The announcement about OLPC 2.0 being an ebook reader has, um, re-kindled discussion over the role of ebooks. In particular, the question keeps coming up: where will the ebooks come from to put on these readers?
Some, no doubt, will come out of the traditional publishing industry. Amazon’s Kindle, more than anything else, has demonstrated that publishers are willing to try ebooks. However, so long as publishing is focused on a lifetime-of-lockdown, imposed scarcity model through DRM, traditional publisher ebooks will remain on the margin, simply due to cost.
Developing ebooks does not have to be all that expensive. Printing and shipping costs vanish, leaving marketing, editing, paying the author, and overhead. However, traditional publishers also have traditional baggage int he marketing and overhead areas: a fondness for big printed catalogs, nice offices in expensive areas, big salaries for executives, etc.
Some books will start out free and remain that way. A few will come from individual authors; more will likely come from collaborative efforts like Wikibooks. The collaborative-authorship system, in effect, is Google’s MapReduce for knowledge collection: break the work down into small enough chunks that individuals authors can do quickly for free and can then be aggregated into a larger work.
Personally, I’m hoping that we can also carve a middle ground, where there is a price tag for ebooks initially that gets dropped after the book’s development is “paid off”. After all, authoring and editing the book typically is a one-time expense. Programs like Baen’s Webscription and CommonsWare’s own Warescription will be experiments in this area. The hope is that we can come up with a model where authors get paid, but there is sufficiently low additional costs that selling a modest number of ebooks to first-mover customers will finance the ebooks for the rest of the world to use non-commercially.
Regardless, I don’t think that there will be a big problem in coming up with a large catalog of ebooks, even on top of the ones already created (e.g., ebook editions of Project Gutenberg). Now what we need is what OLPC 2.0 is aiming for: a low-cost ebook reader for the masses. I wish them luck!
