[15587] in Public-Access_Computer_Systems_Forum
The Future of eBooks
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael Hart)
Mon Nov 8 20:11:42 2004
Date: Mon, 08 Nov 2004 10:56:24 -0800
From: Michael Hart <hart@PGLAF.ORG>
To: PACS-L@LISTSERV.UH.EDU
Reply-to: "Michael S. Hart" <hart@pobox.com>
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ebkfutr.art
11/08/04
THE FUTURE OF eBOOKS
eBooks have been with the public a third of a century now,
though most are probably barely aware of them, if at all.
Most of them are still available free of charge on the Net
and a few are available for perhaps an average of $75 each
from several companies selling mainly to libraries with an
entire collection of a million books or more, but it would
be rare indeed, if there is even one example, for such big
libraries to have even 1% of their catalog as eBooks.
Many such libraries simply haven't figured out how to make
catalog entries for free eBooks and one of the attractions
of the pricey eBooks is that they come with prepared MARC,
MAchine Readable Catalog, records, that free the libraries
from having to make their own catalog entries.
*Obviously one of the requirements for getting eBooks into
*wide use in libraries is to take care of this problem.
Besides that, of course, is the situation concerning facts
that no major players are playing in a major way in eBooks
at all, just a few putting their toes in the water without
actually trying swim anywhere.
At the present time, the vast majority of eBooks have been
prepared and released by private citizens of the Internet,
with somewhere over 100,000 eBooks currently downloadable,
legally, free of charge.
Of course, countries are still extending copyrights, right
and left, to make it illegal to put these books on the Net
and new countries are adding to their copyright term every
single year, until eventually, nearly every single country
will have ruled out a million eBooks that were slated into
the public domain before this anti-eBook legislation began
when the Internet was first coming on the scene.
Even so, it is quite obvious that Project Gutenberg should
be recognized as continuing a growth rate in excess of the
famous "Moore's Law" that states that some computer things
will double in size ever 18 months.
The Project Gutenberg collection has grown from 10 eBooks,
in 1990, to 25,000, in 2004, far in excess of Moore's Law,
which would have predicted only 6,451 by the end of 2004.
Thus we can only expect 100,000 Project Gutenberg eBooks a
couple of doublings later on, and 1,000,000 10 years after
reaching 100,000.
Once we have this collection of a million eBooks online it
won't be long before much more organized systems of eBooks
become available, either from inside the libraries or from
the outside, as it is inevitable that search engines, such
as Google, Yahoo, and MicroSoft new engine, would continue
their massive coverage of eBooks. Just Google "Hamlet and
Project Gutenberg" in Google right now for an example, you
get over 10,000 hits.
The more eBooks we make available, the more people will do
things with them, including making them more available for
everyone to find and use, and also make them available for
use in much wider varieties of format, catalog information
for wider range of international library systems, etc.
Once a million eBooks are available, which I predict would
be within a decade, several things will happen:
1. Libraries will make a greater effort to catalog them.
2. Search engines will increase their eBook listings.
3. Machine Translation will begin to translate books into
what should soon be 100 different languages, which are
going to drive the international cataloging efforts to
even greater heights.
4. Just as with the cell phone, some countries without an
existing major library system will simply bypass steps
through the physical library system to the eLibrary as
they did by bypassing a million miles of copper wires,
by simply going directly to eBooks that flow over that
same kind of electronic transfer systems as cell phone
technology makes their calls. All will be wireless.
5. Even today's smaller laptop computers have enough disk
drive space to hold an eBook copy of every book I have
ever heard of, and more. I have a DVD here that holds
over 20,000 eBooks in only 4.3G of space, meaning that
laptops with DVD drives could easily carry all 100,000
eBooks on a one inch stack of plain DVDs. When double
sided, double-density DVD burners get cheaper, it will
be four times as easy to carry 100,000 ebooks, in fact
it might only take two DVDs. Thus carrying a million,
once thought to be totally science-fiction when I said
it first, back in 1971, should become easy enough that
they weigh only about one pound.
6. My furthest dreams for my expected lifetime, up to the
year 2021, are for there to be 10,000,000 eBooks up on
the Net for free downloading, just about all of what I
estimate to be in the public domain, and 1,000,000,000
if you count them each being translated into languages
far and wide. . .a process I expect would still be "in
progress" in 2021, barring some unexpected growth from
the machine translation area.
7. There you have it, my guess at the course of eBooks of
about half a century, from the first 5K file posted on
the Internet on July 4, 1971 to perhaps a billion book
files by the end of 2021, or shortly thereafter.
"The Best Way To Predict The Future Is To Invent It."
