that these requirements and possibilities are the death mark on a number of … baroque, analogue bound business models.

Yes, I think that, effectively exploited, the ramifications run both wide and deep. Writing and distribution and presentation are changing (with, as you say, relevance to models of ownership of IP) and increased empowerment of the individual changes how organizations of individuals can work to increased advantage. We don’t know what we risk by making new technologies behave like old ones in order to remain conservatively comfortable, but it smells big.

There’s something I’m going to touch on in a later post over on Deadly Fredly, specifically in light of the differences of perspective you/VSCA and I/Evil Hat have on the topic of PDFs (the post is drafted, just not public yet). What you’re talking about is well & good when the only way your product is manifesting is as an e-book — but when you’re looking at the product manifesting in a print as well as an electronic form, I think it’s important for the electronic form to match print in as many ways as possible, at least if your product is the sort that one expects to reference. Those page numbers that you’re proposing doing away with in e-book form are still the most convenient way for two people owning two different implementations of the same product content to clearly and concisely make sure they’re literally on the same page. For me, both as a consumer and as a publisher, I’m still looking at a world where the e-product sky-dives in tandem with the physical, and where the sum of those two is a greater whole. I’m all for evolution and change — but as you say, books are still here to stay for a good long time, and sometimes it’s okay to say that some changes are happening too early even if our geek culture is trained to kneejerk-respond to that attitude as a bad one.

I agree they need to correlate. I don’t think correlating on page number is the right move. And PDF has fundamental issues with presentation that are just flat out wrong — the effort to control the user’s page when there is no page is an imposition that doesn’t need to exist.

Paragraph and/or section numbering (in addition to page numbering in the book — the index is a powerful element of the codex but a weak element of the PDF as it nearly duplicates the search function) would correlate and not force physical characteristics on the non-physical. Doing it elegantly is the work of the artist.

And let’s face it, part of the appeal of the PDF is that there is no new work. We should face that squarely.

Okay. In conversation at a party, tell me precisely where in your numberless, pageless PDF I can find the information you’re talking about, and we might have the start of something I can accept. But until you can do that, until you can give me an e-reader that gives me every feature a book does *plus* the advantages exclusive to an electronic format, I’m gonna continue to think there’s a caravan of carts before this particular horse.

Pageless is not numberless. “John 3:16″ is a more precise reference than a page number. That’s a viable model. The trick will be to make the reference tag (number) part of the content and not part of the technology (codex or PDF viewer or ePub reader). With literal PDF (distributing print previews to each other) we are absorbing information fixed to the artifact artificially into the virtual version. It works only because we are still thinking about e-books as “books that are electronic” which implies book. They aren’t books.

I think it’s unfair to lay this at the foot of the PDF. PDF is essentially just encapsulated PostScript, and PostScipt is essentially just a way to tell a printer how to create a hardcopy printout.

So, yeah, take the printer away entirely and of course PDF isn’t going to be optimal. It’s using a screwdriver as a chisel and complaining that it’s not a very good chisel.

Roger, yes. The human part of the failure is our eager adoption of the wrong technology. Though with some requirements we could argue it’s the right technology. “I control the pretty and it’s pretty” is one of those. Another is “No new work”.

I don’t mean to demean those requirements, by the way. Those are marketing requirements and without marketing no one reads your text. That’s pretty important. PDF delivers in spades here.

Made me think of this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Cd7Bsp3dDo

Brad has a good point, trying to make the physical book and ebook match up is kind of pointless.

If I’m reading a book on my smartphone my “page” in no way resembles a page in the book. In fact, it would be unreadable at that screen size and if I had to pan around to read the page…that would get old pretty fast.

@Fred: I can tell you what string to look for in my book. Not much different than a page:paragraph:line number reference – you still have to note it down somehow so you can find it when you get home.

We need a new drug.

I’m going to experiment this weekend with a layout that correlates precisely and usefully between print and non-print (that is, real physical book and arbitrarily not-physical) using an indexing method that is common to the text rather than the artifact (page number as a phrase is a clue that this is an artifactual technology: page, specifically, should ring alarm bells). Line number is also broken (as in the body of the post, excepting verse).

A unit of content that will typically correlate, though, is paragraph. Super-units might (but don’t need to) include chapters and headings. The trick will be making it also look cool in both contexts.

If it works, that might be a “re-print” version of Diaspora or, more likely (I’m hesitant to dick with Diaspora any more than is strictly necessary), a way forward with new games.

The biggest hurdle is the fact that the tools at our disposal all assume print, which is why they work elegantly with PDF as a target (because it’s an encapsulated print-preview). None of them support what I want to do, so the process will be manual and time consuming and error-prone.

Just spotted a blog that may be worth following:
http://billmccoybooks2.blogspot.com/

A guy that’s been with Adobe for a while moving off on his own. Here’s the signoff from his Adobe blog (might be some good info in there). http://blogs.adobe.com/billmccoy/2009/11/new-blog-books.html

Darn can’t edit comments, Bill McCoy worked on epub. http://www.idpf.org/

Tangent: “a generation exposed to rapid change in technology”

This is a big peeve of mine. I’m convinced that all the hype around “OMG the rate of change in today’s world is higher than ever before” is completely false.

If you feel like writing a post arguing in favour, I’m happy to submit a guest post arguing against.

But if not, hey, that’s fine too. I’m only guessing it’d be a topic that’s up your alley.

Roger, I’m not sure I can support it (and wouldn’t in this context as it’s not a supporting element of this argument) so I wouldn’t expound on it. It would be more fun to start with your position elaborated and go forth. Fair warning though: I’d probably just agree with you and move on.

Fair enough. It’s not like I’ll need to look too hard for a champion…

Jono, gotta say that reads to me like we’re going back to navigating by landmarks instead of using a map. I prefer the map.

I’m not sure why there is this a priori need to discard the book form. Yes it may no longer be functionally connected to new physical forms of text presentation, but it is still historically connected and often with technological and social progress that connection remains extremely strong over the centuries. Look at our system of measurements. Nobody builds anything that humans live in using the metric system and won’t for a long time going forward. Writing text on piles of paper is our cultural heritage and deeply instilled in everyone’s psyche. New technological forms refer to that and rightly so as it makes it easier for the mass of humans to adapt to. There will be some nerdy outliers, but the purity of their approach won’t be accepted for generations.

Further to walkerp’s comments… Technological evolution almost always involves incorporating old (sometimes anachronistic) aspects of technologies into new ones. For example, when pottery was first used amongst Pueblo farmers in the American Southwest (about 2500 years ago), they decorated their pots with painted geometric patterns, that were similar to the patterns that were created in making their traditional basketry, and included long (basket-like) looped handles on the tops of the pots. Neither of these affectations really make much sense with respect to pottery, but to the first generation of potters, a pot was simply a ‘new kind of basket’. The handles were short lived (soon replaced by ‘lugs’ and ‘nobs’), but it took several generations before non-geometric designs were considered an appropriate way to decorate a pot. It could be argued that retaining some aspect of the old technology is necessary for the new one be understood and adopted by people. If something is ‘too innovative’, it is likely to be rejected as the general populous will not understand/appreciate its value.

With respect to Brad’s new ‘digital scroll’ idea– I think it will be a big hit amongst rabbis and biblical scholars.

I agree (and it’s part of my thesis here) that the initial use of new technology is typically to emulate older technology. And indeed we still frequently rivet where once we would have nailed. But we also weld and vacuum-form.

When technology actually revolutionizes, it does so when its implied capabilities beyond emulation of the archaic form are realized. The people who do this (like, say, Google) not only change how things work but also what things there are to do. Television was initially radio with talkers you could see or plays in your home. It became something new — and something genuinely new to do — when the commerical delivery was realised and diverse artforms could be delivered for free. This genuinely changed things.

Similarly, until the quality unique to film was identified (montage, if Eisenstein is worth listening to) it was a way to record a contiguous play. It is no way that now — a single edit now runs no more than a few minutes and a story is assembled from diverse fragments. It’s a totally new thing; a new way to tell stories.

But someone had to think of — and act on — the real underlying difference.

Now the root argument you make above, Bob (ignore the dismissive final paragraph, which I think is already richly addressed in the text but also further in the next post), is certainly the case and we are seeing exactly this inertia and probing for answers in widespread usage of PDF and weak reader technologies: it takes a long time to adapt to new technology sufficiently to take advantage of it. However, in rebuttal to the idea that this is not accelerating, it took generations before pot designs could acceptably change but it took only a couple of decades to create the montage in film. It took less than a decade to get from “networks are for transferring files” to “Google is the essential tool of the internet”.

I agree. And I actually think your ‘digital scroll’ idea is a good one. Perhaps, the codex/book should be seen as a short-lived failed attempt to replace the scroll. Digital technology allows us to return to the scroll, without the previous problems of bulk, storage and the need to make infinitely long rolls of papyrus.

The ‘dismissive comment’ I made above was just to prod you into responding.

I only need to suspect an audience in order to respond. People don’t even need to comment at all. :D