Ebooks: Neither E, nor Books: Paper for the O'reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, 2004

In 2004, when ebooks meant clunky devices and PDFs barely readable on screens, Cory Doctorow stood before the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference and asked a deceptively simple question: what actually are ebooks? The answer he provided was neither E nor books, exactly. This talk captures a pivotal moment in digital publishing history, when the battle over what ebooks could and should be was just beginning. Doctorow argues that ebooks aren't merely digitized paper, but entirely new objects with their own grammar of use: meant to be shared, searched, annotated, and passed along. He anticipates nearly every debate that would follow two decades of digital publishing wars: the futility of DRM, the tension between accessibility and control, and why copyright law's Industrial Age assumptions fail readers in a networked world. Part manifesto, part prophecy, part time capsule, this paper reveals Doctorow as the sharpest voice in the room, making the case that the future of reading was not about replacing paper with pixels, but understanding what each form does best.