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Early adopters await the ebook

Rupert Goodwins AnchorDesk

Published: 09 Aug 2001 16:24 BST

Got an MP3 player and a Minidisc player? Own a pocket TV? Never bother putting your PC case screws back in again? You're an early adopter. So am I. But there's one thing you won't have, because nobody has them -- not me, not you, not any of our friends: one much-hyped gadget idea that's failed so egregiously it will be the subject of MBA theses for years to come. The name of this sad failure? The electronic book.

Ebooks have been predicted for decades. More recently, big publishers have been seduced by the claims of ebook aficionados such as Adobe and Rocket, and have signed up authors to produce content purely for the format. Ebook readers are out there; software for PDAs and PCs is freely downloadable; in short, everything is ready for the ebook revolution.

As you may have noticed, it ain't happening. It's easy to point to some of the reasons -- the £300 you can spend on a reader could alternatively buy you an awful lot of books, many with big glossy colour pictures that would defeat the finest display devices known to mankind. Your Palm might be good for many things, but easy on the eye for a hundred thousand words isn't one of them. And books are just plain gorgeous. Doubtless you can come up with your own reasons why you couldn't give a printer's cuss for this bold new technology. There are loads more, but at heart the ebook is a solution to a question nobody's got.

But ebooks have come up trumps in one place beloved of writers -- the courtroom. By a twist in the plot worthy of Hitchcock, this moribund industry has been the unlikely arena for the arrest of Russian student Dmitry Sklyarov, who stands to experience five years at Uncle Sam's pleasure.

His crime? Telling people how to write software.

If you haven't been following so far, here's the gen. Sklyarov, who studies in Russia, developed algorithms that circumvent some restrictions in Adobe's ebook software. Adobe is fearful that people might duplicate ebooks and give them to friends -- the horror -- and has decided to prevent file copies. So you can't back them up or move them from one computer to another, which when your expensive tome exists purely as bits on a fallible medium is more than a little worrying. Fortunately for all those who might like to protect their investment, Adobe's security isn't very good. As Sklyarov demonstrated when he came over to the US to give a talk on how he got around it.