Forty years later, scientists realized how useful this data might be for future moon missions, but they found it was nearly impossible to reconstruct the equipment needed to play back those tapes. After years of scavenging through NASA and Jet Propulsion Lab warehouses, they managed to find four rare tape players. Between all four players, they were able to salvage enough parts to get one halfway working. By contacting the retired presidents of former moon-mission subcontractors, they found additional parts and a small trove of repair manuals that one of them had in his garage.
What they lacked, though, was an understanding of the 1960s mindset—that is, how people in the era of the Lunar Orbiter thought. They lacked the implicit assumptions that 1960s engineers made and that were never recorded in the repair manuals, and they lacked knowledge of how information was coded and decoded onto those tapes. Information science had matured so much over forty years that it was nearly impossible to mentally travel back in time and think the way engineers did in a simpler time.
This particular story has a happy ending. They leased an abandoned McDonald’s, set up shop inside, and deciphered the old tape reels like modern-day cuneiform tablets. And we now have stunning digital images of the moon at an unprecedented level of detail—from tapes made in 1966.
The story is bleaker for software, though. At least with hardware, tape reels, and aging wax cylinders, you have something to inspect and work with. It’s a lot harder with bits.
A company in Watertown, Massachusetts, called Eastgate Systems seems to be the sole guardian of aging hypertexts from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Before the advent of the internet, these hypertexts were seen as the preeminent form of digital art. They combined text, image, and sound and often did it in a nonlinear way. Reading these hypertexts was a lot like life itself, in that once you made a choice, you were presented with more choices, and you could never go backward. It’s a technique that modern video games like Heavy Rain and Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors have rediscovered.
The pinnacle of such hypertexts was a massive project called Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse, which had to be loaded from several floppy disks and which contained programming that actually—and deliberately—caused your computer to crash. It was designed to make you aware of the medium with which you were interacting. It would be like the equivalent of seeing this page turn to eInk phosphors and then disappear once you read it, or like having a book whose pages could only turn forward, because the past got destroyed with every page turn.
Sadly, while it’s possible to buy Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse, it’s nearly impossible to read it. You would need an aging Mac computer from around 1990 and a defunct program called HyperCard. Maybe Eastgate Systems will revivify these early hypertexts, which have since been overshadowed by the internet, and make them available on iPads one day. Who knows? But the point is that software does not fare as well as hardware.
Media in our culture fares poorly in general, whether or not it’s digital.
Bookmark: Used Books
There’s an enormous market now for used books—a recent article in Publisher’s Weekly puts it in the billions of dollars. Because this market is so big, it allows us as readers to either buy used books ourselves or read used books that have been donated to libraries.
But there’s no such thing yet as a used ebook.
All purchases are individual, and DRM makes sure that a book that you purchased can only be read on your own device. Of course, there’s a dark undernet for pirated ebooks. As an experiment, I searched the peer-to-peer networks for The New York Times bestsellers available this week in ebook format, and I found pirated versions of all of them, contributed by anonymous and technically sophisticated book lovers. And don’t doubt that these folks love books, even though they’re pirates.
Still, though there’s no legally sanctioned and technologically functional used ebook market yet, it’s going to happen. I predict it will be started first by a company like Barnes & Noble that allows the resale of its ebooks through other websites—that is, third-party companies who will be able to sell ebooks to you at a discount perhaps, even though they buy the books directly from Barnes & Noble. There’s nothing strange about this reseller model. It’s used all the time for physical goods. I think the adoption of a reseller model for digital goods will open up a thriving used ebook market.
Perhaps a time period from the original date of a book’s publication will have to pass, maybe a year or two, after which the book will be available as a used ebook sale. At that point, the ebook would be available at a reduced price.
Or perhaps the laws of another country will allow used ebook sales, so you’ll end up going to an offshore website, like those that run legal online gambling sites, entities headquartered in Bermuda or Turks and Caicos. They’ll provide a marketplace for sellers and buyers, and these entities will take a small percent of each sale. They’ll be companies small enough to be run by one person, sitting in a beach chair in Bermuda and drinking a mai tai while his servers hum quietly in some nearby warehouse, raking in the cash and storing all the digital files.
I think it would be healthy if we could have a used ebook market. There are even hopeful signs that it may be starting soon; in 2013, Amazon applied for a patent on the sale of used digital goods, including ebooks. Used books—and by extension, used ebooks—would help readers, because more books could be bought at cheaper prices. This lets a reader get more bang from his or her buck. And it would help authors too, because being able to buy used ebooks means the author’s ideas and stories are kept in circulation longer. A book, once read, could be liberated from a Kindle or Nook and find another reader.
The drawback to used ebooks—and the reason why so many retailers and publishers are against them—is that they might encourage book piracy.
Piracy is possible for physical books, although to a much lesser extent. If a book is stolen from your house, it could be sold to a used bookstore, which in turn might resell it. But theft of physical books is rare, and it’s even rarer when a volume is resold and recognized—although that does happen. In 2010, experts at the Folger Library in Washington, DC, caught a thief who had stolen a first-edition Shakespeare volume from England ten years earlier. The thief had mutilated the book and ripped pages out, but it was still identifiable.
It’s much harder to catch a digital book thief. Ebooks lack sophisticated watermarks or other identifying mechanisms, so one digital book looks a lot like another. This means that there’s no real way to identify whether a used ebook was resold after being rightfully purchased or illegally copied one or more times.
In fact, because there’s no way to forensically differentiate a pirated ebook from a lawfully purchased one, the assumption is that any ebooks not sold by a major retailer must have been pirated. This taints the concept of used ebooks, which is unfortunate. At this point, used ebooks are presumed guilty of being pirated until proven innocent.
I, for one, think we need used ebooks—but what about you? Would you buy a used ebook? Trade one with a friend? Do you wish you could donate some of your own ebooks to a library? Or do you feel ebooks are already priced well and that selling them for less would hurt the livelihoods of authors and publishers alike?