Why Is This Hill So Steep?

by Steve Jordan

  In the case of e-books, a number of user groups appeared, many guided by interest in a particular genre of literature, or devoted to e-books for a particular e-book format. A few of these groups were even started by publishers of these genres or formats, in order to help gather customers, gain insight as to their customers’ desires, and reach a consensus on how to offer their works on the market. Other commercial entities sought out these groups for the same purpose.

  Other groups were formed with a more generalized interest in e-books. These sites did not concern themselves with any specific group; rather, they were interested in furthering and promoting e-books in the marketplace, and helping anyone who wanted to know more about where to get e-books, how to read them, and how to deal with the problems that arose with handling multiple formats, transferring files to different reading hardware, what to do about e-book sellers that suddenly close up and go away, etc. Not only did e-book reading consumers spend time on these sites, so did e-book authors, programmers of e-book reading hardware and software, and publishers interested in entering the e-book field. More than anything else, the coming together of so many parties in one industry helped to develop the e-book market we have today.

  But it also showcased the problems with e-books, namely, the dissonant voices of those who demanded e-books for free, and fought against any attempt to limit e-books’ usage in any way. These groups, similarly empowered by the days of free content, had dedicated themselves to a “no compromise” position on e-books, and maintained a vocal presence on the Web, in essence terrorizing those who dreamed of making money off of literature. Their demands made booksellers nervous, fomented debate and argument among e-books’ staunchest proponents, and kept an industry unsure of its future in such a contentious atmosphere.

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  It may seem that bad business decisions by the first ISPs may have led to the creation of the anarchist points of view regarding property and goods available online; and certainly they did not help. However, it would only be fair to point out that the initial users of the Internet, scientists and military men, had used the Internet as a free and open platform, freely sharing data and collaborating on far-flung projects in a spirit of camaraderie and teamwork. On the other hand, scientists and military men weren’t in the business of selling things, and they could have barely conceived the development of the World Wide Web.

  The Web, though riding on top of the Internet, was and is a very different animal. Unlike the established open trust atmosphere of the Internet, the Web was left free to develop in any way its users desired. Perhaps there was an amount of naiveté on the part of Berners-Lee and the web’s creators, essentially opening a new frontier and expecting everyone to play nice and cooperate right off. Perhaps it was laziness, or a disinterest in writing a coherent set of laws to govern behavior on the Web, or to figure out ways to enforce them.

  But the combination of a lawless Web, ungoverned capitalism through the online services and customers empowered to demand a free ride, has resulted in an online landscape that is non-conducive, and almost hostile, to providing paid content.

  6: Computers’ mid-life crisis—The PDA, cellphone and netbook threaten the marriage

  Computers had become a mainstay in businesses and homes, and the insistence of conservative business interests made sure that paper was not displaced by the electronic newcomers. For a time, the computer-paper relationship was secure, if less than sensible. But there were new electronic devices that would begin to worm their way into the relationship and create another sea-change in the computing landscape.

  Before the computer had made a splash in businesses and homes, consumer electronics companies were experimenting with portable electronic organizers. These early devices were generally credit-card-sized, and designed to hold phone numbers, addresses and notes that were manually entered into their tiny keyboards. They were interesting and handy gadgets for the time, and a few of them allowed the user to do even more than the designers intended: I used one to store and access job-related crib notes to use in the field. But most of these devices were cheaply made and fragile; they never managed to survive whatever pocket I kept them in for very long. Still, they represented the first salvo of a new class of personal electronics devices that would revolutionalize the way people stored, accessed and shared information.

  After the computer made its splash in the office and home markets, these organizers came back, as the more robust Personal Digital Assistant, or PDA. They still functioned as organizers, but they were capable of even more—like their bigger computer cousins, they could have third-party applications added to them, giving them new tasks and ways of informing or entertaining the owner. And they were still small, first paperback-sized, then pocket-sized, and much sturdier than the first electronic organizers, enabling them to go pretty much anywhere.

  My first PDA was a paperback-sized Casio Zoomer, rebranded by Radio Shack. Similar to Apple’s infamous Newton, the Zoomer, with its black-and-white LCD screen, was not fast or pretty, but it allowed me to write text documents that I could later import into WordPerfect (my first novel was written on the Zoomer), as well as store images, keep notes and spreadsheet records, contact data and appointments, translate words to other languages, perform complex calculations, and track my spending to sync with Quicken when I got home. It allowed me to do things that would have required me to carry a notebook with me wherever I went. It was a great tool while I used it, and a good starting point to get into the early world of PDAs.

  The PDAs represented the next real threat to paper in the marketplace, especially when they were capable of being synchronized with computers. Now, instead of printing out information on, say, a company contact, you could download that information into a PDA and take it with you. You could even edit that information, and when you returned to your computer, the new information would be uploaded to replace the old information automatically. Although the first PDAs were sold as simple organizers, new applications were constantly being developed to allow users to download more documents to the PDAs and use them on-the-run, giving them more opportunities to skip the printing step altogether. This was fine for personal use, but businesses still insisted on their paper trails, so the PDAs had little impact on office paper use at its base; but it did begin the process of relegating more and more paper to within-the-office use only.

  The pocket-sized PDAs were effectively led by the Palm Pilot, a well-built little device that could synchronize its data with a computer, making it easy to load the device with notes, addresses, phone numbers, and anything else you could think of. Businesspeople latched onto the PDAs quickly, as they provided even faster access to the information that they used to store in their old organizing binders, were easier to update, and could be backed up with the computer, allowing the data to be recoverable if something happened to the PDA itself. And as businesspeople realized the same organizer functions had uses outside of the office, they were soon using them everywhere, and driving the casual consumer adoption of the devices.

  Programmers also latched onto the Palm Pilot, because of the comparative ease of writing their own customized applications for them, and because of a support organization that supported the sharing and proliferation of such programs that expanded on the Pilot’s value. Some of those programs included small applications designed to read customized text files… like e-books. Today some aficionados define the first “true” e-books as the ones that were written for the Pilot and other portable devices.

  The Palm Pilot was one of a number of PDAs on the market. Though the Pilot was the most popular at first, Microsoft had a vested interest in dominating the market with its own PDAs, running scaled-down versions of the Windows operating system. Many companies that produced Windows-running PCs got into the game of selling PDAs that could be used on their PCs to extend their use beyond the desktop. I eventually moved to a Windows-based PDA, in order to get access to the many third-party applications were being created for the Windows devices, an
d to easily connect to my computer and organizer apps.

  Other companies also sold PDAs, seemingly running as many different operating systems as there were companies offering them. As time went by, the dominance of one PDA brand or another would shift about, creating a constant state of confusion among programmers as to which platform would be the best (read: most popular) to program for. While some programmers could adopt their programs to multiple platforms, some of them were developed for only one, leaving the other platforms cold.

  And as many of the first e-books, and their reading software, were being developed during this period, programmers’ confusion resulted in multiple e-book formats, multiple reading applications, and designed to run on multiple operating systems. There was an e-book format designed specifically for the Palm platform, and one designed by Microsoft for Windows. In addition, there were third-party formats designed to run on both platforms, and more besides. The downside, of course, was that none of these differing e-book formats could be read by another format’s reader application… my Windows-based PDA couldn’t read my friends’ Palm-formatted book unless I downloaded new software to my PDA, inevitably resulting in my downloading a half-dozen or more reading apps to cover every version of e-book I might read. It was expected that, sooner or later, a single format would probably rise to dominance, and all e-books would be created in that format in the future. But as no one could reliably guess which platform or format would become dominant, programmers stubbornly held onto the format they had started with, and kept going.

  So, at the beginning of the ascension of PDAs, e-books were already developing into a mish-mash of non-interchangeable formats for non-interchangeable operating systems… what David Rothman, writer and e-book enthusiast, would one day refer to as the “Tower of e-Babel,” in reference to the ancient story of a grand tower planned by the leaders, but which eventually fell because of a lack of communication between the leaders and their builders. This variety of formats gave e-book producers and publishers pause, as most of them did not want to have to figure out which format or operating system would achieve dominance, either; nor did they want to produce their books in as many as half a dozen multiple formats, with the inherent extra work to create and proof each version of the book, and to keep track of each one in the sales stream. Producers and publishers couldn’t be blamed for this attitude: They were booksellers, after all, not programmers.

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  Before a format consensus had been reached, PDAs suddenly found themselves being replaced by an unlikely product: The cellphone.

  The first cellphones were fairly simple devices, designed to make phone calls… and that was about it. However, the early cellphone market was being built on the idea of having fairly similar phone plans and services, so manufacturers would entice buyers to spend money on new phones (which incidentally served to lock people into service plans). In order to get the public to buy a lot of phones, manufacturers began loading them with extra features. The first phones had basic phone-centric organizer programs built into them. But as time went on, phones became more and more sophisticated, doing everything from playing music to providing maps to get you from place to place.

  When cellphones were combined with PDAs like the Palm and Windows devices, including their ability to load custom programs, the death-knell had sounded for the PDA market. Today, not every phone has all of the capabilities of a PDA, but a number of them do. And although PDAs had seen modest sales since they were introduced, pretty much everyone wanted a cellphone. As cellphones saw meteoric growth, the PDA market, which had never quite hit its stride, was already burning out in the cellphones’ backwash.

  You can guess what this meant: More e-book formats and reading applications. More cellphones were being designed with new, non-PDA operating systems, and cellphones were operated differently than PDAs. Programmers were faced with providing new software for these devices, optimized for the twelve or so buttons, and in the beginning, lack of touch-screen control, of a cellphone. And even in that realm, cellphones could be very different from phone to phone. Even the programmers were beginning to balk at those prospects. As a result, the Western cellphone market would see very few e-book reading applications created for them in most areas.

  I specified the western market, because in the Eastern market—Japan, India, China—exactly the opposite was happening. In the East, more people used cellphones for more tasks, because many people could not afford a computer in the East. But Easterners like to read, and in dense urban areas, where masses of commuters squeeze onto trains to go back and forth to work, having a portable reader was highly desirable. Programmers there created e-book formats optimized for screen-equipped cellphones, so anyone with a cellphone capable of connecting to the Web could access these books. Of course, this was one more format for the Tower of e-Babel, and one more point of confusion for publishers.

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  Cellphones were debatably tolerable for surfing the Web… but they were small, and sometimes Web content didn’t display well on those tiny screens. They were also hard to use for other computer-like tasks. PDAs were a bit better … but they were getting harder and harder to find. And sometimes, a computer—even a laptop—was too much for a simple job, or larger than what you wanted to lug around. Enter the netbook, and more of the same format thing all over again.

  Netbooks were designed to be mini, limited computers. They were not supposed to be as powerful or versatile as a full-fledged computer, but were supposed to do a small set of tasks well. They were also cheaper, smaller and lighter than laptop computers, and designed to run longer on a battery charge. Some expected that these devices would be immensely popular with consumers, and fly off the shelves. In fact, they have done reasonably well, but they have not captured the fancy of most consumers, specifically because of their limited scope and lack of processing power.

  As netbooks were closer to computers than PDAs and cellphones, it would be expected that the e-book reading applications that had been designed for computers would work on the netbooks. The problem was, very few e-book reading applications had been written for computers; in fact, the Adobe PDF document was the only e-book format that was regularly read on computers and laptops, with all other formats coming in at a distant second, if at all. Again, programmers were being expected to create reading applications for these platforms, and by now, e-book app programmers were getting sick and tired of being bothered by every new device that came along. Very little effort was put into creating e-book reading apps for netbooks, and today, many e-book formats are seriously underrepresented in the netbook area… just as they are underrepresented on cellphones.

  All of these devices—PDAs, cellphones, and netbooks—were doing their part to erode the relationship between computers and paper, as all of them could join the computer and make their contents portable. Users, in return, were slowly but surely discovering the benefits of foregoing paper for many daily uses, and increasingly, they were turning to e-books as another way to cut down on the amount of paper in their lives.

  But even as more of the public reached out for e-books and other paperless apps, the myriad of operating systems and formats, and concern over whether the Next Big Thing would somehow sever their device’s ability to obtain e-books, kept many potential e-book buyers from taking the plunge, and many producers from bothering to help. The Tower of e-Babel was too large and daunting, and its future was too murky. Most people felt more comfortable opting out, and sticking with paper.

  7: The programmers—The ME generation

  Chapter 6 described how the myriad formats of the first PDAs, cellphones and netbooks caused confusion in the marketplace.

  The confusion was not simply at the hands of consumers, who had the seemingly daily decision of which brands, operating systems or designs to support. Computer programmers were feeling the pressure as well. Vendors wanted them to write versions of their programs for all of those operating systems, brands and designs. Though it was an exciting time to be a p
rogrammer, it was also a frustrating time. Creating a program often meant creating various versions of it for very different computer operating systems, but with the requirement that each OS’s version look the same, work the same, and maintain full compatibility with all other versions of the program, including those written in the past. Even the simplest programs could take months to years to generate multiple working and backward-compatible versions. And vendors often used questionable logic, and hid behind a lack of understanding of the issues, to demand those multiple programs for less than the operative cost of the appropriate programming work involved. But the alternative, turning out a program for only one operating system, meant alienation from a major portion of the market, derision from customers who used all the other programs, and damage done to a company’s reputation in the marketplace.

  So programmers were working hard, and much of that work was repetitive and frustrating, underpaid, and—let’s face it—uninteresting. Most of those programmers had gotten into programming in order to write programs for fun things like games, and cool things like orbital re-entry plots. Instead, most of them were writing programs designed to copy Line A from a spreadsheet into Line 2 of a word processing program. For multiple operating systems. At a payment equal to the cost of one program. Simply speaking, that wasn’t what most of them had signed on for.