Business Insight Zone

Who will come up with the system for transforming the world’s giant backlog of printed books into e-books? I assume it will be done. The question is, by whom?

The blogosphere (including us) is awash in talk about Amazon’s new Kindle e-book reader, and Steven Levy’s big Newsweek cover story about it. Sample reactions:

• Kevin Kelly thinks the Kindle is headed in the right direction, but doesn’t yet attain what he wants: “that one Cloudbook device still to come” that will integrate everything: books, video, Web, e-mail, phone, whatever — all in one place.
• Rex Hammock is in line with Kelly (and me, by the way): even last year, before the iPhone or the iPod Touch ever came out, he was calling for a book-sized, iPhone-like device that would let you read e-books and do all these other functions.
• John Scalzi is happy to have one of his own novels among the Kindle’s debut titles, but he doesn’t see shelling out $400 for a reader and no books when you could buy 50 printed books for the price.
• Robert Scoble thinks that the Kindle itself will probably fail, but could be important for opening the gateway to e-book readers that really work.
• Peter Kafka disputes the notion that the Kindle will, or even can, be the e-book equivalent of the iPod, simply “because the books you own, the ones you borrow from the library, and every book you buy for the forseeable future, are stubbornly locked in paper format. If you want to read a book on your Kindle, you’ll have to buy a digital copy.” This is very much unlike the current iPod model, in which you can load your whole CD collection — or songs you find online etc. — onto the device with minimal friction.

Which leads me back to my original question. In fuller form: Who will come up with the BitTorrent- or early-Napster-style system for jumping the analog-to-digital hurdle, to transform printed books into e-books?

Let’s do some amateur reverse-engineering to figure out what would be needed:

1. A workable system for translating large numbers of printed books into digital files. This could all sorts of approaches:

• optical scans, with or without character-recognition, image smoothing, and so on;
• system hacks of publisher/compositor computer networks that would enable direct piracy of typesetting files;*
• Project Gutenberg-style keyboarding ventures. It seems clear that a technologically-driven solution based on scanning would be infinitely preferable to relying upon individuals (haphazard volunteers, paid employees, whoever) to keyboard very much material.

2. For distribution of newly created digital files: BitTorrent and its existing analogues. In other words, at this point, the challenge becomes trivial, because it relies on technology already in place.

As far as I can tell, that’s all you would need. Fairly simple project, once you jump the analog/digital divide.

As for who would do this . . . I don’t know. Step #1 is potentially far more labor-intensive than the sort of coding at the root of BitTorrent or the original Napster. Then again, it might be just the sort of challenge that would inspire some in the MAKE crowd to get creative.

What do you think?

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* Let me be explicit in saying that I would never advocate breaking the law this way. I’m just observing that it could be done.