[Web4lib] Re: iPod Libraries; Was: Bitten by the Portable Apps bug!

[Michael McEvoy]

While it may be true that massive amounts of text could be fit onto an
iPod, it would never happen because publishers don't WANT that to happen.

The publishers say "Free is bad, mm'kay?" Instead, if the full text of
Brothers Kazmarov would otherwise fit in a 5k file, let's plump the file
up to 9MB with Digital Rights Management. Why? Otherwise, you could share
said file with your friends quite easily, and the lawyers -> publishers ->
agents -> writer/artist would never get paid. Control is the name of the
game. Are they entitled to control? Sure, but technically, the cost of
that control is complexity and massive waste of storage space. Corporate
politics enter the equation too just to muck things up further (i.e. iPods
and Digital Audio services like NetLibrary).

In a "perfect" world for publihsers, we would all forget any form of media
we so consume (be it book, video, sound, or sensation) immediately upon
finishing it, because our memories act as "illegal recording devices".

All other forms of media otherwise are slave to the best possible
compression to quality ratio. Sound and video media are saddled with size
problems immediately, which are only increased by the monstrosity of DRM
that gets tagged onto any such media.

Is it technically possible to fit an entire library of books onto an iPod?
Sure. is it possible to fit all the videos, cd's, magazines, and
otherwise? Not in less than a nonabyte. What if we added DRM? Well...
you'd never get to use most of it because it would all expire before you
could use even a millionth of a percent of it.

On Tue, May 9, 2006 13:10, frank at limov.com wrote:
- > Eric Hellman writes:
- >> So a top of the line 60GB iPod could store the full text of 559,440
- >> similar books, i.e  0.56 megaGrishams. If we allow some extra storage
- >> for
- >> cover art, we can round up and say that 100 GB= 1 megaGrisham.
- >
- > That's fine if you consider text to be the dominant component of library
- > content as far as storage goes.  However, text is insanely efficient
- > compared with audio and video and pictures, which I suspect take up the
- > majority of space on most people's pocket repositories.
- >
- > For example, I have a wallet with several USB sticks and memory cards,
and
- > way over 90% of the storage capacity (about 4GB in total) is given
over to
- > such material.  Every picture I take with my pocket camera is another 4MB
- > or
- > so, and about 15GB of my 60GB iPod is a recent cache of such images,
since
- > I
- > often fill the 512MB card that's in the camera.  Additionally, about 6GB
- > of
- > space on my iPod is recently download podcasts, and they're just audio.
- > None of this stuff is getting smaller, and all of us are carrying more of
- > it
- > every day.
- >
- > Is this relevant to libraries?  I think so, because the ones I frequent
- > have
- > CDs, videos and DVDs in their collections (as well as LPs and cassettes),
- > and at least the British Library also accumulates every periodical
- > published
- > in Britain, many of which have CDs or DVDs on their covers every issue.
- > The
- > British Library also actively archives web sites, although I don't know
- > how
- > one is meant to use that part of their collection.
- >
- > Consequently, it seems clear to me that a growing part of every library's
- > collection will be non-textual material that exceeds text in storage
- > requirements by several orders of magnitude.  I might be able to get the
- > bare text of a million books in my pocket, but I certainly won't be able
- > to
- > get all their associated media.
- >
- > Even if we ignore all that new-fangled stuff, and just consider what's
- > printed, there's still the problem of pictures to contend with.  The one
- > book I've edited came out at just 187 A5 pages, but its PDF files take up
- > 25MB because of a handful of illustrations, while a related 22-page
- > article
- > takes nearly 30MB, again because of the illustrations.  These data points
- > don't bode well for your back-of-the-ipod calculation. Nor is this a new
- > problem -- back in 1978, I was using an anatomy textbook that was
- > basically
- > a couple of hundred 11"x17" life-sized colour photographs of dissections.
- > Even today, that one book would be banging its head on a 1GB limit.
- >
- >> So, sure, carrying around an entire library is not much of a stretch,
- >
- > Unless the definition of 'entire library' specifically excludes all the
- > eye-wateringly bulbous data that isn't text, I don't see how even a crate
- > of
- > iPods could accommodate it, today or tomorrow.
- > --
- > Frank Wales [frank at limov.com]
- > _______________________________________________
- > Web4lib mailing list
- > Web4lib at webjunction.org
- > http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/
- >


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