Is Poe still out there in Cyberspace? A few years ago so many amateurs had claimed Poerelated domain names that professionals had to resort to odd name combinations, such as < for the Poe Society of Baltimore. Evidently some amateur enthusiasts are not renewing their domain licenses, so many Poerelated names are available once more.
For example, a visit to < produces the message: "This domain may be available for transfer. Make an unsolicited offer.” Is it contagious? Clicking on < brings up the distressing notice: "This domain is for Sale. " A more diplomatic, perhaps cryptic explanation appears at < "This domain has been registered for a client by Easyspace." Finally, < is simply not to be found,
Other registered Poename related domains may surprise you. To begin with < is a mortgage service site don't ask why. And < leads not to a Poe-interest research organization but, unexpectedly perhaps, a fan site for the songswriter and singer Annie Danielewski, who since the age of nine, when she first appeared in a "Masque of the Red Death" costume, has adopted the stage name "Poe." Other searches can produce some shocking results: the search for "Poe videos" brings up PoeVid, not a Poe video, as you might expect, but rather a manifestation of the anagram POE for Point Of Equilibrium in a bizarre foreskin appearance/disappearance performance video. Is there a tradition here, following POE as the nuclear bomb security code used by Sterling Hayden’s character in the film, <i>Dr. Strangelove</i>, in which the anagram stands for Purity Of Essence for impropbable ritual of semen-withholding. Edgar Allan Poe, in thy name what hath been wrought?
Yet if nonliterary Poes are appearing on the internet and amateur literary Poes are disappearing, has the serious literary treatment of Poe taken over new terrain somewhere in cyberspace? The desktop personal computer, now two decades old, is hardly new territory, nor is the laptop computer, around for almost as long. The frontiers of the contemporary electronic terrain wireless, no longer the hard wired desktop or battery-operated laptop but rather the handheld tablet PC, the palmtop PC, the pocket PC, and the cellular telephone. This is the territory where convergence claims are thrown about, where personal computers, the internet, personal digital assistants, persistent computing, and cell phones stand poised to merge. Although photos, music, games and other media are being strongly touted, the first content to be available may be the one that demands the least broadband resources, and that will surely be electronic texts.
Out there beyond cyberspace by an Einsteinian recursion we come back home to the new and rapidly evolving space of the miniaturized personal digital devices. The University of Virginia, which some years ago was among those taking the lead is making a large number of web texts available in HTML according to TEI standards, in this decade has made electronic texts available in new formats, not for the traditional big, fixed office desktop but for the small and mobile personal text readers. There are now three different formats for electronic texts competing for survival: Microsoft Ereader, Palm Reader, and Adobe Reader.
"We see ebooks as another way for the library to enhance educational opportunities and research experiences," said Martha Blodgett, associate University of Virginia librarian for information technology in her press release. Teachers, researchers, students, and Poe aficionados can download numerous texts onto one computer, giving them access through one device rather than carrying many books. Ebooks are convenient for researchers, who can perform keyword searches in less time than it takes to flip through a paper book looking for a certain word or passage. Ebooks also retain some of the best features of paper books. Users can write notes on a page and even "dogear" pages. "This is a new and evolving technology,” Blodgett concluded, “and we are excited about the opportunity to experiment with it."
The University of Virginia Library's Etext Center, which calls itself "the oldest and largest public ebook library on the web," now has 1,800 ebooks available to the public, including "classic British and American fiction, major authors, children's literature, American history, Shakespeare, AfricanAmerican documents, the Bible, and much more." In the initial response, 8.5 million free ebooks were requested between August 2000 and May 2002 by etext readers in 100 countries.
Although the first public responses to reading electronic texts on small personal screens has yet to make a sustained impact, it is possible that texttospeech technology with wireless devices will make a difference. Since Poe tales and poems have high readability, they may be in the forefront of any new breakthrough. David Seaman, director of the Etext Center at the University of Virginia Library, stated: "The goal is to read pages on the computer screen for extended periods of time, rather than to print them out."
The University of Virginia has two Poe books, 20 Poe tales, and one poem available in the three formats for Microsoft Ereader, Palm Reader, and HTML:
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, volume 1 and 2, The Assignation, The Balloon Hoax, Berenice, The Black Cat, The Cask of Amontillado, The Colloquy of Monos and Una, The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion, The Descent into the Maelstrom, The Domain of Arnheim, Eleonora, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Gold Bug, Hop-Frog, The Imp of the Perverse, The Island of the Fay, King Pest, Landor's Cottage, Ligeia, The Man of the Crowd, The Mellonta Tauta, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Roget, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Purloined Letter, The Spectacles, The Tale of the Ragged Mountains, The Tell-Tale Heart, "Thou Art the Man", William Wilson, and Annabel Lee.
In addition, 17 works are available at Virginia in Adobe Reader format: The Balloon Hoax, The Black Cat, The Cask of Amontillado, The Descent into the Maelstrom, The Domain of Arnheim, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Imp of the Perverse, Ligeia, The Man of the Crowd, Mellonta Tauta, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Roget, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Purloined Letter, The Tell-Tale Heart, "Thou Art the Man", and William Wilson.
The University of Virginia Poe e-texts in the various formats are available without charge at
<
The Microsoft Ereader is available without charge in English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian at It requires Windows 98 and Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher and some common hardware elements. In addition, the Microsoft TexttoSpeech package, in English, Spanish, or French, which must be loaded in addition to the Microsoft Ereader, is also available without charge at <
The Palm Reader, available without charge for Windows and Mac desktops as well as palm top devices, is at <
The Adobe Reader 6.0, formerly known as Adobe Acrobat, is available without charge at
poster boy Cary Doctorow, Canadian science fiction writer and journalist
outreach director for EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Cory Doctorow has relicensed his book, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Last year he released it under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs — license. In so doing, he proved conventional wisdom about “free distribution” wrong — the book did exceptionally well. Now, without even waiting for the rest of the publishing world to catch up, he’s taken the next great leap: the book is now available under one of the least restrictive licenses — Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. Already, cool versions are emerging. Here’s a Speed Reading tool for both new books by Trevor Smith.
posted by [ Lessig ] on [ Feb 15 04 at 6:28 AM ] to [ creative commons ] [ 2 trackbacks ]
I write all of my books in a text-editor [TEXT EDITOR SCREENGRAB] (BBEdit, from Barebones Software -- as fine a text-editor as I could hope for). From there, I can convert them into a formatted two-column PDF [TWO-UP SCREENGRAB]. I can turn them into an HTML file [BROWSER SCREENGRAB]. I can turn them over to my publisher, who can turn them into galleys, advanced review
copies, hardcovers and paperbacks. I can turn them over to my readers, who can convert them to a bewildering array of formats [DOWNLOAD PAGE SCREENGRAB]. Brewster Kahle's Internet Bookmobile can convert a digital book into a four-color, full-bleed, perfect-bound, laminated-cover, printed-spine paper book in ten minutes, for about a dollar. Try converting a paper book to a PDF
or an html file or a text file or a RocketBook or a printout for a buck in ten minutes! It's ironic, because one of the frequently cited reasons for preferring paper to ebooks is that paper books confer a sense of ownership of a physical object. Before the dust settles on this ebook thing, owning a paper book is going to feel less like ownership than having an open digital edition of the text.
Posterity vanishes. In the Eldred v. Ashcroft Supreme Court hearing last year, the court found that 98 percent of the works in copyright are no longer earning money for anyone, but that figuring out who these old works belong to with the degree of certainty that you'd want when one mistake means total economic
apocalypse would cost more than you could ever possibly earn on them. That means that 98 percent of works will largely expire long before the copyright on them does. Today, the names of science fiction's ancestral founders -- Mary Shelley, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, HG Wells -- are still known, their work still a part of the discourse. Their spiritual descendants from Hugo Gernsback onward may not be so lucky – if their work continues to be "protected" by copyright, it might just vanish from the face of the earth before it reverts to the public domain.
Lawrence Lessig (email)
Professor of Law at Stanford Law School
Founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society
Author of The Future of Ideas and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace
Chair of the Creative Commons project
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