Thoughts in the dead of night

'The real world map shows what we humans have been given to work with. The Web shows what we have chosen to care about.' - David Weinberger

The return of insomnia has given me lots of additional time to think this week; the following post is likely to be a journey rather than a destination. Apologies in advance. Broadly, the following things hang it all together: digital technologies, material ownership, and genuine indexes of individual enjoyment.

There's been lots of hue and cry over the last couple of weeks about illegal downloads, threatened legal actions, gnashing of teeth on both sides. As E-books are refined the experience becomes much closer to reading from a page rather than monitor all the questions of IP and DRM that have beset and befuddled the music industry are now being fretted over by authors and publishing houses. Ruskin said that literature is 'divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.' Some of the books we'll read are likely to be ones that we'd never have bought, and if we had parted with hard earned cash for, we'd be damn well pissed off. I hope very much that ebooks will give me the same luxury that illegal music downloads do: (just for the record, I'm spending more money on music now than I ever have before) the ability to browse at leisure and in huge volume to decide what I am and am not willing to pay for.

I read this on NewScientistTech yesterday:

Here are some of the responses from NS readers:

The other six pages of comments proceed in a similar vein. The desire to consume and the desire to possess are radically different. Which brings me neatly back to books/ebooks and a comment from an article in The Times (dead tree version) today:

'Some books are worth the trees they're printed on, others are not. That is the distinction that the electronic book offers.'

Some music is worth the trees/discs/vinyl... you get the point. The things I want to read and the things I want to own are as radically different as the tunes on my iPod and the cds on my shelves. The baseline is a judgement of quality and worth. Make more books worth buying and I'll buy them, make more music worth listening to and I will willingly fork out for it. Until the various industries are able to work with this instead of pushing our technologically illiterate government towards empty, draconian and unenforceable threats, we will continue to feel no compunction in downloading 'illegally'.