random incoherence and infantile meanderings

I am rather bad at making a coherent arguement. I get on my rail and ride it all the way down without even noticing the branches where my opinion goes dangerously south.

That said… when the Wall Street Journal makes a ridiculously inaccurate and close-minded argument, it taints the entire article.  Check it out:

For starters, think about what happened because of the printing press: The ability to duplicate, and make permanent, ideas that were contained in books created a surge in innovation that the world had never seen before. Now, the ability to digitally search millions of books instantly will make finding all that information easier yet again. Expect ideas to proliferate — and innovation to bloom — just as it did in the centuries after Gutenberg.

So I am supposed to believe that there were no books before the printing press? Or that “the ability to duplicate” ideas was new? That the ability to “make permanent” ideas was new? Maybe my memory is faulty (and it is) but I was taught that the printing press brought fast and cheap book duplication. Fast and cheap were the innovations, not duplicate and “make permanent.”

I was going to stop there, but this article just gets better as it goes along. Who the heck wrote this thing? Steven Johnson… Hmmm. This has got to be a Dvorak piece and he’s got me.

Okay, here’s what I’m talking about. He proposes that in the future individual bits and pieces of a book will be linked to other bits and pieces through a method of hyperlinking that will allow readers to leave comments and logs. In other words, the world wide web. But he is missing something very vital that stands in the way before “books” = “www”. Most books are NOT released under a CC license. Most books are walled gardens that are not open to the public wandering around on.

What Mr. Johnson is proposing seems to requite the utter collapse of the publishing system as it stands today. No more selling the publishing rights.  In order for long form books to merge with the web, books would have to be published openly. Perhaps in weblog format even.

That would satisfy his next idea, where authors attempt to game the search engines with their text and links to gain a better visibility.

I’m sorry, I just don’t see this happening. Not any time soon. Not at all. Even if authors go to a patronage system where all the content is freely open, even then … can you imagine reading a story where the individual paragraphs are all designed to be attention grabbers instead of supporting the entire tale?

Hmmm, I may have just debunked my entire argument there…

His next point that grabs my attention is, shockingly, one that I agree with. We need some sort of new language for talking universally about pages in ebooks. Hell, we probably needed this language just so that the paperback and hardcover readers could talk to each other about what happens on “page 92.” When I am reading “Call of Cthulhu” on my phone, how do I know what page I’m on in landscape mode versus portrait? And when I get back home and want to pick up reading on my desktop (or *gasp* my paperback copy), how do I find the page number then?

The article ends up with some thoughts on how sampling will remain an important function of selling books and suggests that soon books will be sold by chapters, heralding the return of the cliffhanger. This is so obvious, just based on what is already being done by the new media authors, that it almost makes me think that the idiocacy at the begining was a trick to get the reader to agree when anything reasonable appears.  But then he says this bit of foolishness:

Skeptics may ask why anyone would pay for something that was elsewhere available at no charge, but that’s precisely what they said when Steve Jobs launched the iTunes Music Store, competing with the free offerings on Napster. We’ve seen how that turned out.

Paying for something versus theft. Really? I can’t even figure out how this is supposed to support anything that he has said in the rest of this article.  They weren’t free offerings on Napster! Those were stolen goods! The only thing that comparison “proves” is that people will behave like humans if it isn’t really hard to do so.

Gah!