BILETA 2007

These certainly are exciting times! After having my first article submission rejected by the Cambridge Student Law Review, I was enraptured to recently discover I’ve been successful in my first conference submission; having an abstract approved for presentation at BILETA 2007 (I guess a 50% success rate for an aspiring academic can’t be that bad?). Given this year’s title (Paper, Scissors, Stone: Business, Law and Politics – the E and M-Commerce Debate) and Sony’s recent announcement of yet another dedicated mobile-reader device for your eBooks (quite imaginatively named the Sony Reader) I thought it best to propose something on the future of mobile eBook-reader devices in the wake of countless predecessors, and our current DRM climate. The conference title itself, initially proved a conundrum somewhat difficult to comprehend. What did it all mean? Was it a game? Was business the ‘Paper’, law the ‘Scissors’, and politics the ‘Stone’? Would it therefore follow that business trumped politics, law trumped business, and politics blunts law? Or was it merely a twentieth title, for essentially, the same annual get-together? Given such heightened levels of ambiguity, I too, thought a little wordplay was in order, proffering ‘A Scissor-less, Paperless, Tome: Business, Law and Libraries – the eBook and Mobile-Reader Debate.’ Unsurprisingly, the paper was ultimately accepted for Stream 9 - ‘Tuning in wireless: M-Commerce: the next challenge?’ - aptly considering whether current legislation; user demands; and present business practice; effectively enable m-commerce in such devices to develop.

Announcing the impending release of the ‘Sony Reader’ on the US market at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Convention, April 2007 is set to re-open the eBook and mobile-reader debate once more, when Sony unleashes the next generation of portable, dedicated, reading-devices. Eager to rectify the shortcomings of its Japanese predecessor - the ‘Librié’ – the ‘Sony Reader’ purports to revolutionise the act of reading with electronic paper and eInk, its on-demand ‘CONNECT’ eBook store of 12,000 titles, an indefinite shelf-life for your title purchases, weaker Digital Rights Management (‘DRM’) (DRM = Technological Protection Measures + Standard Form Contracting), and increased interoperability with DRM-free text, Microsoft Word, Adobe PDF and it’s own proprietary BroadBand eBook format. In light of what could be heralded by librarians, academics, publishers and our tech-savvy public akin, as a step closer to realising the fullest potential of mobile reading-devices to enhance our reading experience - both in and outside of the library - it is submitted that the Sony Reader could, in reality, prove a futile business pursuit; another intellectual property quandary in the DRM debate; and the device itself - like so many before it - a scissor-less, paperless tome.

The ‘official’ abstract can be found here.

Anyone going to the conference with an alternative theory as to what ‘Scissors, Paper, Stone: Business, Law and Politics’ is really alluding to, should definitely say hi!

ttfn, xC