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anyone who\'ll listen that the barrier to ebooks is screen resolution. It\'s bollocks, and so is the whole sermonette about how nice a book looks on your bookcase and how nice it smells and how easy it is to slip into the tub. These are obvious and untrue things, like the idea that radio will catch on once they figure out how to sell you hotdogs during the intermission, or that movies will really hit their stride when we can figure out how to bring the actors out for an encore when the film\'s run out. Or that what the Protestant Reformation really needs is Luther Bibles with facsimile illumination in the margin and a rent-a-priest to read aloud from your personal Word of God. 

New media don\'t succeed because they\'re like the old media, only better: they succeed because they\'re worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at. Books are good at being paperwhite, high-resolution, low-infrastructure, cheap and disposable. Ebooks are good at being everywhere in the world at the same time for free in a form that is so malleable that you can just pastebomb it into your IM session or turn it into a page-a-day mailing list. 

The only really successful epublishing -- I mean, hundreds of thousands, millions of copies distributed and read -- is the bookwarez scene, where scanned-and-OCR\'d books are distributed on the darknet. The only legit publishers with any success at epublishing are the ones whose books cross the Internet without technological fetter: publishers like Baen Books and my own, Tor, who are making some or all of their catalogs available in ASCII and HTML and PDF. 

The hardware-dependent ebooks, the DRM use-and-copy-restricted ebooks, they\'re cratering. Sales measured in the tens, sometimes the hundreds. Science fiction is a niche business, but when you\'re selling copies by the ten, that\'s not even a business, it\'s a hobby. 

Every one of you has been riding a curve where you read more and more words off of more and more screens every day through most of your professional careers. It\'s zero-sum: you\'ve also been reading fewer words off of fewer pages as time went by: the dinosauric executive who prints his email and dictates a reply to his secretary is info-roadkill. 

Today, at this very second, people read words off of screens for every hour that they can find. Your kids stare at their Game Boys until their eyes fall out. Euroteens ring doorbells with their hypertrophied, SMS-twitching thumbs instead of their index fingers. 

Paper books are the packaging that books come in. Cheap printer-binderies like the Internet Bookmobile that can produce a full bleed, four color, glossy cover, printed spine, perfect-bound book in ten minutes for a dollar are the future of paper books: when you need an instance of a paper book, you generate one, or part of one, and pitch it out when you\'re done. I landed at SEA-TAC on Monday and burned a couple CDs from my music collection to listen to in the rental car. When I drop the car off, I\'ll leave them behind. Who needs \'em? 

Whenever a new technology has disrupted copyright, we\'ve changed copyright. Copyright isn\'t an ethical proposition, it\'s a utilitarian one. There\'s nothing *moral* about paying a composer tuppence for the piano-roll rights, there\'s nothing *immoral* about not paying Hollywood for the right to videotape a movie off your TV. They\'re just the best way of balancing out so that people\'s physical property rights in their VCRs and phonographs are respected and so that creators get enough of a dangling carrot to go on making shows and music and books and paintings. 

Technology that disrupts copyright does so because it simplifies and cheapens creation, reproduction and distribution. The existing copyright businesses exploit inefficiencies in the old production, reproduction and distribution system, and they\'ll be weakened by the new technology. But new
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