MattMaroon.com

Google launched their eBook store yesterday. As a die-hard Kindle fan and avid read I’m quite disappointed. As an author I’m excited. It’s as if I have split personalities fighting over the last drumstick at Thanksgiving, and either way I both win and lose.

The promise behind Google Books, it was rumored, was that you could read the books everywhere.  As Google themselves said “We designed Google eBooks to be open.” Unfortunately what that means is they’ll run on any device that plays nicely with their DRM. Supporting many forms of DRM on many locked-down devices is not the same as being open.

In fact, I can’t tell what’s “open” about it at all. In my browser I can’t seem to select text or right click, so I can’t copy and paste the book. (I haven’t had time yet to open up Firebug and figure out what’s going on, it might just be something simple.) I don’t see any way to get a DRM-free document that I could convert to run on my Kindle.

I’m sure the closed nature of the system is not Google’s choice, that’s probably demanded by the publishers. But as Judge Judy would say, Google is peeing on our legs and telling us it’s raining. I know open when I see it, and Google Books is not open.

I can see why publishers wouldn’t allow a truly open book store. Scott Adams says that in the near future there will be no such thing as a professional writer, which would mean that there would be no such thing as a professional publisher either. Publishers aren’t stupid, they want to remain in business. There’s a lot of money in remaining in business.

And to be honest, I think they’ve got a real shot of pulling it off. The reason DRM can’t work in music is that record companies still sell the same exact songs on CD. It only takes one unlocked copy of the file to propagate, and then all people who want to download the music illegally for free can do so. Books, by contrast, are  usually not sold in any DRM-free digital format, and book scanners are out of reach for most people. As long as publishers can maintain the upper hand in the cat and mouse game of DRM vs .circumvention they can avoid the fate of the music industry.

Right now I can trivially find any song or disc you can find on iTunes, plus many more, in seconds. I have yet to have the experience of searching for some music I know to exist and not finding it. I can find a decent number of books too, but far from all of them. And a lot of the ones I can find are in a PDF format without text reflow, meaning converting them requires using OCR which is ugly.

So perhaps it’s my own wishful thinking, as a past and potential future author, but I think DRM is here to stay in books. And I think Google’s new product is evidence of that.

I just read the best review I’ve ever seen. And that says a lot, because even if I only read one review per item I’ve purchased from Amazon, I’d still probably be in the top one-tenth of one percent of people in terms of quantity. It was for The Da Vinci Code on Amazon, and here it is:

Seventy pages into Dan Brown’s surprisingly putdownable potboiler, the inevitably green-eyed, French-accented code cracker Sophie Neveu sighs, “This is not American television, Mr Langdon.” Oh, Sophie, if only that were true. You know a book owes too much to the screen when an albino assassin appears on the very first page, and rather than taking the time to construct an original variant on the intelligent-action-man hero you’re simply instructed to think of Harrison Ford – in tweed. This is a movie, pure and simple: a thinly plotted, strongly visual, mildly entertaining Hollywood chase movie about cardboard characters (replete with sappy childhood flashbacks) and with enough Opus Dei-bashing to make it a fast-acting antidote to “The Passion of the Christ.” Crammed full of supposedly arcane revelations about mathematics, religion, symbolism and art – most of which read like verbatim downloads from Google – the “intellectual” content won’t be dazzling or new (forget accurate) to anyone even slightly inquisitive about these topics. Worse, it’s presented with a juvenile fascination for “connections” that would embarrass the most seasoned New Age charlatan. It all moves at a cracking pace, of course, and has enough scope and colour to hold your rapt attention for a few winter nights, and enough Catholic conspiracy theory to warm the heart of an atheist. But it’s so devoid of literary merit, so apparently committed to the squandering of every opportunity to do anything interesting with the material – rather than just ape the narrative grammar of cinema – that it truly beggars belief. The characters are just names on the page, huge swathes of deadpan “I’m glad you asked”-style exposition pad out the clunky plot shifts, and because it’s all so closely modeled on the rhythms of Hollywood nothing ever comes as a surprise – not a word, not an image, not a moment. This is post-literate prose at its direst, plugging directly into pre-fabricated scenarios, characters and images, absolving the reader of the need to imagine anything – which is why it’s such a famously easy read. This is reality as a simulacrum of television, a copy of a copy, and about as convincing. It’s an odd stylistic choice in a novel which takes as its theme the notion that great art depicts truths which evil empires would suppress. My advice? Save your time, and wait for the movie, i.e. wait until this story is presented in its natural form. I’m actually really looking forward to it. Seriously. I quite like the story, I just dislike the way it’s presented here. It’s fundamentally a puerile novel, but as a Hollywood movie I’m sure I’ll be tickled by it. In the mean time, if you want to read the kind of novel this purports to be, get yourself a copy of Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” or, better yet, “Foucault’s Pendulum”. If those don’t grab you, at the very least try Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History” – nothing to do with the Grail, but it’s certainly more deserving of the “intelligent thriller” label than this. Is there really nothing better to be said for “The Da Vinci Code”, as novel? Sadly, I’m with Harrison – I mean Robert: “Langdon considered it a moment, then groaned.” (p.93)

I wonder if he reviewed the movie. I heard it managed to somehow be worse than the book.