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This article is from March 28, 2000, and is no longer current.

Eye On the Web: The Ongoing Digital Revolution …

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In the five or so years the Web has been a ubiquitous presence in many of our lives, its ratio of usefulness to novelty has teetered significantly to the side of usefulness. No longer are we titillated by just being online and being able to browse low-quality JPEGs of our favorite celebrities. These days we use the Web to keep abreast of breaking news, to book plane tickets, to monitor the weather, to order pet food, to hear new music, to buy books. Given the degree to which the Web has revolutionized how we live our lives in the past five years, how much is it likely to change us in the next five?
Last week the New York Times reported that Stephen King’s latest novella, a 66-page trifle called "Riding the Bullet," is being distributed exclusively over the Internet, in digital form. Various high-tech companies, Microsoft among them, have been touting a next-generation phenomena called the electronic book for the better part of a year. The way it works is this: you download a book from the Internet and read it either on your computer screen or on one of a whole breed of new handheld devices. These early devices are pretty clunky, as Publish magazine reported last year, and a standard electronic format for the books has yet to be agreed upon. Never the less, with the release of the apparent crowd-pleaser "Riding the Bullet," it appears that the digital age is storming ahead and we can’t avoid a future in which we’ll be downloading Shakespeare to read on our handheld devices at the beach.
The Web is threatening to change more than just the way we buy and read books. As it forges ahead in its mission to make our lives more digital than analog, the Web is also on its way to change the way we see movies. Sites such as atomfilms.com are now releasing films, in digital and streaming video format, without the traditional hassle of finding a distributor among the Hollywood suits. Independent filmmakers, such as New Yorker Maya Churi who released her film Letters From Homeroom on the Web, are looking to the Internet for the audience exposure they would be hard pressed to cull from the film festival circuit. Whether the increasing availability of film on the Internet means we viewers will have to wade through more crap, or will have easier access to non-studio produced gems, is unclear. What is clear is that sooner or later the Web will change the way we watch movies.
Yet the Internet has perhaps had the greatest effect so far on the music industry. Since audio files can squeeze through smaller pipes than their bulkier video cousins, Netizens have been downloading music tracks, in the popular MP3 format, for some time now. There are even a range of portable playback devices available for mobile Web users who want to download music and take it with them. Now the use of the Web for exchanging and procuring music files is mushrooming even more, thanks to Napster, a free software product developed by a 19-year-old college dropout. Napster lets anyone on the Internet exchange MP3 files with anyone else online and using the software. Napster has been so successful it is shaking the traditional recording industry to its bones, and by all accounts will quickly change the way we get our music, not to mention the price we pay for it.
Will the Web spell doom for the CD, the book, and the movie theater? Perhaps it will, to varying degrees. And if it does, what will happen to the warehouses of movies on actual film, the libraries of paper books, and the retail outlets crowded with compact discs?
Does anyone remember the 5 1/2-inch floppy disk? Or even the 3 1/2-inch disc for that matter, also slowly phasing out of the modern computer. I have a box in my parents’ attic of 5 1/2-inch disks, packed with stories I wrote in college, stories I can’t read anymore because they are stored on a medium that’s gone the way of the dodo. With the quickening of technology, I worry that the same fate may befall these new types of media, and even faster. In ten years, will my folder full of MP3 files be totally useless? Will my QuickTime videos be gathering cyber-dust? Will I be able to read the latest e-books on my antiquated reading device?
I think the Web is great – I can do more from the comfort of my own home than I ever could before. I have access to more information than ever and I always get excited when I see this medium expanded to do something new and different, something I might not have thought possible. Even so, I’ll keep my books on good old paper, and know I’ll be able to read them forever, regardless of the direction the Web may take me. Technology may be cool, but it’s also a little scary.
Andrea Dudrow is a writer living in sunny San Francisco. She has been covering the Web and Web design for the past four years and has contributed to Macworld, MacWEEK, eMediaweekly, Adobe.com, Adobe magazine, Publish, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. She also writes about arts and culture, and spends a great deal of time fantasizing about the broadband future.

  • anonymous says:

    Changes in digital media formats present challenges with respect to loss of access to material stored on obsolete formats. The author’s reference to floppy disks is right on target in that regard. (BTW, they were 5.25 inch not 5.5 inch floppy disks.)

    That sort of media or format compatibility problem is inherent in our race to move to improved technologies. Even without physically incompatible media, file format issues arise when the old material is stored in an obscure or little used format. (For example, files from some of the niche word processors for PCs, like ChiWriter, are effectively unreadable for lack of viewing or conversion utilities—the word-processing files from some of the all-in-one packages like ClarisWorks on the Macintosh are almost inaccessible, unless of course, you have a copy of ClarisWorks or have an extra cost suite of file conversion filters like MacLink Plus.)

    Another way that access to old material could be lost is because of corporate greed. An ebook, unlike a conventional book, can be tied to the original owner’s computer/ebook reader. It could even be given an expiration date—users might have to pay a different rate for a permanently unlocked copy instead of the el-cheapo version good for only 30 days or whatever. What happens to the accessibility of your ebook if your ebook-reader/laptop/palmtop is lost/stolen/destroyed? Can you install a backup to your replacement reading device without paying again?

    So the future access to old materials adds the additional potential problem of encryption & copy protection to things like ebooks in particular. We could even face that with DVD movies. What happens to your library of DVD movies if the studios decide DeCSS is having too much of an impact on profits and they change the encryption on the DVD discs they produce? What happens if they get upset with multi-region players and gray-market trafficking of DVDs and change the country/region codes so old players won’t recognize any disc as valid and you have to buy a new DVD player (or at least pay for a firmware update)?

    With the sharing of MP3 audio files via Napster and similar systems, we see a backlash against the RIAA’s greed (i.e., overpriced CDs). With ebooks we might see a backlash against over-restricted ebooks resulting in the sharing of cracked versions, or for older works, even the sharing of original hardcopy at swap meets or of homemade electronic versions made with OCR and a little manual tweeking.

    Given that the Holy Grail of Big Media is copy-prevention combined with “pay per view” we should be wary of corporate efforts to introduce new media services like ebooks.

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