Dylan's Desk: How to get people to pay for what they used to own

Some days it feels as though the tech industry is busily finding ways to make us pay for things that used to be free, rent us things we used to own, and entice us to create things for the benefit of companies that don’t care about us.

I’ll pick on one relatively arbitrary target to illustrate my point: The startup Oyster, which journalists (including VentureBeat’s) have described as a “Netflix for e-books” — pay the company a flat fee, and you can read as many books as you want from its collection of 500,000 titles.

Interesting, I thought when I first heard about it. Isn’t that what a library used to do, back in the days when most people still cared about books printed on paper? Except the library was free to anyone who cared to walk down and get a library card.

Opponents of digital rights management (DRM) technology, better known as copy-protection technology, raised this alarm over a decade ago. If we let companies lock up their content behind copy protection schemes, we’ll lose the ability to do things we used to take for granted, the argument went. We won’t be able to lend a book to a friend, sell a used CD to a neighbor, or continue to watch a movie we bought a decade ago when we upgrade to a new TV.

The advocates of copy protection pretty much lost this battle in the music industry — for awhile. Apple removed DRM from the music it sold on iTunes, and from then on, DRM-free files were pretty much what people expected to get. That lasted until the rise of streaming music services like Spotify — and now we’re back in a world where you can listen to anything you want (nice) but you have to pay a monthly fee (ok, fair enough) and you don’t actually own anything (bummer).

But no comparable repudiation of copy protection happened in the world of books. E-books are still shackled with ridiculous copy protection schemes, making it extremely difficult for libraries to lend them. Patrons who want to borrow an e-book have to take a bunch of steps — including downloading special software from Adobe — that are error-prone and seem designed to discourage anyone from even making the effort.

If it had been easier for libraries to lend e-books, there’d be no need for a startup like Oyster.

But let’s not single out Oyster, even though it did scoop up $14 million in funding to support its idea. After all, once publishers, together with Amazon, Adobe, and Apple, have crippled the book industry, well, there’s a business opportunity in fixing that problem. Because people still want to read books, and if the current e-book distribution model is so broken, and if the subscription model works so well for music, why not see what you can do to replicate the Netflix model for books?

The deeper problem is that, as Anil Dash wrote over two years ago, we lost the Web. We lost our early enthusiasm for open standards and shared infrastructure. We lost the sense of idealism that prized sharing, that drove us to add publicly-accessible metadata to everything, and that had us working towards interoperability and distributed systems. We lost the fervor that created Dublin Core and Creative Commons. We left Flickr behind — with its rich metadata and its enormous store of reusable and remixable photos — in favor of Instagram, which has neither.

But while Dash wrote that this was just part of a cyclical pendulum swing and that it is possible to rebuild the Web we lost, I’m a bit less optimistic. Alexis Madrigal’s essay earlier this month about the virtues of email crystallized the point: Email is open, interoperable, and owned by no one. It’s also overwhelmed by the amount of content (and spam) the world is shoving through it, which means most people’s inboxes are hopeless messes. And it’s leading one startup after another (not to mention many journalists) to declare that they’d like to kill off email. The thing is, many users of email would agree. Many of us can’t wait for email to die.

In a larger sense, we need more things like email, not fewer. But where are the people who are building these open, interoperable systems? Where are the crowds of enthusiastic people needed to give these projects love, momentum, and energy? Where are the startups that really want to change the world and aren’t just saying that as code for “we want to be worth a billion dollars”?

Dash’s advice is still good, two years later. If you want to build an open web that makes the world a better place, raise the bar on UX, examine alternate ways of funding your idea, explore new architectures, and exploit the insularity of walled-off companies like Facebook, a closed platform fully owned by one corporation.

You don’t own your own words on Facebook — you barely own your own face.

But all too many people don’t care and aren’t following Dash’s advice. Meanwhile, Facebook has nearly 1.25 billion active users.

And if you want to send a message to one of them, you need to download the new app.