are fundamentally different from modern books in the same way
that printed books are different from monastic Bibles: they are
malleable. Time was, a "book" was something produced by many
months' labor by a scribe, usually a monk, on some kind of
durable and sexy substrate like foetal lambskin. [ILLUMINATED
BIBLE] Gutenberg's xerox machine changed all that, changed a book
into something that could be simply run off a press in a few
minutes' time, on substrate more suitable to ass-wiping than
exaltation in a place of honor in the cathedral. The Gutenberg
press meant that rather than owning one or two books, a member of
the ruling class could amass a library, and that rather than
picking only a few subjects from enshrinement in print, a huge
variety of subjects could be addressed on paper and handed from
person to person. [KAPITAL/TIJUANA BIBLE]

Most new ideas start with a precious few certainties and a lot of
speculation. I've been doing a bunch of digging for certainties
and a lot of speculating lately, and the purpose of this talk is
to lay out both categories of ideas.

This all starts with my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic
Kingdom [COVER], which came out on January 9, 2003. 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
introd