Apparently, Amazon has been
wirelessly updating error-ridden books, and it raises the obvious question:
Should e-book patching even be a thing?
I'm torn. I mean, technology-wise, I think this is great, though I can see the potential abuses all too clearly.
Patching is not a new thing. Computer games have been doing it even longer than George Lucas.* Even print books get the occasional
story-tweaking revision. So let's not pretend this is
some new, infuriating thing that Big Publishing is doing to us. The difference now, though, is that eBooks can be patched immediately -- even automatically without the user's consent.
I'm going to say auto-patching is a Bad Idea because of
Potential Abuse #1: Tweaking the story. Imagine a writer with Lucas Syndrome, endlessly fiddling with his masterpiece. You're halfway through his novel when a character references something that never happened -- except it did happen, in the revised version that got pushed to your device
after you started reading.
Even without auto-patching, I fear this abuse. We'd all be arguing over whether Han or Greedo shot first, only to find out we were reading different versions.
Computer games show us
Potential Abuse #2: Publishing the novel before it's done. In November, 1999, me and my fellow game developers were working 80+ hours/week to get
our game finished before Christmas. We were close, but it was buggy -- critical cutscenes didn't play, others crashed the game, memory leaks made the game unplayable after an hour or so, important characters would kill the player for no reason, etc.
It sounds unplayable, and for some people it was, but they released it anyway. If we brought up a bug at status meetings, we were invariably told, "We'll fix that in the patch."
Don't get me wrong,
we made a dang good game, but if you play it without that patch, I pity you. And I fear a world where authors release rough drafts of a novel for quick sales, knowing they can always "fix it in a patch."
That said, I think abuse would be the exception. I think most authors, if they updated their novels at all, would only make small changes. I say that because
most film directors don't make controversial changes
every time a new video format is released.
Most game developers release playable games, using patches for bugs they couldn't have foreseen.
If it actually works that way, it could give e-books more value. We all know the things e-books can't do (can't loan, can't resell,
DRM, etc), but print books can't be updated to make themselves better. You'd have to buy another copy for that. Mostly, I think this would be a good thing.
What do you think?
* Apparently, the term 'patching' is from the old punch-card days of computers, when a bug fix had to be literally patched onto the cards.