Given that Oprah is reviving her book club and featuring a host of classics that are mostly, one presumes, in the public domain, it seems like a tremendous opportunity to show the value of works that are unencumbered by restrictive copyright limitations.
I think it might make sense to sell a device (a Pocket PC or Tablet PC, perhaps?) with a subscription that guarantees a copy of a complete, annotated text of each book as it's selected for the club. The book would, of course, be delivered digitally, along with hyperlinks to related resources. But readers would also be able to share and publish their thoughts on the books, and create derivative works or other uses of the text right from the device.
The opportunity for the device retailers is tremendous. If the device is cheap enough, they could sell the subscription at a rate that would subsidize some of the hardware cost, and present it to the reader as a simpler purchase than buying each of the individual works at a bookstore or online retailer. And for the readers, the involvement with the book would be greatly increased by the chance to interact with the author's work in ways that are prohibited by the current intellectual property regime that controls more contemporary works.
Of course, it might be possible to do all of this without the device. You could just build a web community to service this audience. It seems like a close fit for efforts like eat more words. But I think the audience and market are finally there for the switch to a digital context, and a bundling deal just clicks with my gut sense of how this book club should be sold.
It's been instructive for me lately to watch the travails of graduate level students struggling with dozens of bulky books. For them, it'd be an easy sell to advocate moving all of their textbooks to one lightweight, searchable device. But the chicken and egg problem preventing that option from being available to most students is that there isn't a mass market for the device outside of academia. I submit that Oprah's Book Club members, with their regular, predictable purchases of books that are easily converted (or already available) in digital form, we've got a chance to make as big a shift to digital content in the publishing industry as we've had in the recording industry.
Let me know when I can buy one.
Wouldn't the annotated version be under copyright?
The annotated versions would be under copyright, yes, but I was thinking of user-supplied annotations, perhaps submitted under a Creative Commons license.
I think it'd be important to also offer a software alternative of the device for those of us who really don't want another small piece of dropable electronics to carry around, worry about recharging, and find a pocket for. The low-end Palms are cheap enough Orca could probably just work out some sort of licensing deal. She's got that kind of pull, right?
A while back, I was carrying mine and PK's iPods, and told him to give me his cel phone so I could see just how expensive I could make my pants.
but I was thinking of user-supplied annotations..
Yeah, Pepysdiary is a great example of terrific user supplied annotation of a work available on public domain.
I'm a huge fan already of Pepys Diary. I can't see how that level of daily interactivity and web-linked annotations could be available other than on an web-enabled device.
However I already have several, albeit unannotated, classics on an SD card on my Palm 505. I download free e-texts from Project Gutenberg, then run them through DropBook and have a lovely text I can save to SD at the next synch, ready to be read in Palm Reader.
A way of commercialising this process for something like Oprah's book club (forgive me for not being entirely familiar with it, I live in the UK) might be to run some kind of subscription content service like AvantGo. Digital content contributed by members could be available on a website like the Pepys weblog but also downloadable for mobility.
Would something like that be possible? I am a techno-illiterate so my thought may be an unimplementable one!
Computers and web sites and weblogs are great and all... But I'm still not buying into electronic book-replacements until they get a hell of a lot better, and I'm pretty sure most of the world is with me on this.
On-screen text is getting far better (I looove me some ClearType®) but it has a long way to go before I curl up with an eBook. The text just isn't pleasant enough to read yet.
Although whatever happened to that whole electronic paper concept that was all the rage back in '99?
Came to your site from Rome, Italy, by BlogSnob. I have made an anti-smoke site in Italian and in English. The Italian version is full of comments by visitors. The English one has no comments at all and much less visitors. I don’t understand why.
Please, have a look of my site and give me suggestions. And, if you agree with my aims, link it on your .
Thanks and see you soon
Eze
Dear Oprah this is not a comment, but asking for the possibility of an honour to have an interview with you. I am from The Gambia, West AFrica, presently doing my Masters in Journalism and Cultural Studies. (Broadcasting). I have been given my Dissertation already and have choosen to interview Black successful women in Britain and the United States.
TOPIC: HOW FAR HAVE WE COME AS BLACK WOMEN ARE WE BETTER OFF NOW?
Hope this get to you, as soon as possible as I seem not to have access directly to your e-mail address. You have been an inspiration, I hope and pray that people like you keep the banner of hope flying even in this daker days.
Cheers and God Bless!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
hey oprah iam marie anne am from guinea i just need your helpe please send me your cel phone numbre i can talk to you