 I'm Cliff Lynch I'm the director of CNI and I'll be doing the session. The topic today is ebooks and what's going on in the you know increasingly bizarre world of ebooks. I'm sure that you many of you have been seeing some of the headlines that have been emerging proposals from publishers that they license ebooks to libraries that simulate where and actually wear out after 26 circulations you know which is one of the particularly mind-twisting ones that I've seen lately. I should say that I've been watching the development of ebooks with considerable interest for a long time. About 10 years ago I wrote a long piece about where ebooks stood then and some of the things that I was watching for and thought might happen and then I sort of put that aside and you know put it in the background and moved on to to spend more time on a lot of other things and recently I've been kind of coming back to this topic after about a ten-year hiatus and it's been really interesting to look at what's proved out and what's not proved out. One of the things of course that's quite striking between now and ten years ago is that ebooks are no longer kind of a fringe thing for a few people who like to read electronically. They are actually a major market force and as I was just discussing with a couple of folks here they're a sufficiently major market force that when you look at some of the big sales channels like Amazon they're you know they're they're now a dominant factor over hardcover books they'll probably in the not distant future overtake sales of softcover books they are a serious consideration in release strategies for high-impact popular fiction you know the question of do we release an electronic form concurrently with the hardcover print edition or do we do something else. There have been great controversies about pricing them so they're they're really no longer sort of a novelty they are a very serious and real economic factor in the book industry. Now I think you can look at ebooks and I'll come back and define terms in just a second from kind of three different prisms that are useful. One is to look at them as genres of communication if you will. Ways that that people communicate with other people and to think about how the properties and characteristics of that communication have changed as we've seen it migrate from the affordances of print on paper to the affordances of various kinds of digital environments. A second way of looking at them and it's a way that I don't think we look at them enough is as cultural product as important sort of permanent traces and records of our culture and certainly that's one of the ways that libraries and especially research libraries look at books and look at many other parts of the cultural record and they build collections of them they think about how we're going to preserve them for example. That conversation is startlingly absent in the ebook world today with the exception of tiny little niches that that exist around university presses which are very close to the academy. When you move beyond there there's this sort of frightening silence about about ebooks as cultural products or cultural records and you know one of one of the things that that's particularly difficult is that it seems like libraries are getting almost systematically shut out of that discussion and I'll come back to that point which is really important. The third prism is an economic prism where we start talking about how this restructures the the publishing industry broadly and the role of authors of publishers of booksellers of other players in this world and who wins and who loses economically and that's an area I'll maybe say a few words about but I'm not going to emphasize because there are endless people you know analyzing this every other day and announcing winners and losers and of course they're all announcing different ones but you know this this this just seems to be one of these areas that the the business press cannot get enough pages of prognostication and hand wringing in about. So let me let me you know start by by kind of defining ebooks broadly I think of them as digital works that sit on some kind of platform that platform can be a general purpose computer it can be some kind of a reading device it it may be a very limited function device like a Kindle which you know stays quite close really to the affordances of paper at least the way it's been programmed right now it may be something that as I say has all of the flexibility of a general purpose computer. I want to be clear that when I talk of ebooks though I'm talking about the content that sits in these things not the platform itself. It's worth noting as far as the platform goes that we now see a much richer range of platforms in use there are a number of things that really were designed to look and handle a lot like books Kindles and nooks and things like that but now that we see the rise of tablets of various kinds iPads and things like that we're seeing that class of devices as a platform for a lot of reading. We're seeing more people than you might think although as with everything here data is hard to come by and there's a lot of anecdote but there seems to be actually more reading on smartphones than you might think people are are actually going through not just short newspaper articles but lengthy texts on various kinds of smartphone devices with high quality screens so that's evolved as another platform. We've also seen for really sort of the first time in the last couple of years the large-scale rise of platform emulators so that you can run almost all of the platforms emulated on your PC you can run many of them on some of the smartphones or tablet devices so there's this sort of strange interoperability by emulation that's showing up and one of the things that's worth noting about that limited interoperability is that the interoperability is less about reading the book because the experience of reading the book isn't all that different from one platform to another today it's mostly about coping with different purchasing channels that want to be their own silos and all of the horrible DRM and stuff that comes with those purchasing channels really there's there's very little functional distinction it's mostly it's mostly about emulating all of the the connect back to that one of the other things that I want to note is that I was very struck when I looked at this ten years ago that we were misunderstanding what was going on with these platforms we were thinking of them as equivalences to books rather than portable libraries the notion that in fact it wasn't that people would walk around with one book on their reading device but they'd walk around with two or three hundred books on their reading device and part of that argument I think was was made by building on the experience with music where you literally find people now walking around with all the music they've ever bought or heard or been able to swipe from someplace on a single device you know and it would take them three and a half years to just listen to all of the tunes on the device once so it's become even more than a portable library it's become somebody's sort of comprehensive personal library of record that doesn't seem to have happened yet by and large for books in part perhaps because so many titles are still not available in electronic form whereas in music now particularly outside of classical music there are really very few holdouts that haven't moved into into the digital environment that's how that's really strikingly not true when you look at the when you look at the world of ebooks there are many many high-profile popular authors who haven't gone there and don't seem to be in any big hurry to go there although I was looking at a breathless newspaper story I think this morning or yesterday that JK Rowling's may break down and license out Harry Potter finally for for ebook use so the personal library kind of issue I think has not really emerged that strongly yet and that's one to pay attention to because I think that the kind of searching an organization that people expect as they really get portable comprehensive personal libraries is going to be quite different and quite a bit more sophisticated than what they've settled for in the world of music and I actually do say settled for in the world of music because really I think by most of the kind of objective measures we we think about for retrieval systems the ability to organize large amounts of music on something like an iPod and navigate it is is pretty limited so those are those are just a couple of kind of framing things by way of by way of defining terms let me say a few words about sort of where we are intellectually with ebooks as as modes of communication it's very interesting to look at what's happened with the scientific journal and I believe Chris made this point yesterday and I guess made it a little more forcefully than I would have she put up a journal from the 17th century and a modern journal and suggested that a modern scholar would be pretty comfortable with the 17th century one I actually think they'd grumble a little bit about the weird fonts but modulo that you know if you just sort of look structurally and certainly if you if you just do a hundred year window they're absolute you know there's there's absolutely no intellectual distance there now I think part of the the reason that that's persisted is that we are just finally now coming out of the period where we were doing dual print and digital production of journals I mean that that trailing print even though it had been deprecated and was no longer viewed as the version of record still shaped a lot of the thinking about what does a journal article look like and there are now people there was a workshop for example one through two ago that brought together a number of people interested in scholarly communication called Beyond the PDF which was really looking at ways we might represent and communicate scholarly articles differently so that conversation is is is actually as I perceive it starting to take off just a little bit now the same conversation though about monographs seems to be stalled there was a lot of action back or back eight or nine years ago ten years ago we had projects like Gutenberg E for example that Mellon funded working with the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Historical Association trying to get authors to think through what would a monograph look like if you had all the affordances of the digital environment and those projects were a very mixed success they produce some very interesting works at quite high cost they took a long time for those works to develop perhaps because the authors had way too many options and way too many choices many of the authors found the experience to be both challenging but also sort of exhausting because they felt like writing a monograph was hard enough inventing the future of the book at the same time off of an almost clean slate was overwhelming for a junior faculty member there one of the ideas that that came out of that was perhaps one could do sort of templated things that provided a compromise between reaching more of the affordances of the digital environment on one side but also constraining choice to a manageable level to help the authors to help the editors to also help with the preservation of the work might be a way forward but I've seen less actual practical work on that than I might have thought seven or eight years ago so other than some sort of experimental communities that you know we're out there a long time ago and are still out there but I regard as sort of narrow experimental communities you know the people who write interactive fiction and things like that I've not really seen a whole lot of exploration of how we might intellectually rethink the future of the book going on in the in the popular press or in the in the scholarly press arenas over the last few years that's kind of an interesting development I would have thought that the monograph would be the right place for that to happen simply because of the scale of effort involved in producing a monograph and the relative lack of urgency and completing it when contrasted to journal articles where people are you know unhappy to do things that will delay it even for a few days getting into the publisher because they're often at least in the sciences in a big race to to report results doesn't seem to be happening right now at least in the places where I'm looking certainly we are seeing some conventions almost getting established of books having websites that go with the books and those websites actually in many cases being part of the promotional campaign for the book but in other cases providing additional material that didn't fit in the book I think actually one could do a very interesting study at this point of book and website pairs and the different kinds of websites and the motivating purposes of those websites that are paired with various kinds of books but but we're seeing those kinds of developments rather than rethinking of the book itself another thing though that is very interesting is we're seeing sort of a I don't know how to put this exactly but we're seeing a bit of a split emerging between books that are produced by the big publishers and where there's still a very clear intent to do books that exist both in the print world in the digital world so think back you know like where we were with the scientific publishers 15 years ago when they were starting to get their toes wet in the digital world so absolute commitment to parallel publishing for the time being and there they are following very you know sort of standard editorial practices about versioning and corrections and things like that but one thing that has happened economically as we've sort of restructured the book market around electronic books is we have seen an enormous rise in self-publishing again I I I've not seen data that I find terribly believable but my sense is that probably the number of self-published books out there and readily accessible through channels like Amazon today is you know an order of magnitude bigger than it was five years ago these folks are publishing only electronically some of them are actually making substantial revenue streams and I should note they come in two flavors one is amateurs who who never had a publisher and have always self-published and then occasionally very professional writers who have become irritated with their their publishers for one reason or another and believe it would their lives would be either more pleasant or more profitable or both if they move to self-publishing and we're starting to see a few of them show up as well but one of the things that's remarkable there is that they don't have the same inhibitions about versioning and additioning that the that the sort of professional publishing industry does where a new addition or a corrected addition is a big deal they just number them like software you know this is this is version 2.11 of my book and it just came out last week you know and replaced version 2.10 and you know sometimes they're just cleaning up minor stuff that editorial you know blunders that people reported typos spelling things like that other times there you know they didn't like that scene they'd never like that scene they rewrote it and put it out with a better one and you know this this is a very interesting kind of phenomenon because you're sort of never sure you're up on an author's work that you're paying attention to you can have conversations about the same book with someone else except that it's not really the same book there's often no organized effort to save the versions or even in some cases to track the changes from version to version so this is actually in you know an interesting development that we've not seen much before except in the world of software and is just sort of cheerfully going forward with nobody paying attention to it this is one that you know I would predict that we will find at least some important writers emerging out of this sort of world of amateur authorship of authorship not mediated by the traditional publishing industry and that there will be a good deal of scrambling around as scholars 20 or 30 years hence try and really understand the emergence and evolution of some of these authors the good news about some of these authors is that they're really mostly interested in getting read and they're really not terribly interested in things like DRM they often published through into environments that do not put a lot of DRM constraints on things and that means that collectors can easily collect this material and save it in ways that that don't happen easily and highly DRM constrained environments I mean Amazon for example occasionally sort of does a new edition of a professionally published book and what they'll do is they'll just push it out to your Kindle essentially and you know quietly updated or at best they'll send you an email telling you to click here and it will update your copy if you want it updated so tracking what's happening with this kind of versioning I think is worth paying a little attention to and it's it's something that really has been very alien mostly in the journal environment where they've been quite disciplined about it and in the world of traditional publishers at least in modern times certainly and you know the early days of printing there was a lot more poorly identified versioning but this seems to be reemerging so those are a couple of comments about kind of the the e-book as as an intellectual construct I want to talk a little bit about e-books as cultural products and where where that's fitting and I think you know what's really striking here is is how different this is because it's a consumer market and there's just sort of absolute asymmetry between the negotiating power of the big publishers and the big channel providers like Amazon on one side and the consumer on the other and how differently this is coming out from the much more symmetric negotiations between for example research libraries and scholarly publishers during the transition to of journals to digital form the notion that a license for example needs to include archival provision that when you license something you have some expectation to be able to use that indefinitely and even use it beyond the demise of a publisher that was a critical negotiation in the migration of journals to digital form and basically I think it was clear to all of the stakeholders in that migration authors readers libraries publishers that the migration would not happen until we had a credible credible archiving strategy because it's ridiculous to talk about a scholarly record that is no record yet we seem to have cheerfully thrown this out the window for consumer publishing and really there's no player in the market with enough economic weight to serve as a counter force libraries were where the predominant and are the predominant purchasers of scholarly journals the public that huge diffuse thing not you know public libraries or the library sector or something else are the you know there is no dominant organized purchaser of popular monographs of various kinds so the only the only route it appears into into thinking about the the long-term archiving of this cultural record is the routes that essentially pass through copyright and copyright deposit to to the Library of Congress the rest of the library world seems to be largely outside of this conversation right now even more disturbing because of all of the digital rights management and related stuff that makes it that basically has destroyed the used book market as it applies to electronic books you've cut the role of collectors out one of the things that we've learned again and again over the past few centuries is that collectors particularly in the you know early years play a very very important role in holding on to cultural heritage as it slowly finds its way into the institutions of society in fact you see the whole ecosystem of used book dealers and private collectors feeding very systematically into libraries and archives and you know we've seen that for lots of different kinds of material and for very long times this is the first place where it seems like the to a first approximation that whole resale market that whole collectors kind of world has been systematically destroyed by leveraging the kind of DRM and license terms that come along with digital works and while that's annoying on a consumer basis you know and certainly you see consumers considering you know a value proposition that says well I could buy a paper book for $14 and I can either give that away or keep it with pretty high confidence that I can read it for the rest of my life or resell it for a few dollars or I can get an electronic one that base that costs a couple dollars less that has the virtue that I can carry it around very portably and it isn't heavy and it doesn't take a bookshelf space but that has the negatives that I really to a first approximation can't loan it to people yes I know there are some you know sort of I don't even know what to call them sort of kabuki loan arrangements for for some of these e-readers but you know or maybe Potemkin loan arrangements but you know basically I can't loan it I certainly can't resell it and you know hopefully I can read it for some number of years to come if I want to come back to it that that's the kind of you know balance arrangement people are making now and you know as I say it at an individual level it's annoying and you can kind of make choices one way or another but if we step back and look at this at a cultural level when we realize that these e-books aren't getting into library collections or they're getting in in very you know sort of compromised and equivocated ways you know this is this is setting up for a major disaster around the cultural record in the making and it's one that isn't going to come to fruition for some years as we continue to see dual electronic and and print publishing but it's one that I fear really is coming before us I want to touch on just a couple of other things that are going on here and you know there really are as I say just almost endless developments here that I think deserve exploration for from perspectives that I'm not seeing them get much in the in the popular media one of the other things I'm very struck by and this is true to a more limited sense of music as well is that we're seeing an awfully powerful fragmentation of delivery channels the notion that as a collecting organization you can get a good view of what's being published or what's available for acquisition in a market like the United States is getting shakier and shakier as you see these exclusive arrangements to single channels of delivery you see books that are exclusive to specific platforms and specific sellers there's always been a little bit of that there's certainly been lots of small specialty publishers who do limited runs of things but now the permutations between channels and platforms are such that it really is becoming quite complex to to to under simply understand what's out there year-to-year what the distribution of this material looks like what's of interest and and where you might persistently acquire it and remember you don't have the fallback of the kind of collective library system behind you cleaning up after the publishing system the notion of going and looking in something like you know OCLC's Worldcat trying to understand the publication record of an author is is no longer really giving you the same picture that it did even even ten years ago now you have to start looking in kind of a you know time-dependent way through a wide range of delivery channels some of them quite small we're also you know starting to see abandoned books books that were put out as e-books for specific platforms that go away and are no longer in manufacture and for some reason the they're really Western quite software to migrate it without the author's cooperation maybe there was a obsolete DRM system in the mix of the old platform maybe the author lost interest maybe the author doesn't even know where their you know current sort of files that could be reformated that formatted out to a new platform is so we're actually starting to see and this is again a phenomenon in books that is almost without precedent you know books that are orphaned for technological reasons I I have to say that I'm sort of waiting half fearfully for the first great you know technology orphaning to occur because right now the standards are weak enough and the DRM sit and multiple enough and the DRM systems are still problematic enough I could readily believe that some platform could go could be discontinued and we could suddenly find people with substantial bodies of books that they they can't read it's it's interesting to me to see that the music industry has been sort of slowly and quietly pulling back from this over the last few years in the sense that they are doing a lot less DRM than they used to so in fact you're starting to see a reasonable amount of interoperability among purchased digital music from multiple sources and multiple channels probably more so I would say now then you are you are actually for books interestingly enough so at least to my eye books are starting to surface as the place we could actually see larger collections of technologically you know orphaned materials that people have spent a good deal of money on surfacing I think that's a that's a development that bears that bears careful watching I'm not going to say anything much about the issues involved in licensing popular books into public libraries I mean I think things are fairly clear there the libraries ideally would like to be able to well ideally they'd like to be able to license it just like a book and do unlimited concurrent usage I think that they would settle for something that emulates the behavior of a print book with one use at a time serially I think that the many of the publishers are looking at this as a situation where they would like to see some per use charge essentially per circulation charge and the question is just whether they want to see that as a ongoing charge you know metered every time it goes out or prepaid in some estimated way like this book that circulates 26 times and self-destructs until until we figure out where or if there is a meeting ground between those models I think it's going to be it's going to be very difficult to to expect to see large numbers of popular books finding their way into circulating library collections now this is I it's worth saying that this is something that I think the research live this is a battle the research libraries have largely left to the public libraries to fight right now in part because I believe they think that because their user communities are better scoped and more limited that they will be able to cut satisfactory license deals but I haven't seen much actual cutting of such deals for popular materials and there are a lot of popular materials that research libraries are going to need and then at the nonfiction level you know that that's sort of dividing line between scholarly and non-scholarly is anything but clear in many disciplines and even the things that are non-scholarly are often vital raw material for the next generation of scholarly inquiry certainly when we talk about other parts of the cultural record the fact that you know it's literature fiction or something like that makes no difference it's part of the cultural record and part of the ongoing body of material that scholars study so I don't I think that we ignore some of these developments in the in the academy at considerable peril and perhaps should be thinking a little bit more about how the needs of the research library world are going to connect up with some of the problems that public libraries are facing right now as far as the economics go as I said I don't want to go deeply into there but I do think what we're seeing implicitly are a set of conversations about what's a book worth what's the clear ability to keep a preservation copy and to have a loanable copy of a book worth we're actually you know kind of conducting a experiment in the consumer market around that except it's it's an experiment with funny constraints if you want the archival and and circulatable one you're gonna have to go with paper in most cases and yet there is a sort of a parallel campaign to demonize paper as you know obsolete and only old people use paper and you know the the world that's zooming ahead and and leaving places like libraries behind is all about electronic reading it's interesting that that you know sort of public relations campaign is going on without much evidence that those new ebooks are really using any of the affordances of the digital environment right now other than you know sort of portability and rendering on screen I mean they're the they're the most meager of the of the potential affordances that are available but that's that that's the way that's being set up right now we're we're not seeing a lot of bookstores anymore I don't know you know when the when the last time you saw one that didn't have a closing everything must go kind of sign in the window but they they clearly have become in a not very long period highly you know endangered species that it really didn't take very long this was this was almost a non-issue 10 years ago when I was writing that piece and now really they're almost they're almost gone from the world it's it's very striking yet we've seen the growth which I'm not sure was widely predicted not of lots of sales points for electronic works but of a few rather monolithic stores Amazon the the Apple bookstore the Barnes & Noble bookstore there they're really there there are a number of small players around there but much more concentration I think than than people would have expected 10 years ago and yet and and this is this will be my final point one of the things that is very interesting to me about this concentration is that it's somehow made for a much less transparent market we used to have really pretty good data about the book market and now we have these rather proprietary marketing channels where it's quite difficult to get data about what's being sold in detail what's on offer how that is changing year to year I mean they're they're very selective and self-interested in the in the data that they release and it's actually I think become significantly harder than it was 10 years ago to really understand in a in a data driven way rather than an anecdotal way many of the dynamics of this marketplace and and that's an area that that probably also bears some thinking about so I've been going on for a long time nobody's interrupted me I'm most of the way through the list of things that I wanted to touch on recognizing how limited our time was and how many different ideas I wanted to sort of put out in circulation about what's happening in the book market I think what I'm going to do now is I'm gonna pause and invite some questions comments challenges corrections or other things from the audience they are recording this so you might want to grab the mic sir David Carlson from SIU Carmeldale two observations one sort of in that cultural and one in the intellectual piece one is it's sort of my observation that just as we see students in many cases faculty limit themselves and their choice of what they read or research to availability of full tax I think we're starting to see that too in the book world so that if you're if you're a diehard Kindle guy or gal and it's not available on the Kindle you move on unless it's really compelling you know unless it's the Harry Potter thing or whatever else so I'd like your comments on that and secondly the other thing I didn't hear you talk about but I think is occurring is the apparent increasing nature of new forms of content and I refer in particular to Amazon's shingle platform whereby it's it's not an essay it's not a blog posting but it's not a book it's in the 100 200 page if we had pages kind of realm that and there are two elements of this one of course is the length but the other the other piece of this that I think is interesting is it's about the distributor acting in a way as publisher giving an imprimatur to it so just your comment two wonderful questions we are starting to see that phenomenon you know it's exactly the same one we used to see about if it's not online you know if I can't get it online right now may as well not exist we're seeing that now for certain kinds of books and certain kinds of readers you know they're interested in what they can get on their e-reader and if not unless it's something very special they're just not gonna bother with it right now I think the market is fragmented enough and most people have kind of a favorite e-reader that we're we're not quite seeing that become a heavily self-reinforcing thing yet that you know oh I can't get this for my Kindle doesn't doesn't put the author and the publisher that have made the choice not to make it available at that at quite enough risk yet to be excruciating especially if they've made an exclusive with the NOAC or with with something else I think we're very close to that point though and again I this is something that the publishers have data on we we know for or they know what the impact is of or at least in specific cases of deciding for example I'm gonna put books out only in paper first and then six months later when I do the paperback release I'll put it out priced like a paperback for any reader as opposed to I'll put it out in parallel with the hard copy edition and I'll put it out priced like a discounted hard copy hard I'm sorry discounted hard back most of that data doesn't get public yet but I I do feel like something is you know we're creeping up to a to an inflection point there as far as the short essays I've been very intrigued by that phenomenon you know basically it's sort of almost impossible to publish a hundred page book unless you're somebody fairly special in print and now people are doing this fairly casually onto book readers typically you know priced for a couple of bucks long short stories lengthy essays things like that that didn't have good venues before I think this is actually a very nice and kind of unexpected side development and it's one where I think mostly mostly you're seeing established writers do it at this point perhaps because people are more willing to try one of these if they recognize the author's name but I think that I think that as they become more commonplace this will this will sort of reemerge as a legitimate genre for a lot of people and I think it's a wonderful thing there are an awful lot of books that really don't shouldn't take more than a hundred pages and are excruciatingly padded to 250 to make a hardback. David? David Rosenthal from Stanford. Two quick points the first is a couple of years ago Mike Keller established a policy that said for all kinds of electronic resources, journals, books, everything, any agreement that didn't get Stanford a copy that they could keep and use. Required his signature and that's actually that level of pushback has actually been quite effective. The other one is anybody who's interested in this area should be reading the fascinating discussion that's going on on Joe Conrad's blog between Joe, John Lott, Barry Eisler and a bunch of other authors who are self publishing on Kindle. Because what this illustrates is that in some sense the big effect of these books has been because they have a different and much more efficient distribution channel. When Joe wrote the first blog post, John Lott held the number one, number four, number ten and three other books in the top 40 on Amazon. Joe had the number 35. The reason was they had dropped the price to 99 cents a book. At 99 cents a book, Amazon gives them 35 cents. That's a bigger proportion of the total purchase price than they would ever get from a print legacy publisher even for an e-book. John Lott was making $1,800 a day in 99 cent downloads. 99 cents is the price of a book and that is going to be transformative. There is no future for book publishers in pricing at $10 or things like that. This is an argument between the intellectual property owners and the public and their customers about the value of the thing they're trying to sell. Retailers know the customer is always right. Forget bookstores. Most of the big publishers are going away because they can't exist at 99 cents a book. And the other big thing about it is that the reason that these guys are making so much money is that their backlist stays in production. And they're making this money not from the books that they published that they got out there in the last year or so. They're making it from books they wrote 10, 12 years ago. I definitely commend that series of blog posts which I came across a couple weeks ago myself. It's very interesting to hear authors with a real financial stake in this. People who've been earning a living and a pretty good living as authors. Those are few and far between by the way. One of the things that's happened in the marketplace over the last 20 years is that there are a few authors who make a very good living. There are a lot of authors who do it for love or as an adjunct to other ways of earning a living. And then there's not much left in the middle. So these kinds of conversations are really interesting. I think the jury is still out on whether all books are going to end up costing 99 cents. But we're already seeing an awful lot of books out there for 99 cents. And that's a really interesting phenomenon. And seeing the kind of volume that David is talking about offsetting that is also fascinating. I still though really worry greatly about the sort of archival issues about these flows. Putting it in the hands of authors doesn't believe it or not make me feel that much better than putting it in the hands of publishers. Authors are actually very fragile holders of their works in many ways. George will give you the last comment. George Strong, NSF and the Niter Interagency Program. Cliff, you've told us a lot of interesting things about e-books. You've mentioned e-music and we also know there are e-movies and e-games. Give us your prediction that we can come back in 10 years and check you on for the merger of these formats now that you can. The merger of these formats, well, certainly we've seen a, you know, just as we've seen a very complicated evolution of the market for books and for music, that's also happening in video. Although that situation is even more richly complicated because it started not from one place but from two places. One place was television and broadcast television and the other was movies. And so, you know, you've really had two systems kind of evolving and largely merging with each other in hideously complicated ways. I think that we're already seeing convergence there. I mean, you're seeing the same channels. Marketing music, marketing digital music, digital videos and electronic books. You're seeing in many cases platforms that increasingly can handle all of these. Not in all cases. Book-specific platforms seem to be a special kind of holdout. But my guess is that things like the iPad will really move the idea of converged platforms ahead. Yeah. Well, okay, so that's the platform side. Now, you know, actually there is some crossover here but it's almost always bad. You know, there are bad novelizations of movies. There are bad movies from novels. There are, you know, dubious games derived from novel series and things like that. I guess my sense is that you can probably do this now if you want to. I personally can't point to anyone who's sort of gone out and brought all of these things together in a holistic way that really works. You know, that as a work of communication or of art is greater as a whole than its individual components in a substantial way. I think you probably are going to see more experiments in that area. Certainly there's interesting back and forth between video games and movies in various ways. But how long before you get a wide range of offerings like that that are really exciting, I wouldn't want to predict. I guess the scale of investment is such that, you know, to really come out with a portfolio of these things that they almost tend to be franchises. You know, think again of Harry Potter, right? You know, you've got what, seven books, eight movies, some kind of theme park. I'm sure there are half a dozen licensed video games derived from it. But, you know, the more extended this franchise gets, I guess I wonder how interesting some of the stuff on the fringes are. It's a great question, though, and one that probably really bears some watching. I think we're probably past time and supposed to be headed to lunch. Thanks for joining me for this. I hope that it's given you a couple of new angles on some of the things that are going on in the e-book market. And as, you know, we all explore this strange landscape further. I'd love it if you send along interesting discoveries. Thank you.