Ceci n'est pas une ebook

This morning the Web is abuzz, rightly so, with the news of Amazon’s full-text search option on 120,000 titles in its catalog (with plans for very rapid expansion). The implications are extraordinary, but I want to home in on one specific aspect of the project as reported in Wired’s “The Great Library of Amazonia”:

The copyrights to these titles are spread among countless owners. How was it possible to create a publicly accessible database from material whose ownership is so tangled? Amazon’s solution is audacious: The company simply denies it has built an electronic library at all. “This is not an ebook project!” Manber says. And in a sense he is right. The archive is intentionally crippled. A search brings back not text, but pictures — pictures of pages. You can find the page that responds to your query, read it on your screen, and browse a few pages backward and forward. But you cannot download, copy, or read the book from beginning to end. There is no way to link directly to any page of a book.

What intrigues me here is that the characteristics of different data formats are being deliberately (and rather cannily) leveraged against the copyright issue. It’s not a “library” or even a “book” because computationally the data is expressed as an image rather than machine-readable text. (I recently wrote about the differences between image and text as data types in an essay in MIT’s Eloquent Images volume.) This has very important implications for much of the current work in fields like textual studies, and indeed makes that work practically relevant to the legal and commercial sphere. Of course it also begs a more fundamental question: what is an ebook, or indeed a book—functionally, computationally, and imaginatively?