At that time,
there was a lot of talk in my professional circles about, on the
one hand, the dismal failure of ebooks, and, on the other, the
new and scary practice of ebook "piracy." [alt.binaries.e-books
screengrab] It was strikingly weird that no one seemed to notice
that the idea of ebooks as a "failure" was at strong odds with
the notion that electronic book "piracy" was worth worrying
about: I mean, if ebooks are a failure, then who gives a rats if
intarweb dweebs are trading them on Usenet?
A brief digression here, on the double meaning of "ebooks." One
meaning for that word is "legitimate" ebook ventures, that is to
say, rightsholder-authorized editions of the texts of books,
released in a proprietary, use-restricted format, sometimes for
use on a general-purpose PC and sometimes for use on a
special-purpose hardware device like the nuvoMedia Rocketbook
[ROCKETBOOK]. The other meaning for ebook is a "pirate" or
unauthorized electronic edition of a book, usually made by
cutting the binding off of a book and scanning it a page at a
time, then running the resulting bitmaps through an optical
character recognition app to convert them into ASCII text, to be
cleaned up by hand. These books are pretty buggy, full of errors
introduced by the OCR.
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