A brief digression here, on the double meaning of “ebooks.”  One meaning for that word is “legitimate” ebook ventures, that is to say, rightsholder-authorized editions of the texts of books, released in a proprietary, use-restricted format, sometimes for use on a general-purpose PC and sometimes for use on a special-purpose hardware device like the nuvoMedia Rocketbook [ROCKETBOOK].  The other meaning for ebook is a “pirate” or unauthorized electronic edition of a book, usually made by cutting the binding off of a book and scanning it a page at a time, then running the resulting bitmaps through an optical character recognition app to convert them into ASCII text, to be cleaned up by hand.  These books are pretty buggy, full of errors introduced by the OCR.  A lot of my colleagues worry that these books also have deliberate errors, created by mischievous book-rippers who cut, add or change text in order to “improve” the work.  Frankly, I have never seen any evidence that any book-ripper is interested in doing this, and until I do, I think that this is the last thing anyone should be worrying about.

Back to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom [COVER].  Well, not yet.  I want to convey to you the depth of the panic in my field over ebook piracy, or “bookwarez” as it is known in book-ripper circles.  Writers were joining the discussion on alt.binaries.ebooks using assumed names, claiming fear of retaliation from scary hax0r kids who would presumably screw up their credit-ratings in retaliation for being called thieves.  My editor, a blogger, hacker and guy-in-charge-of-the-largest-sf-line-in-the-world named Patrick Nielsen Hayden posted to one of the threads in the newsgroup, saying, in part [SCREENGRAB]: 

> Pirating copyrighted etext on Usenet and elsewhere is going to > happen more and more, for the same reasons that everyday folks > make audio cassettes from vinyl LPs and audio CDs, and > videocassette copies of store-bought videotapes.  Partly it’s > greed; partly it’s annoyance over retail prices; partly it’s the > desire to Share Cool Stuff (a motivation usually underrated by > the victims of this kind of small-time hand-level piracy). > Instantly going to Defcon One over it and claiming it’s morally > tantamount to mugging little old ladies in the street will make > it kind of difficult to move forward from that position when it > doesn’t work.  In the 1970s, the record industry shrieked that > “home taping is killing music.”  It’s hard for ordinary folks to > avoid noticing that music didn’t die.  But the record industry’s > credibility on the subject wasn’t exactly enhanced.

Patrick and I have a long relationship, starting when I was 18 years old and he kicked in toward a scholarship fund to send me to a writers’ workshop, continuing to a fateful lunch in New York in the mid-Nineties when I showed him a bunch of Project Gutenberg texts on my Palm Pilot and inspired him to start licensing Tor’s titles for PDAs [PEANUTPRESS SCREENGRAB], to the turn-of-the-millennium when he bought and then published my first novel (he’s bought three more since —­ I really like Patrick!).