©ollectanea

Are you anticipating the launch of the iPhone in two days? Are you at this moment in a line to buy one? You could be. You probably aren't. But if things go even a little bit like everyone is predicting they will, the iPhone will change your life whether you have one or not. Take, for example, the post at Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age ｻ Apples and Changes: What publishing can learn from the iPhone. The author sees the triumph of the multi-use device as the big story here, with profound implications for publishing.

I don't disagree, actually, but from my perspective, it's another example of the triumph of "show me the money." Once any content industry figures out how it can make more of it from letting loose than from holding tight, it will let loose. Copyright won't have to change for this to happen. It will just slip into the background from whence it came (before the Internet).

I had just read a few minutes before the Print is Dead blog post, that Harry Potter is making more money from sales and licensing of things other than the actual book. Granted, a toy Harry is probably protected by intellectual property rights too, but the toy Harry is holdable, carryable, posable. He can be digitized, obviously, but he becomes something else when he's digital. He has an additional value as a thing, and his sales success can take the pressure off making profits on the book content itself, that can be digitized (and over which you lose control if you digitize them).

So these two stories come together: the iPhone implication is that a multi-purpose media device is the missing link, that once it's widely in use, publishers (and Hollywood and everyone else) will understand why the stand-alone reader never succeeded, publishers will begin to respond to or even anticipate consumer demands and migrate to networked social environments and the difference between a book and the 'net will gradually fade away, entirely for some genres, not entirely for others. And copyright doesn't need to change for any of this to happen. It just becomes less relevant to the business of making profits, so it's not always necessary to assert it. So the theory goes.

Chapter II: next installment to follow after a year or two of iPhones ... In other words, "we'll see."