Miss January, and the future of publishing

When I killed Twitter a friend consoled me by saying, well, the only thing you ever posted about was writing. Marginalia is the opposite: my scrapbook of distractions: movies, TV, January Jones' black eyes like a doll's eyes. (Actually they're blue but the show is graded.) So if you follow this blog, 2011 will be more of the same. When I had a home my wall was pinned with all kinds of crap. Thanks to technology, anyone can share in my Many Wastes of Time.

But then last night I was nosing around the torrents, as you do, and wondered, hey, what .epub files are out there? And in less than ten seconds I had downloaded three commercial best sellers. The speed itself was unsurprising: the total works of Shakespeare are around 5 megabytes – less than a single pop song at 128kbps – and the books in question were around 500k. I've been told by programmers and developers that DRM protected ebooks are easily cracked, which makes sense: the format is XHTML, which is designed for sharing, and its contents are text only, with maybe a cover graphic.

The ease of access was enlightening. If you are faced with the choice of buying an ebook for the hardback cover price or downloading it for free faster than you can cough, is the "new" publishing business model sound? Computer users are more savvy than ever, networks are faster, storage devices are of greater capacity and cheaper – and the commercial object being illegally traded is, proportionally, smaller and easier to hack. We're talking the average size of an email here. Publishers may be trading on the basis of free distribution sooner than they think.

JJ pic c/ GQ, as per usual.