Across the digital divide.

This seems to be related to a comment I made on a previous post of yours and I have been thinking about what you have said here for some days which is why I haven't commented here till now.

I can imagine a future where computer hardware and network access are so cheap that they are accessible to everyone on the planet and where educational and information materials are available for free to anyone with internet access.

The question then is how many years will it take to achieve that? What measures will bring it about sooner? What would delay it?

Good enough Hardware is available now for about $400. This is too expensive. There is some credible projections that this price will come down to about $100. There are over a hundred manufacturers of Android phones at the moment and this is a powerful downward pressure on prices. Rapid changes in this hardware will mean that one and two year old hardware will be available for much less provided the manufacturers and sellers are not allowed to ban resale of hardware, by, for instance, having the hardware locked to particular networks. We must have the right to unlock our phones and network devices.

Public Internet access is of a number of types - Fixed wires and cable TV cables; Mobile WiFi and Cellphone. Competition has been effective in driving down prices and driving forward technology but consolidation in ownership of the networks will slow this. Oppose the ATT/T mobile merger. Whenever such a merger happens try to get a duty imposed on the netwrk to work with virtual carriers for a fair rate. That's not enough on it's own. We must fight for free wi-fi in every school and library, even if all the other library services are closed down.

Free Content is the third leg of this stool. I have volunteered for project Gutenberg and for Wikipedia since I first heard of them. Every major work of classical literature in English is now available to download for free. All of them. In a few years we will have kindergarten to undergraduate level educational content for every subject available too. I'm working with Appropedia to get all the basic technical information to operate off grid available too but that one is going slowly.

What about the interim? What happens between then and now? Well as people with money buy ereader and ebooks they will get rid of books. There will be a ton of second hand books coming on the narket over the next few months, so cheap that even the charity shops will be barely able to afford to stock them. Encourage every coffee shop, and workplace to have a book swop bookshelf where anyone can come and drop off their old books or collect books they never read before. With luck that will tide us over.

My concern is people seem to think of the digital era in terms of the broadcast era.

In the broadcast era, there was no way to control access to the signal once transmitted, so content providers had a vested interest in everyone being able to afford a receiver. The makers of receivers might have preferred to charge everyone top dollar, but it made more sense to sell to everyone and seek profit by varying size and quality. As technology made quality cheaper, it was often planned obsolescence or calculated withholding.

If you compare the rate of affordability for physical storage devices - records, tapes, cds - to that of digital, the drop is far slower, what counts as cheap is more costly and the difference in functionality is far greater. One might argue this is made up for by vastly cheaper content, but that only counts as long as the player and the computer are working.

I started thinking about this when Apple changed the affordable nano to have fewer features (no more clickwheel, photos or video) and durability (touch screens more prone to breakage) and cost just as much if not more.

Also when Apple and others started discussing offering budget devices which required an ad based subscription to operate. And when a friend tried to give me his old iPhone to use as a touch, and it turned out that without a cell phone account it can't be used at all.

There's money to be made in gatekeeping and even as prices drop the goal remains giving people the least amount for the most cost. And once everyone is dependent on semi-monopoly circumstances, those prices will not fall.

It's being seen in the throttling of bandwidth. The ability to own something matters a lot.

I fear you are focusing on where the puck is and failing to consider where it is going.

Price of a new Kindle four years ago: $399
Price of a new Kindle two years ago: $259
Price of a new Kindle today: $114
You see where I'm going here?

The price to download CC-licensed books from Feedbooks: $0.
Quality of such books: highly variable, but they include the complete oeuvre of Cory Doctorow, Peter Watt's BLIDNSIGHT, Stross's ACCELERANDO, Jo Walton's THE PRIZE IN THE GAME, Nick Mamatas's MOVE UNDER GROUND, a couple of my own books, off the top of my head. And counting. Oh yes, and then there's the Baen Free Library and the like.

Price of a pirated book: also $0.
Difficulty of finding pirated books: variable, but generally not large.

As a medieval historian, I can only see the world slipping backwards into the chaos of the past. I'm watching for the return of the aristocracy and this is one place they will hit and hit HARD. If people have no access to printed material that challenges their perceptions of reality, of right and wrong, or just their place in the Cosmos, then they will have no chance to rise above the societal level of their birth. We MUST keep reading and ideas available to those who want/need it!

Hey, they are already here.
It's just that they've wised up, and are now invisible to the public.
CEO's, corporate types with the 7 and up figure salaries?
They pretty much look like everyone else.
And, yes, they are hitting literacy pretty hard.
Look at the attack ont he public sector in Wisconsin.
The Ducal Koch brothers anyone?

Both my children have had near-daily homework assignments from their teachers that require computer use and access. Luckily, I have this access.

As a teacher in the district, I know that more than 1/5 of our district's students do NOT have access outside of the public library, or the schools' labs.

I have had to correct, sharply, teacher perception that poor kids "won't" do their homework to "CAN'T" during teacher workshops.

My district is currently pursuing a grant that will put all of the district's texts on e-readers. I find it fairly short-sighted on a number of levels, not the least of which is that you can keep slightly outdated books on the shelves when the district funding is low, and round your updating cycle up a year or two. If you stop paying the e-reader company your update fees, you lose the books.

Just adding that, in libraries that have the luxury of e-reader and Ipad checkout, I am willing to bet that the devices are less than 1 per thousand patrons. The waiting lists will be long. The fact that any one library kindle might have a near infinite number of titles on it means nothing to the person on the bottom of the waiting list, who just wants to read one book at a time.

And if you tell a library board, a state or local government, or even a library consortium that they need to purchase enough devices to make them freely available, they will laugh to hard that they wet themselves. If they are struggling to find money for books, sinking all the money into tech that is more expensive and can be lost stolen or broken, is not very likely.

As usual, you say something that needed to be said in a way that makes people open their eyes and go "Ohhhhhhhh" as the light floods in.

I adore my ereader, and am grateful for it as it's lighter and easier to carry on my commute than a book, particularly with my bad back.

My parents used to scold me for thinking them rich. But by what I knew, we were. I had clothes, I had food, my dad drove a Cadillac, and I could read whatever book I wanted whenever I wanted. And even though we weren't rich, that made all the difference in the world to me. So definitely it's important to remember people who don't have what I had -- or what I have now.

Thank you for the sweet, gentle, affectionate sledgehammer of a reminder.

I don't doubt that we need paper books (I happen to think they aren't going anywhere). I do believe in the ebook solution, not as a panacea, but as a mitigating influence in the rich/poor gap that you mentioned. Specifically, on your questions:

"Can you guarantee reliable internet?"

Some readers (such as the kindle) come with free 3G internet access with which you can obtain your reading materials (often free) and even browse the internet. I use my kindle for reading blogs.


"Can you find a way to let people afford what will always be, essentially, brand new books, rather that second- or even third-hand books, reduced in price after being worn to the point of nearly falling apart?"

Digital books don't wear out the way paper ones do. As a high school teacher, I have been advocating ebooks as a way to reduce the carrying burden for students. Have you SEEN how thick textbooks are? It's just ridiculous to expect a kid to carry more than two of them on any given day. Also, Kindle copies of older books (before 1923) are free, and many libraries lend digital copies of books to their patrons.

"And can you find a way to completely destroy—I mean, destroy—the resale market for those devices?"

Resale is dropping all the time (a new reader is $114 right now). I wouldn't be surprised to find them dropping to free (the way we do cell phones) in the hopes that people will then purchase reading materials on them. Certainly a district that swaps paper textbooks for kindles will save a LOT of cash.

Libraries are more critical now than ever, and the internet has made every individual library branch that much more powerful. I visit my local college library's website for its OED access, for instance, and I visit them more often that ever because Google Books leads me to resources that I can only fully exploit with an inter-library loan. The format changes we are experiencing may confuse a few politicians, but not the people who actually use libraries.

<3

Most excellent thinky thoughts, as usual.

Print will never die.

The forms may change. We're seeing an upheaval in publishing. The advance may die. The consignment model of bookselling may die. The mass market, midlist paperback is dying. Print on demand is becoming much more the model.

But print books are just too darn useful.

Consider, I can read a book printed 500 years ago. My computer can't read files from 20 years ago. Sheer archival value alone will save the print book.

THANK YOU.

My mother was a librarian. I have a great love for physical books that she instilled in me, and as an author, I may offer my work in e form, but I will always want something tangible pushed with actual paper and a binding. There's nothing to me like the tactile experience of a book. And I still go to the public library in my town.

Thank you for writing this. It beautifully expresses a point that I think it is so often overlooked, especially in techcentric places like the Bay Area.

While I love the idea of ebooks, and expect to buy a Kindle before the end of the year, I still wholeheartedly agree with you.

Also, while it would be the truly poor people who would lose out if print died completely, they wouldn't be the only ones. You can add to all of those desperately poor kids, the ones whose parents might just not see the point of reading. My Mum encouraged my reading, but I had friends whose parents didn't, and if the means to read a book had required laying down up-front money, it wouldn't have happened. Picking up a cheap ex-library paperback was tolerated, or failing that they could borrow mine - but there would be no ex-library ebooks, and you can't lend someone a download.

It would just close off so many alleys - ebooks and e-readers are wonderful, but they really can't be the only thing.

I'm an early adopter, and for me, e-books have become my format of choice for convenience's sake. (And I _wish_ that more physics textbooks existed in e-book form. It would make coping with preparing lectures while travelling much less painful).

But that doesn't mean I think print is dead. I also agree with you that it's not a good message to send. What really bothers me is that people's absorption in the e-book revolution is really a very small piece of the problem. Local and used bookstores were having serious trouble long before e-books became a significant part of the equation, and library funding was similarly endangered. Something deeper lies behind those issues than just the existence of an electronic alternative, or even the existence of the Internet. And if we don't understand and address those forces, the access of the poor to books (like their access to education and health care) is going to be increasingly endangered.

Seanan, you rock! The same people who predict the demise of the book predict the death of the library, with equal glee, it seems. I've blogged about that. It's a very arrogant attitude; books are much, much, more accessible than e-books, and libraries are a means of education and improvement for immigrants and the poor - as well as anyone at all who cares to use them.

This was clearly stated, moving, and just plain right.

I'm a librarian, btw. Here from twitter.

The level of white male privilege on display here is staggering.

As damiana_swan has pointed out, THE MAJORITY OF THE WORLD LACKS THE INFRASTRUCTURE TO SUPPORT RELIABLE COMPUTER OR INTERNET TECHNOLOGY.

Hell, parts of the United States still lack those things; just a few weeks ago, we spent a long weekend on the Washington Coast in and around the La Push Indian reservation. Despite being the land of Jacob (of Twilight fame), there was no reliable cellphone reception there. The electricity went out twice during our stay. The minimal cellphone reception we had was sporadic at best. This was roughly four hours from Seattle, WA - Geek Central for the Continental U.S.A. And I tell you this much, too: judging by the condition of many of the mobile homes and houses there, few folks in La Push had $120 to spend on e-readers, much less on internet cafes. (There were, for the record, none of those in La Push.)

I've spent large chunks of my life in the poorer parts of the United States; I've also traveled to Europe, Canada and the Bahama Islands. Even in places we normally think of as "technologically developed," people just don't have the trappings we associate with the Information Age. They don't exist there now, and - given the state of global economy - might not exist there for years. Few computers. Limited internet. Uncertain or expensive electricity. Subsistence-level funds. Again, we're not even talking about Russia, Sudan, Kabul and so forth - we're talking about Greece, England, the United States.

It's nice that y'all have tons of pocket change with which to buy technological goodies. It's wonderful that you have plenty of venues for internet access. It's great that you can hop into your local Starbucks and gulp overpriced lattes while you cruise their wi-fi.

MOST OF THE WORLD'S POPULATION CANNOT.

The mere fact that so many people are so vehemently, adamantly W-R-O-N-G about this subject proves how out of touch many of us have become.

And for the record, you can still get books for damn near free without stealing them.

PS: Thank you, Seanan. You're dead right.

I lived in a small town in the Kentucky mountains for four years without a bookstore. Oh, there was the book aisle at Wal-Mart, of course, but it was mostly Bibles, inspirational reads, and the top ten NYT bestsellers - and all adult books. No childrens, tweens, or teens, or anything else. When I wanted something to read, I had to go to the library, and at first, I grumbled about it, because I didn't think Harlan would have a "decent" enough library. I was wrong. This library isn't much bigger than the apartment I live in now, three hours away. But this library has an amazing selection, and I have days - even though I live right across the street from my neighborhood branch library - when I miss it, especially for its superior inter-library loan system and for its local history.

But yeah. I sit here and I look at the books trapped in cyberspace in my Kindle "archive" and wonder what I can ever do with them. And I see writers and readers and publishers arguing over the price of e-books. I just can't walk up to someone, like I did the other day at the hospital, and say, "I'm finished with this Reader's Digest, would you like to have it to read?" At any given time, I keep three or four (sometimes five or six, just depends on how long it's been since I've been to Half-Price or Friends of the Library) mmpb copies of Rosamunde Pilcher's The Shell Seekers just to give away to people. It's my favorite story, and I enjoy sharing it with people.

You just can't say, "Oh, I have this book you'd love to read. Let me go get it for you. BRB!" with an ereader. It's a growing problem.

I started to reply. It got long. I made a post about it. Briefly:

1) Ebook readers are getting cheaper by the week. Yay. Computer and internet access are available for even very impoverished families in all but the most rural areas. Yay.

2) Neither of these facts disproves your basic points, because it's like saying "even very, very poor families have cars." Yes, many of them do, and almost all of them *could*--if this, and that, and a bit of luck, and someone available who knows the tech, and so on. The ones who don't, are still squeezed out of a lot of resources--and the number of resources only available through these sources is growing.

... Continued at my Dreamwidth ...

We need ebook readers to get cheaper (it's happening; yay) so that, like a record-player or cassette deck, they're available even for very poor families--and we need enough cheap, good content for them that those families have a reason to come up with the one-time expense of the device.