Last month Cory Doctorow gave an eloquent and often-amusing speech at the National Reading Summit to an audience of “librarians, educators, publishers, authors and students” called “How to Destroy the Book.” The transcript was published yesterday by the University of Toronto’s student paper, The Varsity.
Doctorow begins by describing the threat of a group of copyright pirates who “dress up their thievery in high-minded rhetoric about how they are the true defenders and inheritors of creativity,” and that “what they really see is a future in which the electronic culture market grows by leaps and bounds and they get to be at the centre of it.”
Of course, the pirates he is talking about are those who would be sure that “when you buy an ebook or an audiobook that’s delivered digitally, you are demoted from an owner to a licensor. From a reader to a mere user. These thieves deliver our digital books and our audiobooks wrapped in license agreements and technologies that might as well be designed to destroy the emotional connection that readers have with their books.” Because, as he argues a little bit later, “the most important part of the experience of a book is knowing that it can be owned. That it can be inherited by your children, that it can come from your parents. That libraries can archive it, they can lend it, that patrons can borrow it.”
He concludes the first half of his speech with these lines: “Anyone who claims that readers can’t and won’t and shouldn’t own their books are bent on the destruction of the book, the destruction of publishing, and the destruction of authorship itself. We must stop them from being allowed to do it. The library of tomorrow should be better than the library of today. The ability to loan our books to more than one person at once is a feature, not a bug. We all know this. It’s time we stop pretending that the pirates of copyright are right.”
The first part of the speech can be read here, and here is the link to the second part.
