Better than online book ordering

This article on CNN briefly tells us that something is finally arriving that many avid readers have been wanting for years: a machine that can download and print a paperback book on request. I expect this to be a real boon for obscure authors (nowadays, that can mean anyone this side of Stephen King) and their fans.

Personally, I'm rather fond of reading books on screen, though I'd be a lot happier yet if the E-book publishing industry would cease-and-desist from "paving the cow path" by forcing on us formats that simply imitate the paper-page book with all of its disadvantages, such as separating the beginning of a sentence from its end and a diagram from the text that explains it. But my world has a place for paper books, and I still read many of them. This new piece of technology can, in effect, combine the convenience of paper pages with the commercial advantages of E-books, in that publishers no longer have to guess how many copies they should print in advance, and lose heavily if they guess wrong. And the forests will be grateful too, because publishers tend to print a few extra copies just in case, and I know of no efficient way to turn unread books back into living trees.

Still, don't underestimate the usefulness of a library, where you can find many more books than you would be likely to own yourself, and of second-hand bookshops, where you can buy a book that you only want to read once or a few times before passing it on. There are even E-book libraries such as Libwise where you can read an E-book without having to own it, though I pay a subscription fee for that privilege. It all helps to reduce clutter in my house and conserve trees.

Here's an idea (doubtless not original, and feel free to use it if you have the connections): equip libraries with E-book readers where patrons can view the book of their choice if the library doesn't have a paper copy of it. I dare to hope that this will not be hamstrung by the same pointless DRM arguments as E-music, because

• consumers understand that they should pay for books if they want to keep them

• publishers understand that they benefit from allowing their books to be borrowed and read in libraries

Some simple technological precautions would be necessary to prevent illicit copying, but the main protection against this has always been that consumers don't mind paying for value received. I'd also be in favour of a Public Lending Right scheme that rewarded the authors of books that were read often.

Oh yes ... an article about downloading music, by a musician I respect.

Why Software Has Bugs

Slashdot led me to this article inTech Review in which Bjarne Stroustrup says, among other things, "People reward developers who deliver software that is cheap, buggy, and first. That's because people want fancy new gadgets now." I've agreed with this for quite some time. The converse of it is that, for areas where the pace of innovation has slowed, or where bugs will cause serious inconvenience to people who use the software, quality can be (and is) much higher. Early cars, or even later cars like the ones my parents drove in the 1960's, were unreliable by today's standards, and don't even ask me about the TVs of the 1960's. Most of software is in that era now. In a few decades it'll work much better, not because of dramatic advances in technology, but because customers just won't want to pay for sloppy workmanship any more.

So why did people buy those cars and TVs? Why do they use today's software? Simple. What came before was even worse. There's an interesting book called "To Engineer Is Human" (find it at your favourite book place) which argues that engineering, as a discipline, makes progress by learning, and it learns by failing. I've been working in the software industry for twenty years and I've still got a lot of learning to do!

Irrational Voters

A few days ago I happened upon this article by Bryan Caplan. (I found it from Arts & Letters Daily, which has many interesting links.) A big part of Caplan's argument is that voters in the USA share mistaken views about some important issues, so the democratic process cannot help but produce bad policies. (Please do read what he says.) I offer a couple of counterpoints, having to do with (1) money politics (2) the fragmentation of political power in the USA.

Money Politics

Caplan points out that the US Supreme Court can overrule some bad policies by ruling them unconstitutional, and wonders if bad economic policies might be overruled by some like entity that would rule them uneconomic. However, due to the corruption of legislators in the USA, policies that threaten to reduce companies' profitability often are not enacted even when many voters support them. Corruption also harms the economy in many ways, but at least it has a silver lining.

Fragmentation

Caplain laments that voters have little incentive to find out which of their beliefs (about economic policy) are mistaken, because the benefit to an individual voter of voting for a sensible policy is slight: most likely the mistaken policy will be enacted anyway. But, as far as I can see, he says nothing about the cost to politicians of enacting a mistaken policy. In the USA, this cost is slight. If the results of a poor policy cannot be blamed on foreigners, the Supreme Court, or the President, then the blame can be diffused among hundreds of individual legislators who demanded various favours or amendments in exchange for their votes. By contrast, in countries with strong and cohesive political parties, the cost to a legislator of voting against his or her party's platform is considerable, and the cost to a party of pushing through a harmful policy can be high, because voters know that the party's leaders could choose what policy would be enacted, and will hold the leaders responsible for the consequences of the choice they made.

In short, the remedy for the ills of democracy is ... Parliament.