Cloud Computing: What Does it Mean For Book Publishing?
When Mike Shatzkin looked into the future at this year’s Book Expo he saw everything in the cloud in 20 years time.
Well we’re going to have a cloud network, and we’re going to access that material through screens and devices. …. You’ll have screens of various sizes for various functions. And, by the way, if you want to get at your material using my screen, you’ll be able to do that. You’ll have your iris scan, or your fingerprint, or six passwords, or however you felt you had to lock up that material. But you won’t be locked to any particular device, you’ll be able to use any device.
The cloud metaphor is hot right now but what does it mean? In the context that Shatzkin used it at BEA the concept is indistinguishable from today’s internet. But just like the ‘web 2.0′ buzz word from a few years ago, the ‘cloud’ means different things to different people. Let’s try to parse it.
Here are some frequent uses…
- Cycles — commonly, the cloud is understood to mean a processor-in-the-sky, aka a computer on the network that does some work for a local user. This is like sending your laundry out or getting take-out instead of cooking at home. You outsource a common home activity to get the benefits of an industrial scale.
- Services — Gmail, Google Docs, Blogger, YouTube and similar web-based email, blogging and productivity platforms offer services that run on networked computers (as opposed to Microsoft’s applications that run locally). These are commonly called cloud services. It is like eating at McDonald’s instead of bringing take-out home. The services are fast and convenient. Not to mention all the cleanup, maintenance, and infrastructure expenses live with the service provider — not the customer.
- APIs — those wonderful data pipelines that allow applications like TweetDeck to sub in for Twitter.com — are also considered cloud based. In this case the processing cycles are typically split between the users’ computers and those on the net. I suppose this is like inviting the restaurant’s chef to cook in your home kitchen.
All three contexts require online data storage and I suppose it is that storage Shakzkin is eying for his personal library circa 2039.
The Case Against the Cloud
Uploading the entire contents of your laptop onto the internet sounds really great but there is an obvious knock against the cloud and its enthusiasts — it assumes that the personal computer revolution and Moore’s law never happened. Everyone has more memory and processing power in their phones these days then a whole computer lab of undergraduates circa 1995. Service providers and application developers need to work with that trend not against it.
In a recent Guardian article — “Not every cloud has a silver lining” — Cory Doctorow said that if service providers and application developers do otherwise than they are snowing users for service fees.
Developers’ intent aside, this is unlikely to be an either/or proposition.
The Apple app store is a case study in the dynamic tension between the cloud and the computer. Iphone developers have tried promoting web apps over native ones and it plainly hasn’t worked. A native app is better than a web app. On the other hand Apple has tried controlling the native background processes that applications can use on the iPhone and that plainly hasn’t worked either. A native app with full system access is better than an app without. But there are downsides with each scenario.
If the app store is any indication the future of computing is likely to be an integrated hybrid model rather than one or the other.
The Cloud and Publishing
So how is all of this really going to affect book publishing and book reading?
Reading books online isn’t a processor intensive activity, so we can dismiss the utility computing angle as overkill.
Reading books online is already backed by cloud services like Shortcovers and O’Reilly’s Safari. That is here now. No need to wait 20 years. Shortcovers has elegantly and prophetically taken a shortcut around DRM and eBabel. (The pros and cons of reading-as-a-service will need to wait for another post.)
It is the APIs that are likely to be the game changing cloud applications for online reading. A giant ISBN-table-in-the-sky or a Kindle API are things I have blogged about before. But an API from Bookscan or an API from BooknetCanada’s catalogue 2.0 initiative would be equally momentous.
The question remains are these going to be open firehoses or will the data provider make developers pay to take a sip? Therein is balance of power in publishings’ future.
7 Comments