{"id":486,"date":"2008-02-09T14:05:00","date_gmt":"2008-02-09T18:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=486"},"modified":"2009-01-14T23:19:35","modified_gmt":"2009-01-15T03:19:35","slug":"the-revenge-of-the-classics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=486","title":{"rendered":"The Revenge of the Classics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&apos;ve lived such an overstuffed life for so many years that I&apos;d               almost forgotten a psychology that was a very big part of my youth:               Sniffing around for &#8220;just something to read.&#8221; I&apos;m a very               deliberate reader these days because I don&apos;t have a lot of completely               uncommitted time. I have a reading buffer of 50-100 books on hand               here, all of which were chosen because they touch on one of my interests               or another. (My library as a whole contains somewhere around 2500               books, down from 3000 before we left Arizona.) I never have to cast               about at random for just something to read.<\/p>\n<p>For many people, reading is an even bigger part of their lives,               believe it or not. (Maybe fewer than we&apos;d like, but they&apos;re out               there.) These people are driving the ebook industry right now, and               I&apos;ve noticed a phenomenon few others have commented on: the explosion               of interest in out-of-copyright books by people who might not have               been slobbering Dickens or Jane Austen fans in the past. At numerous               sites online, people are uploading ebook versions of many classic               texts. I follow <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mobileread.com\/\">Mobileread<\/a>,               which now has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mobileread.com\/forums\/ebooks.php?order=desc&amp;sort=dateline\">about               3,800 free ebooks online for download<\/a>, the bulk of them pre-1923               works, some well-known (they have <a href=\"http:\/\/wiki.mobileread.com\/wiki\/Complete_Works_of_Charles_Dickens_Available_at_MobileRead\">Dickens&apos;               complete works<\/a> now) and some pretty obscure, like the Scottish               Psalter of 1650. Mobileread is interesting because people are creating               versions in the popular small-screen ebook reader formats like Ebookwise,               MobiPocket and BBeB rather than raw text\u2014nor formats used primarily               on PCs, like PDF and MS Reader.<\/p>\n<p>I continue to boggle at people reading Thackeray on their cellphones,               but boggle or no boggle, it&apos;s being done. <i>The classics are coming               back<\/i>. I can&apos;t entirely explain it, but I have some hunches:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Many of these ebook editions are beautifully done. The Dickens                 canon is the work of one man named Harry in the UK, and they include                 some of the nice old 19th Century woodcut illustrations plus color                 covers where those were available. (<i>Oliver Twist<\/i>, yes.                 <i>Martin Chuzzlewit<\/i>, no.) They are <i>not<\/i> shot full of                 OCR errors and gaps like some of the stuff I&apos;ve downloaded from                 other places, including the venerable Project Gutenberg.<\/li>\n<li>They are free and they are easy to get. There are no hurdles                 to jump, nothing to sign up for, no money to lay out, and no DRM                 to drop sand in the gears of the experience.<\/li>\n<li>There are no ethical issues involved in obtaining them or passing                 them on. I still think people are basically honest, and they do                 consider the rights of copyright holders.<\/li>\n<li>They&apos;re classics because they have withstood the test of time.                 They&apos;re <i>good<\/i>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The classics have always been available in bookstores, of course,               at prices comparable to those of newly published books. But if you&apos;re               shopping for something to read on the train going in to work because               it&apos;s a dead hour coming and going, it&apos;s hard to beat free, especially               if free is easy and involves no pokes from the conscience.<\/p>\n<p>What we&apos;re seeing here might as well be called open-source literature.               It&apos;s being done by volunteer labor, including people who are drawing               new artwork and contributing it without copyright claims. It&apos;s significant               because people writing new ebooks have to take into account that               the total available number of reader-hours in the audience is finite,               and the friction involved in obtaining and reading the classics               is now approaching zero. Like Linux, it will take a while yet for               the well-formatted library of classic ebooks to mature, but like               Linux, they will eventually become a competitive force to reckon               with. <\/p>\n<p>And wow, dare we hope that the premodern will put a fat boot up               the ass of the postmodern? A lot of those &#8220;dead white males&#8221;               must be grinning about now. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&apos;ve lived such an overstuffed life for so many years that I&apos;d almost forgotten a psychology that was a very big part of my youth: Sniffing around for &#8220;just something to read.&#8221; I&apos;m a very deliberate reader these days because I don&apos;t have a lot of completely uncommitted time. I have a reading buffer of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[33,17,16],"class_list":["post-486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ideasandanalysis","tag-books","tag-ebooks","tag-publishing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=486"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":498,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486\/revisions\/498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}