I made this video a little over a year ago with help from two friends of mine—one luckier than the other. At the time I thought that the Catalyst Webworks web site was just a few weeks away…*cough*…and that this video would be a great element for the front page.

Well, here it is, finally—after a brief stint on the now-defunct jsmcdougall.com—a world debut of the first Catalyst Webworks commercial. Please watch, laugh, enjoy, and pass it on.

Thanks to Ed Dooley of Mad River Media (lucky friend behind the camera), and Morgan Pielli of MorganWritesABook.com (the dancing chicken).

Enjoy! (…and Hi Mom.)

Finally, after nine wonderfully successful months in business, our intrepid web site company has a company web site! We’re very excited to finally be live. We have so much planned for this site and we can’t wait to begin rolling it all out.

Here’s a quick tour of what’s already on the site…

Our Process: When dealing with complicated topics—like web design and programming—we find it’s good to be clear about how the process of development works. For the benefit of our clients, our potential clients, and ourselves, we’ve put a lot of work into crafting a clear and straight-forward development process that produces unique, effective, and flexible sites.

We’re proud of our development process, and we’ve detailed it here for the world to see.

Our Packages: Our current clients are already familiar with our innovative web site package offerings. But, for those of you out there who haven’t seen how we work, we’ve detailed our development packages here.

Our Portfolio: Check out the sites that kept us so busy we had no time to build this one! Our portfolio is stacked with wonderful organizations and businesses. This current portfolio gallery is a temporary implementation of our portfolio. Stay tuned for the bigger & more impressive version coming soon!

Testimonials: Over the past nine months we’ve built some great sites for great clients. Read their testimonials of our work and services to see what they think of us. Hint: They like us. Some of them  even “like like” us.

Our Newsletter: We’ve hinted at a newsletter in the past. We’ve even sent one or two. But now that this new site is online, we’re ready to go full-steam ahead into newsletterland. Check out what our newsletter will offer subscribers, and then be sure to sign up!

Here’s a quick preview of what’s to come…

• Client Account Login
• Video Tutorials
• Easily Downloadable WordPress Plugins
• A Full Support Section
• Live Support Chat
• Blog with Commentary and Tips
• Photo Albums
• Event & Seminar Information
• And, of course, a lot more!

Thanks for poking around the new site! Please leave a comment below to let us know you stopped by. (We know anyways, actually, but it’s always nice to say hi.)

Charlotte Abbott released part two of our interview today—freeing it from the torment of pre-stage jitters. I have excerpted a few of the questions (and my responses) below. Please read the complete conclusion to this gripping yarn at Follow the Reader.

What are the top two or three technologies have you found most valuable in engaging audiences online?

Twitter for daily conversation. A blog as a conduit for book, author, and community content. Blip.tv for serving up high-resolution video with no size or time restrictions.

For tracking your success and progress, ChartBeat, HootSuite, and Google Analytics are essential.

[...]

Do you see any downside to giving away books or content online?

Books should be owned and content should be free. Content is stolen when publishers make it easier to steal than to buy. By locking up digital content with DRM or asking readers to sign unholy licenses or making content exclusive to one vendor, publishers are making it more attractive to snub the law and steal (and distribute) the digital content than to buy it. Publishers should offer digital books and chapters for sale for a slightly reduced price straight from their web sites in an open-source (or universal) format. Currently, a DRM-free PDF gets my vote, but I see room for something better.

What technological tools or developments are you most looking forward to in the coming year?

I’m looking forward to the development of mobile media. I think that high-quality digital content delivery through mobile devices with screens big enough for reading long-format books will revolutionize book reading and book content. Paper books will continue to have their place and incredible value. Lifelong readers recognize that and will continue to buy paper books for their unique virtues. Electronic devices will never be as good as paper books for quiet, powerless, peaceful reading.

However, once high-quality digital mobile content delivery is done well, book content can grow beyond paper and e-ink devices. Books will slowly evolve to look more like web pages, with links, supplemental videos, audio clips, and the book publisher’s intended formatting and design. Of course, plain text should still be an option for readers who don’t want to be bothered with the flash and bother of videos, etc., but the option for all the bells and whistles we’re already used to on the web should be available as well. The ability to include such ancillary content will provide publishers with an entirely new product that offers more than the bound book can or should. This new product could be a powerful new revenue stream.

Recently I sat down to do an e-interview with Charlotte Abbott—of Follow the Reader fame—about how authors and book publishers can build communities of readers online—and why it works. It was a blast to do, and thanks to Charlotte’s clout and well-earned reputation in the industry, the interview was picked up by the Shelf Awareness daily newsletter as a top article. Charlotte has posted part one of the article on Follow the Reader. Part Two is waiting in the wings with a nervous belly and unbearable stage fright. Let’s start a slow-clap to get him out here…eh?

I have excerpted a bit of the Q&A below. For the full article, please reward Charlotte for her work by reading it on the Follow the Reader site. Thanks.

As the digital landscape evolves into subject areas with their own distinctive topographies and constituencies, some publishers have begun developing their own online “reader communities” as a part of longterm marketing strategy for their books, authors and imprints.

One trailblazer in this area is social media consultant and web programmer Jesse McDougall, who I first met at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference in 2009, where he was clearly more evolved in his thinking on this topic than the other independent publishers in attendance that year.

Read on for the first installment in my two- part interview with Jesse – about the art and science of building reader communities.

[...]

What does online outreach to reader communities have in common with traditional book marketing, and how does it differ?

Books are social creations. They are borrowed, shared, recommended, and discussed in the physical world every day. Publishers send authors out to book signings, interviews, and speaking engagements in the hopes of bringing together like-minded book fans to ignite discussion and spark a hopefully-lively word-of-mouth campaign. The goal of marketing books online is no different. Social media platforms and new content recommendation tools not only make these digital communities possible, but they also increase the speed and range of the word-of-mouth campaigns ten-thousand times over. That means a person attending a digital webinar by an author has the ability to tell and invite 300+ friends with the click of a mouse, where a person attending a real-world seminar only tells his friends in town, and maybe only an out-of-work cousin can make it.

One of Chelsea Green’s most successful campaigns was to run a weekly contest on Twitter. This brief and easy 10-minute contest drew 40-50 people every week, and through them we were able to contact a total of 15,000+ people with links to our website. That exponential potential isn’t possible in traditional marketing.

In your work with Chelsea Green and other clients, what steps have you taken to build focused audiences within specific subject categories on the Web?

The internet is organizing itself into crowds. People are seeking out and aligning themselves with like-minded people. Home gardeners are finding other home gardeners, motorcyclists are finding other motorcyclists, and so on. These groups of people are taking part in conversations that can span all the major (and some niche) social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.

The first step is to examine the niches in which you publish. Once you’ve got a clear idea of the audience (or audiences) you’d like to reach, you must seek them out online. For example, there may be thousands of stay-at-home mothers talking on Twitter for the quick interactions it allows, but very few of them visit YouTube because they don’t have time for a 4-minute video.

Find your audience—wherever they are—and listen to them. Join their groups, or feed, or page, and listen to them. Join the conversation only once you’ve got a clear idea of the conversation and etiquette. Add value to the conversation by offering friendly expertise from your books—when and where appropriate—with a link to find more. Do not offer sales pitches. The content should sell itself.

Over time, your participation in the discussion should come to be seen as valuable, and therefore folks will pass along the content you provide.

To read the rest of Part One of the interview, please check out Follow the Reader.

Twitter—the wildly popular “micro-blogging” service—is making a giant impact on the internet, and joining the ranks of internet giants by doing so. If you’ve watched any cable news program in the last year, you’re probably already familiar with how it is helping to cure us all of the reckless habit of using sentences longer than 140 characters—this one is 163! (E-Gasp.) But, the lesser-known—and possibly more important—impact is how Twitter is helping to improve the traffic tracking tools online.

The Back Story

Twitter is a brilliant little shoehorn. Its 140 character limit was originally built into the system so that the service would play nicely when ‘tweets’ were sent to mobile phones as text messages—which, at the time, already had a 140 character limit. The mobile phone text message character restriction is now disappearing rather quickly as new phone platforms, which are not limited by small screens and tiny data transfer—like the iPhone and Droid, make their way into texters hands.

But Twitter will keep the 140 character limit even though the original reason for it is disappearing. The restriction has made Twitter the media darling, and it has been the cornerstone for the new standard of quick, straight-forward, and safely-ignorable communication—an often-useful white noise in the background of your internet life.

Though, while the 140 character limit hasn’t budged, the way people use Twitter certainly has. The majority of tweets are no longer about personal hygene habits:

I’m brushing my teeth with baking soda for the first time. Holy pantload that’s gross!

Rather tweets have morphed into, most often, some form of recommendation:

Read a great blog post about using baking soda as tooth paste! I might try it! http://wow-bakingsoda.com/2010/10/03/toothpaste

As you can see in that last example, the URL for the link recommendation requires 47 of the allowed 140 characters. And, in some cases, URLs can be as long as—or longer than—140 characters in themselves. And so, to help Tweeters crunch down the length of the URLs they were recommending, link shortening services began popping up around the ‘net: is.gd, bit.ly, and tinyurl.com were a few of the first.  At first, these services were simply redirection scripts parked behind short web addresses. (Here’s one I built with a friend as an experiment while enjoying(!) anchovy pizza: http://lnkr.us.) But soon these young new services began to feel the competition of their fellow link-shortening brethren. Each service began tacking on new features in the hopes of luring more folks their way—because as we all know, money follows traffic.

The Paradigm Shift

Tools like Google Analytics and Mint have been helping web site owners understand the traffic coming to, dancing around, and leaving their sites for years. These are great services pumping out loads of useful information, and web site owners should take advantage of them. They do, however, have one inherent limitation: they can only see, and report on, traffic that touches the web site being tracked.

These new link-shortening services introduced something new. By inserting themselves into the “recommender –> audience” relationship, they allowed—for the first time since links started flying around the internet—the masses to track activity on links beyond their own web sites.

This is valuable.

The Internet’s Crowds

The rise of social media platforms gave people a place to “hangout” online. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Scribd and all the rest have done a great job developing platforms that people find enjoyable, useful, and familiar. People are spending incredible amounts of time on these sites, which, try as you might, you will never own. Therefore, you will never get to track their data.

As business owners learn the ins-and-outs of marketing their wares online, they will discover the need to go to where the people are congregating. Businesses large and small are (and should be) making the move to social media platforms by setting up accounts, pages, feeds, etc. Before the advent of these link-shortening services with tracking capabilities is was often impossible to accurately gauge whether or not promotional campaigns on these external sites was worth the effort.

The Old Way

Let’s say, for example, you’re a book author with a popular Facebook page. You’ve got 4,000 fans. Great. Does that matter? Do they buy books? If you’re fortunate enough to have a web site set up that sells your book directly, then tracking direct sales from your Facebook page is easy. Google Analytics will tell you how many folks came from your Facebook page and purchased a book on your site.

Now, let’s say you don’t have an e-commerce site set up for whatever reason. So, you instead direct people to buy the book from your shiny, new Amazon.com listing. You post a quick excerpt from your brilliant foreword to your Facebook page, and then insert the Amazon.com link at the bottom asking people to follow it to find more.

Unfortunately, because the link you’ve just placed on your Facebook page is directing people right from Facebook.com to Amazon.com, Google Analytics or any other site traffic tracking tool will never know if the link has been followed. Only Facebook and Amazon will know—and they do know.

The New Way

By using one of these link shortening/tracking services, you are inserting a third party into the Facebook.com to Amazon.com link. The new, shortened link you’ve placed at the end of your shining foreword excerpt now directs people (invisibly) through another service—one to which you’ve got access. The process now goes:

1. Facebook.com (where the link is placed)
2. bit.ly (where the link is tracked)
3. Amazon.com (where the link directs the visitor)

Here are some examples. For demostation purposes, pretend these links are placed on Facebook where I can’t track them with Google Analytics—instead of on my blog, where I can.

Naked examples—both links redirect visitors to the same page:

1. Naked Full (untrackable) Link: http://www.amazon.com/Start-Your-Blogging-Business-Startup/dp/1599180472/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268671697&sr=8-1
2. Naked Shortened (trackable) Link: http://bit.ly/bxJAJn

Some embedded examples—the URLs (to both full and shortened links) are hidden here in the HTML, so the user will never know the difference:

1. Embedded Full (untrackable) Link: Check out this video!
2. Embedded Shortened (trackable) Link: Check out this video!

Why It Matters

Tracking your social media efforts is now easier and you can compare your effort to results. Let’s say in the example above that it took you 20 minutes to excerpt your foreword and post it to Facebook. And, a week later, you log into your bit.ly account and see that the link sent 20 people right to your Amazon page. That’s one person per minute of promotional effort over the course of a week. That’s not bad.

The next week you decide, instead of an excerpt, to post a 3 minute video documenting one of the processes you explain in the book. The video takes you roughly 60 minutes to set up, shoot, edit, and post. A week later, you see on bit.ly that the link you’ve placed after the video sent 120 people to the Amazon page. That’s two people per minute spent per week. You’ve just learned that videos are twice as effective with your audience! More video!

Conclusion

Social media platforms are collecting and organizing throngs and masses and hordes of people online. There is incredible opportunity for businesses and organizations to find and interact with their perfect audiences. (Notice I didn’t say “sell to.”) If done intelligently, your efforts in social media will pay off with increased brand awareness, a loyal (and talkative) audience, and increased sales. These new link shortening/tracking tools provide a great measurement tool to help you gauge whether or not you are working intelligently. Use them.

And did I mention they’re free?

• hootsuite (the one I use and recommend, though the others are great services too)
• bit.ly
• budurl

I realized the other day that I’ve now spent over ten years working with small business web sites. Has the internet even been around 10 years?! Was it really 13 years ago that I was ducking class and hiding in the school’s computer lab so I could “email” the fellow geek sitting at the computer next to me? (Apparently yes, it has been over ten years.)

Over the last decade, I’ve built, rebuilt, optimized, launched, tracked, and torn down some pretty great (and pretty bad) sites. And I’ve learned a thing or two about how to squeezed the most out of a site’s visitor traffic. When business owners are looking to boost the effectiveness of their web sites, I often find that the necessary changes can be quick and painless.

So, in an effort to help business owners squeeze more productivity (and business) out of their sites, I offer the following three quick site updates:

1. Place your contact information on every page.

> Tweet this tip. <

The internet has replaced the phone book. Folks no longer drag the large yellow paper directory out of the cramped kitchen drawer to find a telephone number. They instead whip out their iPhone/Blackberry/Mac Book/Droid/etc. and search Google. (Let’s be honest, they’re probably already staring into the thing anyway.) Once those folks navigate to your web site, they click and begin scanning* the page on which they land for the contact information they need. Your phone number, store hours, and location (if applicable) information should be instantly obvious.

Now, let’s look at a different segment of your web site visitor: the casual browsing audience. These folks don’t come to your web site seeking contact information. They have entered your web site to peruse your content, your products, the photos you put up of your company dogs, etc. As they travel through the site, their attention is fragile and precious. It often only takes a slice of your content (a photo, a sentence, a product) to spark the visitor’s urge to contact you. When that spark happens, you must make it as easy as possible for the visitor to find your contact information. If you make the person dig through your site to find it, he or she could very easily get distracted from the impulse to give you their business.

* See #2.

2. Use less text.

> Tweet this tip. <

Web sites are not read. They are scanned. Often, they are scanned frantically. This fact is an “old” pearl of wisdom that has been floating around the web development industry for … apparently over ten … years. There are probably long blocks of text on your web site right now that only your mom will read. (Hi Mom!)

• Replace short paragraphs with bullet points.
• Keep your descriptions short, and keyword* rich.
• Visitors should be able to determine the purpose of your page with only a passing glance.

See how easy that was? The information you provide should do one of two things: add evidence that your product/service/widget is right for your visitor, or direct your visitor toward your product/service/widget page.

Now, having said all that, the web DOES provide you with an awesome opportunity to provide massive amounts of information at a very low cost. And, when a visitor DOES land on exactly what he or she is seeking, you should provide the as much information as you can about the product or service. This massive amount of information should only be supplied at the end of the visitor’s trail (i.e. on a product page, on a service description page, etc.). And it should be extremely easy for people to find the end of the trail.

As E.B. White says, “Omit unnecessary words.”

* Keywords are any word or phrase that folks will type into a search engine to find your page. These are not often what you think they are, or what you would like them to be. Google Analytics can help you determine what keywords people are using to find your site.

3. Sign up for (and use) Google Analytics.

> Tweet this tip. <

Google Analytics is a free service from the search monster that is relatively easy to install and use and it will tell you more about your web site traffic than you will ever need to know: visitors per day, time spent on the site, entrance points, exit points, pages viewed per visit, browser settings, screen resolutions, referring sites, etc.

It is a colossal amount of data and it can be daunting at first. But the real benefits of Google Analytics is that it answers the question: Is my web site working? And, if you find that your web site isn’t working to drive customers through your door, Google Analytics will tell you where the site is failing and what needs to be done.

Last week, Kat Meyer and I had the privilege and opportunity to lead a workshop at O’Reilly Media’s Tools of Change Conference in Times Square. Kat titled it wonderfully: The Slow Marketing Movement: A Social Media Workshop for the Bookish.

The benefits for book publishers and other companies that participate in the world of social media are well known at this point: community, word-of-mouth promotion, instant market research, etc. So we didn’t want to simply rehash the tired “Pie in the Sky” hullabaloo about social media. The folks attending our workshop were already sold on “why.” We wanted to present them with “how.” Therefore, our goal for this workshop was to detail the anatomy of a successful (long-term) social media strategy for content-producers and then describe the tools and tracking services necessary for them to get started.

Social media presents real opportunities for book publishers and other businesses to meet, build, and cultivate an audience. It is a long process punctuated with exciting bursts of growth. I’ve posted the slides from the presentation below, but they are unaccompanied by any audio or video recording. Unfortunately, the conference was unable to tape our workshop.

Nevertheless, please enjoy and share!

For all the time I’ve spent on Twitter, I had never done a Twitter interview until Friday when I participated in Charlotte Abbott’s & Kat Meyer‘s Follow the Reader weekly #followreader chat. Every week these two book mavens ask other industry folks to sign on to Twitter and drink from a fire hose of 140-character questions. It was a thrilling experience and, despite the furious pace, amazingly info-rich.

Here’s my quick summary breakdown.

The pace: furious.
The line of questioning: non-linear.
The character limit: 127.
My answers: brief.
The result: awesome!

I encourage you all to read through last week’s interview, and then to come participate in next week’s. I won’t be the resident industry-insider again, of course, but I will be in the audience firing off questions.

I’ve pulled out some highlights from Friday. Enjoy!

1. charabbott: Hi everyone and welcome to today’s chat on building reader communities with consultant @jsmcdougall #followreader
2. charabbott: Yes, our guest is @jsmcdougall – a pioneer in building reader communities in his work with @chelseagreen #followreader
3. jsmcdougall: Hello! Thanks @charabbott for inviting me. #followreader
4. charabbott: @jsmcdougall For readers who are online, what are the unique benefits of joining a reader community? #followreader
5. jsmcdougall: Well, books have always been social objects. People share/discuss them all the time. Doing it online makes it faster & public #followreader
6. jsmcdougall: Members of a reader community get the benefit of knowing their publishers–kind of like knowing your farmer. Very healthy! #followreader
7. CollectedMisc: What are strategies for keeping people engaged w/a gazillion apps vying for attention; & seemingly short attn spans? #followreader
8. jsmcdougall: @CollectedMisc Great question. Pick 2-3 apps/sites that have your core audience already. You can’t put everything everywhere. #followreader
9. AMACOMBooks: #followreader. Can communities grow around subjects, authors, or publishers? Where do you see most people joining in?
10. jsmcdougall: @AMACOMBooks Building a community is most effective when it IS based in a subject or niche. Pick a niche audience to start. #followreader
11. charabbott: @jsmcdougall It’s a paradox that reading is a solitary act, and yet readers are intoxicated by instant connections #followreader
12. jsmcdougall: @Writing_Is_Fun Reading is solitary. But what is the first thing you do when you finish a good book? You tell someone about it #followreader
13. abbystokes: #followreader A 3D social event (dinner party) is successful w/only 6 pple. Pressure says online success is #s. Loyalty wins over #, yes?
14. jsmcdougall: @abbystokes Good point. Online success is both #s and focus. Start with focus, the #s will follow. The internet is…huge. #followreader

A tall, well-armed Scotsman once told me that people with Scottish blood in their veins only feel two emotions, “Weepin’ and Anger.” I see evidence of this all throughout my family. I am part of a hot-blooded and emotional tribe, and therefore I am prone to hyperbole—both dishing it out (OMG! These pizza Hot Pockets are the best thing ever!) and being taken in by it (Plaid pajamas are the cruelest injustice of our time! AAARGH!). My reaction to such statements is usually to grab my broadsword, paint my face, and charge off to slay all the plaid pajamas in the land…until, of course, it’s time for Hot Pockets.

I tell you this to illustrate the mindset I had when I read the passionate speech author and digital-freedom-warrior Cory Doctorow gave to publishers, writers, librarians, and educators at the National Reading Summit in Canada in November. Doctorow is, among many other things, a New York Times bestselling author who offers all his books as free downloads from his web site. In the speech below, he discusses the destruction of books.

For you busy readers, I’ve pulled out a few excerpts I found to be particularly moving. And, true to the spirit of Doctorow’s argument, I have reposted his entire speech at the bottom so you don’t have to rely on my editing to find the best points. Thank you to Jade Colbert at theVARSITY.ca for transcribing and posting it.

Excerpts:

The anti-copyright activists have no respect for our copyright and our books. They say that when you buy an ebook or an audiobook that’s delivered digitally, you are demoted from an owner to a licensor. From a reader to a mere user. These thieves deliver our digital books and our audiobooks wrapped in license agreements and technologies that might as well be designed to destroy the emotional connection that readers have with their books.

[...]

These licenses are of course built with unenforceable clauses. You can tell, because they’re liberally peppered with language like “If any part of this license is found to be unenforceable, the rest of it will remain in effect.” This is of course the lawyers’ way of saying, “We didn’t limit this to the things we thought a judge would smile upon. We put everything in here. It’s a kind of possible wish list and the only way that you’ll find out which parts are real and which parts are imaginary is to sue us over every point.”

[...]

Which brings me to the second half of that important realization: the most important part of the experience of a book is knowing that it can be owned. That it can be inherited by your children, that it can come from your parents. That libraries can archive it, they can lend it, that patrons can borrow it. That the magazines that you subscribe to can remain in a mouldering pile of National Geographics in someone’s attic so you can discover it on a rainy day—and that they don’t disappear the minute you stop subscribing to it. It’s a very odd kind of subscription that takes your magazines away when you’re done [as is the case with most institutional subscriptions with Elsevier, the world’s largest publisher of medical and scientific journals].

[...]

People keep showing me ebook readers that try to recreate the book experience with cute animations showing the turning of pages. But if you want to recreate the important part of the book experience, the part that keeps people buying books for their whole lives, filling their homes with treasured friends that they would not part with for love nor money, then we need to restore and safeguard ownership of books. When I buy a book, it’s mine. There’s no mechanism, not even in the face of a court order, whereby a retailer can take a book away from me, and yet Amazon—there’s the most extraordinary thing that they had to do in the United States—you’ve heard of course that someone put a copy of Orwell’s 1984 in the Kindle Store, and it wasn’t licensed for distribution in the U.S.—of course, Orwell is in the public domain outside the U.S., in copyright in the U.S.—and Amazon responded to this intelligence by revoking the book 1984 from its customers’ ebook readers. After they’d bought it, they woke up one morning to discover their book had gone. But Amazon was actually pretty good. After thinking about it for a day, and confronting the media storm, they decided to restore the books—they gave them back to the people, and they made a promise: “We will never ever ever ever ever give your books away again. Unless we have to.”

The full monty:

An elegy for the book

I’d like to start my talk today with an elegy for the book. The first part of the elegy is called “Pirates.”

Pirates

There is a group of powerful anti-copyright activists out there who are trying to destroy the book. These pirates would destroy copyright, and they have no respect for our property. They dress up their thievery in high-minded rhetoric about how they are the true defenders and inheritors of creativity, and they have sold this claim around the world to regulators and lawmakers alike. There are members of Parliament and Congress-people who are unduly influenced by them. They say they’re only trying to preserve the way it’s always been. They claim that their radical agenda is somehow conservative. But what they really see is a future in which the electronic culture market grows by leaps and bounds and they get to be at the centre of it. They claim that this is about ethics, but anyone who thinks about it for a minute can see that it’s about profit.

Part two of this elegy is called “The people of the book.”

The people of the book

We are the people of the book. We love our books. We fill our houses with books. We treasure books we inherit from our parents, and we cherish the idea of passing those books on to our children. Indeed, how many of us started reading with a beloved book that belonged to one of our parents? We force worthy books on our friends, and we insist that they read them. We even feel a weird kinship for the people we see on buses or airplanes reading our books, the books that we claim. If anyone tries to take away our books—some oppressive government, some censor gone off the rails—we would defend them with everything that we have. We know our tribespeople when we visit their homes because every wall is lined with books. There are teetering piles of books beside the bed and on the floor; there are masses of swollen paperbacks in the bathroom. Our books are us. They are our outboard memory banks and they contain the moral, intellectual, and imaginative influences that make us the people we are today.

Copyright recognizes this. It says that when you buy a book, you own the book. It’s yours to give away, yours to keep, yours to license or to borrow, to inherit or to be included in your safe for your children. For centuries, copyright has acknowledged that sacred connection between readers and their books. We think of copyright as something that regulates things within a bunch of buckets—DVDs, video games, records—but books are more than all of these things. Books are older than copyright. Books are older than publishing. Books are older than printing!

The anti-copyright activists have no respect for our copyright and our books. They say that when you buy an ebook or an audiobook that’s delivered digitally, you are demoted from an owner to a licensor. From a reader to a mere user. These thieves deliver our digital books and our audiobooks wrapped in license agreements and technologies that might as well be designed to destroy the emotional connection that readers have with their books.

These licenses of course can run up to thousands of words. If you have an iPhone and buy an audiobook from Audible using the iTunes store with it, you agree to an estimated 26,000 words of license agreement. The Canadian Copyright Act itself only runs to 33,000 words. The premise of these licenses is forget copyright. Forget the law in the public realm that gave you the rights to your books. From now on, we write the law.

These licenses are of course built with unenforceable clauses. You can tell, because they’re liberally peppered with language like “If any part of this license is found to be unenforceable, the rest of it will remain in effect.” This is of course the lawyers’ way of saying, “We didn’t limit this to the things we thought a judge would smile upon. We put everything in here. It’s a kind of possible wish list and the only way that you’ll find out which parts are real and which parts are imaginary is to sue us over every point.”

It’s basically a way of saying that copyright is nonsense, and that readers should stop paying attention to it, and only agree to these crazy, abusive licenses.

And on top of those licenses, they add digital rights management technology. Digital rights management technology, of course, has never stopped the book from escaping onto the Internet. To those publishers here today who believe that you can buy DRM that will stop your books from appearing on the Internet without restriction, I say to you, “Behold, the typist.”

So if DRM doesn’t stop people from copying books, what does it do? What it does is makes it illegal for someone to create a reader that can display a book or play an audiobook. Imagine if a giant book chain did a deal with Ikea so that Ikea would be the exclusive supplier of reading chairs and shelves and light bulbs for its books, and actually got a law passed that made it illegal to sell chairs and bookcases and light bulbs that were compatible with their books. This would not be in the interests of readers nor of publishers nor of writers. It would very much be in the interest of Ikea, because they would then have a lock in over our readers that would allow them to exercise undo power in the marketplace.

We’ve heard publishers and writers and other people involved in various creative industries bemoaning for years the undue influence exerted by chains like Wal-Mart, because they control a critical distribution channel. But imagine if that control continued beyond the grave, after the sale, so that any after-market use of your collection required you have an ongoing relationship with a mere retailer or distributor. Imagine how bad that would be for publishing.

So part three of this elegy is called “Saving the book.”

Saving the book

After years of writing and talking and thinking about books, I’ve come to a simple but important realization: I love books. Not just reading them or owning them—I have a deeply sentimental attachment to the very idea of the book.

And it’s not just me. It’s social. It’s across our entire society. If you’re making a short film, and you want to illustrate a society that’s falling into tyranny, you can just cut away to a scene of a pile of books burning, and everyone will know exactly what you meant. If you want to indicate that a character in a book is very sympathetic, and you mention how much she loves reading and going to the library, then your readers will immediately show sympathy for her. Books have this penumbra of virtues, they ooze virtue, and it’s long beyond anything rational or reasonable, because all of you who are people of the book know that there are many books that are absolutely unworthy of that virtue, and yet—and yet—when I worked in a bookstore and had to strip paperbacks to send them back, it was painful to tear the covers off of books. I can barely bring myself to recycle the phone book every year.

And yes, it’s a wonderful place to be for publishing, because they get a free ride on this sentimental attachment that people have to books. People go on buying books because they love the idea of books. Publishers are going out today and paying high-priced marketing consultants to help them understand “the electronic experience” of a digital book. The experience of how a book could be consumed.

Which brings me to the second half of that important realization: the most important part of the experience of a book is knowing that it can be owned. That it can be inherited by your children, that it can come from your parents. That libraries can archive it, they can lend it, that patrons can borrow it. That the magazines that you subscribe to can remain in a mouldering pile of National Geographics in someone’s attic so you can discover it on a rainy day—and that they don’t disappear the minute you stop subscribing to it. It’s a very odd kind of subscription that takes your magazines away when you’re done [as is the case with most institutional subscriptions with Elsevier, the world’s largest publisher of medical and scientific journals].

Having your books there like an old friend, following you from house to house for all the days and long nights of your life: this is the invaluable asset that is in publishing’s hands today. But for some reason publishing has set out to convince readers that they have no business reading their books as property—that they shouldn’t get attached to them. The worst part of this is that they may in fact succeed.

Part four is called “Respect copyright.”

Respect copyright

People keep showing me ebook readers that try to recreate the book experience with cute animations showing the turning of pages. But if you want to recreate the important part of the book experience, the part that keeps people buying books for their whole lives, filling their homes with treasured friends that they would not part with for love nor money, then we need to restore and safeguard ownership of books. When I buy a book, it’s mine. There’s no mechanism, not even in the face of a court order, whereby a retailer can take a book away from me, and yet Amazon—there’s the most extraordinary thing that they had to do in the United States—you’ve heard of course that someone put a copy of Orwell’s 1984 in the Kindle Store, and it wasn’t licensed for distribution in the U.S.—of course, Orwell is in the public domain outside the U.S., in copyright in the U.S.—and Amazon responded to this intelligence by revoking the book 1984 from its customers’ ebook readers. After they’d bought it, they woke up one morning to discover their book had gone. But Amazon was actually pretty good. After thinking about it for a day, and confronting the media storm, they decided to restore the books—they gave them back to the people, and they made a promise: “We will never ever ever ever ever give your books away again. Unless we have to.”

Now I worked as a bookseller for a number of years in this city, and I never had to make that promise to any of my customers when they bought books. Designing a book reader so that books can be removed from it without the reader’s knowledge or consent violates Chekhov’s first law of narrative: any gun on the mantelpiece in Act One is bound to go off by Act Three.

When I buy an audiobook on CD, it’s mine. The license agreement, such as it is, is “don’t violate copyright law,” and I can rip that CD to mp3, I can load it to my iPod or any number of devises—it’s mine; I can give it away, I can sell it; it’s mine. But when you buy an audiobook through Audible, which now controls 90 per cent of the [downloadable] audiobook market, you get a license agreement, not a property interest. The things that you can do with it are limited by DRM; the players you can play it on are limited by the license agreements with Audible. Audible doesn’t do this because the publishers ask them to. Audible and iTunes, because Audible is the sole supplier to iTunes, do this because it’s in their own interest.

To explain to you how I know this: my last book was a Random House audiobook. We went to Audible and said, “Will you do this book in your store without DRM,” and they said, “No.” When we asked them with this one, Makers, which just came out this week—again, a Random House audiobook—Random House is of course the largest publisher in the world, a major customer—we went to Audible and said “Will you do this?” And Audible said, “Why, yes, we will. But iTunes won’t carry it.”

Anyone who claims that readers can’t and won’t and shouldn’t own their books are bent on the destruction of the book, the destruction of publishing, and the destruction of authorship itself. We must stop them from being allowed to do it. The library of tomorrow should be better than the library of today. The ability to loan our books to more than one person at once is a feature, not a bug. We all know this. It’s time we stop pretending that the pirates of copyright are right. These people were readers before they were publishers before they were writers before they worked in the legal department before they were agents before they were salespeople and marketers. We are the people of the book, and we need to start acting like it.

So that’s the end of the elegy.

Copying is life.

Three or four billion years ago, the first self-replicating molecules occurred due to some cosmic accident of chemistry and radiation. And three or four billion years later, they emerged as us. Copying is what we do. Copying is the difference between inert matter and life. Copying is built into our DNA.

I have a 21-month-old daughter, and when she was two weeks old, my mother, who holds a PhD in early childhood education, came to visit us in London, where I live, and she said, “Have you stuck your tongue out at her yet?” And I said “Why, no.” And she said, “Stick your tongue out at her and watch.” And she started sticking her tongue out at Poesy, and Poesy started trying to do the same—she copied her. Poesy had never seen a mirror by this point. She didn’t even know she had a tongue. That’s how deeply ingrained in us copying is. We copy like we nuzzle for the breast. It’s right in there at our most fundamental level.

Copying has been part of our narrative tradition for as long as we’ve had a narrative tradition. If you pick up a pop copy of the Babylonian version of the creation myth, you’ll find that the people who wrote Genesis copied from it. Copying is part of how we do all the stuff that makes our society run. No one ever succeeded by making up their own railway gauge. HTML does not function because everyone gets to make up their own tags. You don’t get to make up your own system for calling people on the phone. If you hire an accountant and he said, “I’ll be right over, as soon as I’ve invented an alternative to double-entry bookkeeping,” you’d fire him. Copying is progress.

Copying is creativity.

I started writing when I was six years old. I went to go see Star Wars just down the street at the old University Theatre with my dad in 1977. When we got home, my brain was fizzing with ideas and I got a stack of paper and I cut it and stapled it and turned it into approximately the size of a massmarket paperback, and I wrote down stories. I thought that I was going to be a writer. I kept on writing my fanfic for months, just trying to write down what that story had done to me so that I could understand it.

When I was 12, I wrote my first novel. It was a terrible Conan pastiche. I’d grown up on Conan. My dad was a Trotskyist but he was a Conan fan before he was a Trotskyist. So when I was a kid on long car trips across Canada, I’d be in the camper in the back, and he would tell me these Conan stories, but he retold them without Conan in them, so they had Harry, Larry, and Mary in them—they were gender balanced, racially balanced.

I discovered Conan when I was about nine, I went down to Bakka, the science fiction bookstore, and Tanya Huff, who was working there, a wonderful Canadian writer, gave me a Conan novel to take home, and the scales fell from my eyes. By the time I was 12, I’d read the whole Conan canon, and I set out to write my own Conan book. By the time I was 16, I was sending out stories; by the time I was 17, I was selling them. I was 30 when my first novel came out—it was a long slog. And here I am today. I quit my job in 2006, and all I do today is write, and I started by copying. And that’s how the kids in your class start writing: by copying.

And yet, we produce materials in the name of authorship that say to kids that they are not supposed to copy. We reify the kind of ridiculous, mythical originality that has never existed. Cervantes invented the novel and we pour our wine into his bottle every day without having to invent a new literary form. We build on the works of others. To tell kids that they can’t create, they must take nothing from those that preceded them, is to tell them a terrible, corrosive lie about creativity, about authorship, about reading and writing.

Copying is meaningless.

We make a million copies before breakfast. Every time you click the mouse, the number of copies that are made between you and some remote server beggars the imagination. Think about it for a minute: first there’s the mouse click that’s converted to the USB buffer, that’s sent off to a network buffer, that’s sent off to your router’s buffer, that’s sent off to several other buffers, then sent to a remote server. The remote server makes a copy of the file on a drive buffer and a network buffer, and then its router’s network buffer, and then possibly a caching proxy, and then 10 or 15 routers between you and it, and then it gets to your modem’s buffer, and then your network buffer, and then your graphics buffer and then your hard drive buffer, and so on and so on. A hundred copies just by clicking the mouse. The number of copies you make every day beggars the imagination, because after all, that’s what computers do. They’re the world’s most perfect copying machine. To be a good computer is to be an accurate copying machine. To be a bad computer is to copy less. That is the technical definition of good computing: to copy well, and faithfully, and quickly, with as little friction as possible. So copying is meaningless, but yet, copying is reified.

We have a copyright statute that intends to do something quite credible: to regulate the supply chain of the creative industries. To ensure that the deal that’s struck between the agent and the publisher, and the publisher and the distributor, and the distributor and the bookseller, and the agent and the filmmaker, the filmmaker and the theatrical distributor—all those relationships are set out in a set of good, well-crafted industry rules.

But what we do is we trigger copyright with copying on the presumption that the act of copying will require some great piece of industrial apparatus that will necessarily imply a big firm with lawyers and agents and other professional people who are well-situated to interpret and act well on the copyright statutes. Copyright is a kind of tank mine: it’s designed to blow up only if you run over it with a record-pressing plant.

But copyright has become a kind of mine that attacks civilians, because civilians copy all day long now, without a printing press, without a corporation, without a record-pressing plant. It’s not that civilians are doing anything they didn’t do before, it’s just that they’re doing it through steps that involve making copies. The fanfic that I loved and shared with my classmates when I was six years old, and 12 years old, and on and on, now it’s shared by blogs, by web, by email, and so it involves making copies instead of passing copies from hand to hand. That is why copyright has become metastatic.

Copyright now encompasses every aspect of your life that you do with computers, because computers incorporate themselves into every aspect of your life. I’m an expatriate. The way that I stay in touch with my family? By copying. Through Skype, through networks. The way that I get my health information? Through networks. The way that I do my books? Through networks. The way that I publish: through networks. The way that I get an education and teach—I teach at the University of Waterloo, and at Open University—through the network. All of that suddenly comes under the jurisdiction of copyright. Not because copyright was intended to regulate all those things, but because all of those things involve copying. And when a copy is made, copyright is triggered. And therein lies the disaster.

Copyright law, as good as it may be for regulating the relationships between writers and publishers, or publishers and film companies, is a very poor regulator of all these other things that constitute the bulk of our daily lives.

For an example of just how bad it can be, we’ve had multiple incentives in this country to write a new copyright statute and they’ve been very fought, not least because multiple governments have refused to ask Canadians what they want from copyright. [Sarmite] Bulte and Jim Prentice refused with Bill C-60 and Bill C-61 to ask Canadians what their copyright statute should look like. They met instead only with lobbyists from copyright industries, and primarily lobbyists from American copyright industries, shooing, for example, the Canadian Creators’ Alliance and other Canadian groups that wanted to meet with them.

Finally though, after years of pestering and hundreds of thousands of Canadians putting their names to a Facebook group that called for consultation on what Canadian copyright should look like, Minister Clement created a public consultation, and what we saw from that public consultation is that Canadians overwhelmingly want fair and balanced copyright that moves and maintains copyright as solely a regulator for the interaction of industrial entities, and doesn’t make copyright the regulator of their entire lives.

But while Minister Clement was soliciting opinions from Canadians, he was participating in a series of secret treaty negotiations called the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement, the most recent round of which concluded in Seoul, Korea. I’d like to think that I had something to do with these meetings, in particular, why they’re secret.

Traditionally, copyright has been made, on the international scale, through the World Intellectual Property Organization, which is a UN specialist agency that has the same relationship to copyright law as Mordor has to evil. A lot of us from various public interest groups started showing up and writing down what was being said, and publishing it so that people in countries could find out what their governments were doing. And people woke up around the world, and the treaty that they were making, a broadcasting treaty that would have banned a number of existing Canadian practices, including the way we do cable television, collapsed on the back of transparency about what they were up to.

So they moved this treaty-making process out of the UN and into a members-only club of rich countries. Poor countries were instrumental in toppling these treaties because when they started to find out what these treaties would actually mean for them—remember that if you’re a sub-Saharan African nation, you don’t send copyright experts to Geneva, you send experts on children’s health, you send experts on water, and maybe these days you send experts on climate change, but those people serve as reps on every UN body, and they rely on advice from expert consultants there who, up until they got there, were from the entertainment industry. And when they found out that what was actually being proposed were rules that no one in the developed world actually had to follow, that would have just increased the burden that they had to the developed world, they rose up against it, too, so they’re not invited to the ACTA meetings either—it’s just the rich countries. Subsequent to the ratification of this agreement, it’s understood that ratification of ACTA will be a key piece of participating in other trade agreements.

What is it that Minister Clement has been negotiating on your behalf while you thought you were telling him what copyright law should look like?

Well, one of the things is called a three-strikes rule, and this is something that our business secretary of the United Kingdom, Peter Mandelson, has drawn fire about because he spent the weekend in Corfu with David Geffen and came back decided to revise British copyright law—that’s not my account of it, that’s his account of it.

Three strikes works like this: if anyone you live with is accused of three acts of copyright infringement, without any proof, without any evidence, without a judge, without a jury, without a lawyer, without due process, your Internet connection is taken away and your name is added to a register of people for whom it is illegal to provide Internet access for a period of time. In France, where this law was just passed, it’s a year.

Now think of what this means for your participation in the information society. Think of what this means for your children. How many kids could do their homework without the Internet? How many kids could stay in touch with their grandparents without the Internet? How many people could do their jobs without the Internet? How many parents could stay abreast of their children’s health issues without the Internet? How much will you lose if we take away your Internet access?

Well, it’s easy to tell, you just have to look at the corollary. What if we had the reverse implemented? And we know from the takedown business that preceded this proposal, where anyone who makes up a webpage on the Internet, you could accuse them of infringing copyright without any penalties if you get it wrong. We know from that that there’s very sloppy takedown procedures. Universal, for example, argued that a mother who had uploaded a clip of her adorable toddler dancing in the kitchen infringed on their copyright because in the background faintly for a few seconds you could hear Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy.”

So what would happen if we said that these people were sloppy in their takedown notices which they carry over to these copyright accusations for three strikes? If we said, “If you make three incorrect copyright accusations, we take away your company’s Internet access.” We’ll go around to every Universal and NBC office in the world—we’ll leave GE, the parent company, they can keep their Internet access—the whole Universal-NBC axis: go into their offices, into their wire closet with a set of bolt cutters, and we’ll cut off their Internet access, and you can be the company that does business by fax from now on.

It is a corporate death penalty, because to be a corporate entity in this world is to be a participant in the information society, just as to be a fully-fledged citizen in this world is to be a participant in the information society.

And there Minister Clement has been, negotiating away your due process rights to being a full-fledged citizen of the information society, even as he was asking you for what you thought those rules should be. And that’s just for starters. Included in this is an obligation for anyone who provides hosting on the web—so that’s YouTube or the people hosting this video stream that’s being recorded now, it’s Blogger, it’s Yahoo groups, it’s anyone who hosts your user content—to first ensure that material doesn’t infringe on copyright. Let’s give YouTube as an example to see what that means.

YouTube gets 16 hours of video uploaded to it every 60 seconds. Simply put, there are not enough lawyer hours between now and the heat-death of the universe to vet 16 hours of video per minute on YouTube. How will YouTube stop infringing material from showing up on the site at all? Well, they do it by becoming like a cable television station, and we know what cable television looks like. We show up as a supplicant to one of a few companies, the lawyers go through your errors and omissions, they make you take out anything you can’t get permission for, even if it’s fair dealing or fair use. Ask any documentarian what it’s like producing a video with, say, a mob scene in the streets of Bhutan where someone happens to be wearing a Pepsi logo on their shirt, because Pepsi has not given permission, and the insurer is not going to allow you to exhibit it theatrically until they have it from Pepsi. So that’s what it looks like. It looks like an enormous burden on free speech and on participation in culture. It means that your students’ abilities to both access and produce material that they share with other students will be fatally wounded. So that’s the second thing that ACTA does.

The third thing ACTA does is it imposes a burden on ISPs to surveil their networks, and to pass surveillance information on to rights holders so that rights holders would now be charged with examining in fine detail without a warrant, without due process, and without particularized suspicion—the hallmarks of liberal democracy—they would be required to surveil everything you did: your communications with your family, your communications with your doctor, your communications with your lawyer, your kids’ schoolwork.

In fact, we already see this in microcosm. You know, there’s these spyware creeps who will sell you software for your library, your school, or home, that spies on what your kid does and is supposed to monitor what your kid does and keep them from looking at naughty things? On the grounds that somewhere there’s a boiler room big enough where they looked at every page on the Internet, and mark the bad ones bad and the good ones good? You know what these companies make most of their money doing? They make most of their money selling their software to Syria, to Iran, to China—that’s their primary business. And then they have secondary revenue streams. It’s just come out that one of them is taking everything your kids do on the Internet, including their IM sessions and their emails, and selling it to market research companies so they can figure out better ways to sell things to your kids. So that’s what it looks like in microcosm.

What will it look like when it’s not just kids who labour under that regime? What will it look like when copyright mission creep expands to create a burden of surveillance on everything everybody does on the network?

And finally, there’s this business of what happens at the border. They argued that border guards should have the obligation to check all incoming media to ensure that it doesn’t contain anything that infringes copyright. Laptop searches at the border. It means all that stuff on your laptop—pictures of your kid having a bath, love letters to your wife or husband—all that material to be stickily pawed through by some customs guy at the border.

When this first emerged, those of us who were critics of this that said, well, this looks like they’re going to have to search your iPod. The people in charge said, “Oh, no, it won’t be iPods, it will only be things that have the potential to make a substantial infringement.” I don’t know what iPods these people are using, but you can buy an iPod that carries $100,000 worth of music on it. So I don’t know what these people are thinking. It’s not as though storage capacity is going down. From now on, hard drives just get cheaper, smaller, and more capacious, and nothing is so small it won’t be capable of Internet copyright infringement.

Anyway, the entertainment industry argued against a diminutive secession to this. They said, “We can’t allow anything. Anything is too much. We can’t give people the message that there’s an acceptable level of piracy. You need to search it all.”

We’ve seen what this treaty looks like, and it’s bad.

Maximal, abusive, mindless copyright expansion isn’t just a disaster for the public, though. It’s also a disaster for creators. There’s this myth that those of us who write do something different from those of us who read, that there’s a fine line between writers and readers, but I’ve never known anyone to use more information than those who create information. The most aggressive copyists, the most aggressive owners of books and acquirers of books and all other media that I can think of are writers. The most aggressive users of the network to research and market, to reach out to their colleagues, to communicate with their publishers, are writers. So even though some writers might think that they might need this, even thought they might apply some Stockholm Syndrome that’s caused them to align themselves with the copyright maximalists that run giant industrial entities that figure that this would be a good idea—it doesn’t actually follow that this is actually good for writers, or for other creative people.

Copying creates new opportunities for writers and other creative people that have not existed before.

When I had my daughter, I realized that mammalian reproduction is something that we take very seriously. We care about where every copy we’ve made of ourselves goes. We care a lot about this division. But mammals have to invest a lot of energy into their copies. There’s a lot of organisms that don’t. Think about the dandelion. The dandelion doesn’t care where its seeds go, it just cares that every single opportunity for germination is taken, that every crack in every sidewalk has a dandelion seed growing out of it.

And that’s what the creators who embrace copying—who say “It’s the 21st century, copying happens, pretending it doesn’t is lovely and historical, like being a blacksmith at Pioneer Village, but it’s not contemporary”—writers that have embraced copying have found that being like a dandelion pays off. It gives you a fecundity to your work that allows it to find its way into places that you never thought it would be found before.

The most heartbreaking stories I’ve heard about where my books have gone—my books are copyable from the day that they’re published, they’re published jointly in the U.K., Canada, and on audio by Holtzbrink-Macmillan-Tor, Random House, and HarperCollins, so, you know, three of the four or five big publishing entities. These are available as free downloads, but I get the most amazing letters from people who found these free downloads. Now, they also go out buy the book afterward—that’s lovely, too—but in terms of a reading strategy, what we’re here to talk about today, one of the most moving things I ever heard is from a sailor on a ship in the Persian Gulf, saying “I’ve never really read, but here I am confronted by incredibly long hours of boredom, and we were able to download and pass around copies of your book on the ship. We’ve all read it. We all talk about it. It’s become part of how we think about the world.”

Now, this particular book is about how futile the War on Terror is and how problematic it is that we put troops in the Persian Gulf. So it’s quite amazing that this book has made it there and has become part of that dialogue, a dialogue that I don’t think I’ve ever participated in.

But even more interesting are the letters I get from readers who found in my books the capability to do all that social stuff that kids do with books.

Neil Gaiman, who I’m sure you’re all familiar with, is a wonderful and inspiring writer, has a lovely schtick that I’m going to do for you today. How many people here have a favourite writer? Put your hands up if you have a favourite writer. Keep your hand up if you paid for the first book you got by your favourite writer, put your hand down if you got it for free. About half of you got your first book by your favourite writer for free.

You got it from the library, you got it from your friend, someone gave it to you for nothing, because that’s one of the most important ways that we discover reading: our friends tell us how important it is to them and it becomes part of our social conversation. That’s the thing about copying on the Internet: it’s not like counterfeit, it’s not like that guy on a blanket on Yonge Street selling bootleg DVDs. Copying on the Internet is most often a hand-to-hand act, it’s a thing that happens between people: I buy this, you should, too. Here, take this, it means something to me. It’s part of that continuing conversation of literature that predates publishing, that predates printing, that predates copyright, that is really at the core of what it means to have a culture.

As the elegy reminds us, publishers have set out to sever this emotional connection by getting this licensing fever, by saying that ownership is something that can’t exist in the 21st century, that readers have no business owning their book. So I want you to do something. Maybe if you work in the industry, if you’re publishers or writers, I’d like you to, essentially, cut it out. I’d like you to have better license agreements on your works. Here’s a great license agreement for an ebook, because everyone’s asking me, “What’s a good license agreement for an ebook?”:

Don’t violate copyright law.

It’s four words long! And it’s everything you need to do to uphold copyright law in your books. Anything else is purely confiscatory of your readers. Your readers know what that license means. They don’t know what the 26,000 words [in total, for an iPhone user to buy an audiobook through the iTunes store] mean. And none of you would really ever agree to those licenses either for your own purposes. So don’t do that.

If you’re a librarian or an archivist, don’t buy the media that has the abusive license terms associated with it, and especially don’t buy media with DRM, and especially especially, don’t buy media with DRM that tracks your patrons’ reading habits. Librarians have fought for centuries for the intellectual freedom of their readers.

Now I have to take my jumper off because I have this great T-shirt. Librarians had these when the Patriot Act passed. It says, “We’re the radical guild of librarians. We know what you’re reading, but we’re not saying.”

Licenses that requires that librarians turn over their patrons’ reading habits? No librarian is going to do it, because we know that your behaviour changes when what you do is surveilled. We know that intellectual freedom requires a private space. So you guys that work in libraries, your collection acquisition people are really the suckers that every ebook publisher has square in their crosshairs, they really think that they can milk you for it, and that’s because many of you have bought these ridiculous subscriptions that disappear when you stop subscribing. They’ve got you marked for suckers. It’s time to stop being suckers. It’s time to start doing right by your collections and by your patrons.

The people who manage the Bodleian Library in the U.K., which I’m sure you’re all familiar with, I had a meeting with them recently and they said, “You know, our job isn’t to safeguard literature for scholars. Our job is to safeguard our culture for the next civilization.” That’s what archiving and librarianship are about.

You people are the safeguards of our culture itself. You are the continuity between civilizations, and the only way we can maintain that is if we ensure that licensor technologies do not prohibit those elements of archiving and circulation that are lured by printing or publishing.

So the final thing that I want you to do is get involved in further consultations, and to demand from your members of parliament further consultation on ACTA—transparency into ACTA. We need to see what that treaty says, we need to get the public into that treaty, and Minister Clement should stop going to those meetings until we’ve told him that that’s what we want him to do. Because we had consultation on copyright in this country. We know what we want on copyright, and it’s not secrets in smoke-filled rooms, it’s transparency and public-consultation, multilateral participation.

So thank you very much, I’ll take some questions now.

When it comes to the launch of new and exciting techno-gadgets, I—and perhaps, we all—have been spoiled by Apple. Yes, they’ve gotten it wrong on occasion, but so often, they get it so right. They’ve repeatedly raised the bar, and our expectations. Perhaps that’s why, when I first saw the unauthorized, leaked images of Amazon’s first Kindle on the web all those years ago, I thought surely they were the creation of an internet ne’er-do-well. I laughed, because I thought I got the joke. “Yeah!” I said. “That DOES look like it’s from 1980! Good one, you internet pranksters you.”

The image of the original Kindle that was first leaked online. (I believe.)

But so it was.

In the days of high-speed streaming video, 5-second song downloads, 30″ computer monitors, and a nation of media addicts, Amazon released this.

Amazon’s Kindle (along with all the other faux-paper e-ink readers) ignores the fact that all media is evolving—books included. These e-ink readers are nothing more than a cautious step between the old and the new. They’re too married to the formatting and failures of their paper predecessors to take full advantage of what’s possible. They’ll never be as good as paperbacks for quiet, un-powered reading. And they’ll never be as good as computers for multimedia content. Why offer a device that offers a poor version of two experiences?

By releasing an e-reader so hopelessly tied to the paper, Amazon gave Apple an opening to provide something better. If the latest swirl of rumors is true and Apple plans to release a tablet computer, or iSlate, early next year, you can bet your life it will put the Kindle to shame when it comes to digital content delivery. Any e-ink device simply will not be able to compete. I’m not going to reveal any names, but I have it on very good authority, for example, that—unlike the Kindle—the new Apple tablet will, indeed, have a color screen. Might it also … play video?! (Please pardon the sarcasm.)

Book publishers are feverishly searching for the best ways to pour their content into the new digital stream. And rightly so. I’ve argued here in the past that book publishers, as producers of a continuous stream of high-quality and edited content, are perfectly suited to capitalize on the new opportunities presented by the digital content revolution. Selling e-books has long been the most accepted method—and though I have my reservations—I wouldn’t necessarily disagree. I would argue, however, that the best e-books are certainly not Kindle e-books.

Book content should no longer be imprisoned by the limitations of paper. Digital books should include author interviews, instructional videos, pop-up definitions of esoteric terms, instant foreign translations, optional soundtracks, links to helpful web sites, and anything else publishers and authors can dream up to increase the value and effectiveness of their content.

What the rumored Apple iSlate represents for publishers and e-book readers is the ability to break free from the limitations of paper—which were so dutifully copied by Amazon and Sony—and provide digital book content to readers on a portable device with a screen big enough to be reasonable for reading long-form content (as opposed to the small screens on the iPhone, netbooks, or similar devices that can deliver high-quality digital content).

I understand the arguments for the e-ink format: the non-back-lit screen is easy on the eyes, easy on battery life, etc. And since we spend upwards of ten hours a day staring at glaring screens—whether 30″ wide or glowing in your pocket— I can understand the argument for not wanting to read the latest vampire novel off yet another backlit screen. When I desire such a quiet reading experience I pick up the paperback. It is still the best at what it does. No electronic reader could ever truly duplicate the experience of reading off paper. So why try? When building a digital reader, build something different. Build something that offers book readers new material—and publishers a new revenue stream. With the coming of the iSlate, it looks like Apple may have finally done just that.