This is almost exactly what I’d been thinking. Thank you so very much, especially for Act V
— Iain 
Personally, I didn’t have to dig that far. I found the lengths to which they went to ensure that only purchased content was convenient to use (notwithstanding the Wikipedia sop) somewhat stomach-turning.
I’d be interested to know whether random free content in acceptable formats (like http://craphound.com/down/Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom.prc) even works in the device.
P.S. Mad props for the ‘Right to Read’ references.
P.P.S is that a new favicon?
Electronic text books? Get real! By the time I’ve finished a subject (as an undergrad student), I’ve thumbed backward and forth in them numerous times, and have hand-written notes all over the place.
Even if one could annotate such books digitally, I’d still go for the paper version and hand-writing. There’s something physical about working by hand that gets lost in digital translation.
As a metaphor: I’ve worked extensively in designing houses for people to live in. When the company I worked for switched from pens and pencils and paper to computer, we thought our productivity and quality would go up. The reverse happened. Something was lost when the ability to doodle was lost.
— Jonathan Christie
The Kindle, like all of the devices before it, is doomed to fail. The problem that most companies have been trying to solve (making the screens better to read, etc. ) isn’t the main issue. Trust me, if there was compelling content on a 160×160 Palm screen, you’d read it. Nope, the big problem is this silly notion of DRM. Making the process of transferring content to the device means it’s a non-starter for a majority of people. Books have no DRM at all. I can buy a book, and when I’m through with it, I can do whatever I want with it. I can resell it as a used book, give it to my friends, burn it, or even turn it into pop-culture art. The book companies don’t care one whit after the initial sale. With these eBook solutions, not only is the experience less than stellar (although it is improving), but the content controls mean I’m stuck with whatever I bought, even if it was a weak moment of exuberance after watching Oprah. I can’t do anything with the content outside of deleting it. Where’s the use in that? If I want to share it with my friends, they have to get their own copy, or I have to lend them my device. And the usurious rates some publishers charge (ie: hardcover prices) are absolutely ridiculous.
The only reason I can see for publishers to cripple the eBook experience is to ensure that paper books stay with us for a very long time.
I am reminded of an inscription from the bookplate a famous author pasted in every book in his library. It read “I never loan my books, for people never return them. The only books remaining in my library are those I’ve borrowed from others.”
— Charles
Great framework. I agree with the sentiment here, which, by the way, is causing an identical stir next door. You know, the whole music thing.
The fact is, though, that information has been liberated digitally. No one is taking their personal book collection to a photocopier, making copies, and leaving them in the center of town. Book companies know this; I doubt they will ever care. But are you really pretending that DRM-free books won’t jumpstart literary Napster? Copying and sharing is just so effortless.
I’m not saying I like it, or that I will buy Kindle, or that I have a counterproposal. But the entire arts industry is in an awkward, fumbling stage, and I’m not sure anyone is supplying good ideas to speed up adolescence. Someone–or some company–is charged with testing the boundaries to push things along. I’d call it part of the process, not exactly Armageddon.
On Act IV, I would sound the alarm on Gmail or online banking or cellular records or the digital cable box that reports my tv habits before a digital book reader. What’s the privacy policy like?
— Robbie
Looks like I got it right. I sell children’s e-storybooks and not only are they DRM free but the system is designed to allow unlimited sharing of storybooks with no restrictions. Take that Amazon! :D
— The Duck
Robbie, there are plenty of DRM-free books available online, for free or not, and the closest I’ve seen to Napster is spammers trying to sell copies of Gutenberg on CD. People still buy books by Cory Doctorow, Rudyard Kipling, Vernor Vinge, Elizabeth Moon and William Shakespeare, to choose some authors at random, even when they could download them instead.
— Carey
“the entire arts industry is in an awkward, fumbling stage, and I’m not sure anyone is supplying good ideas to speed up adolescence.”
Agreed. But I personally feel that the arts industry will not grow to adulthood. Artists are slowly realising that they are dependent on the industry for distribution, publicity and revenue. The industry can no longer supply better distribution in the digital world than the artist can. The publicity that matters is already shifting to user reviews and ratings even on Amazon’s own site. And the revenue will go where the distribution and publicity lie. How exactly this will work I’m not sure but I imagine that the money currently going into the arts industry will be spread more evenly across the pockets of the artists. Books, music and all art will become cheaper and artists will still make more profit.
— Ercan
This is an attempt to portray the Kindle in the worst possible light.
Luddism has returned.
— Bryan
Concerning books, I’d stay with the dead-tree variant and a real home library, but to read newspapers with such a device is a nice thing (and DRM doesn’t matter for newspapers as I usually throw them away the next day).
— Rhubarb
A big problem in the whole thought process about ebooks is the notion that there should be a specific device and format. The best ebooks are HTML files. My ebook reader is the browser on N800.
(It would be nice if Project Gutenberg had HTML versions of all its titles without the reader having to do the scripting to convert the plain text format to something browser-friendly.)
The first analogy is not quite right: You can give away or sell your book, and you can presumably give someone your Kindle; you can’t photocopy your book and sell it, and Kinkle’s terms of service are referring to defeating DRM to make digital duplicates.
But in the end, this isn’t a moral issue over intellectual property. It’s an arms-length contract negotiation. Don’t like the terms, don’t do business with them.
— Marko
The most intelligent attitudes towards eBooks that I’ve seen so far come from Baen Books and author Scott Seigler, both of whom distribute eBook copies of their work for free; Seigler over the Internet, and Baen with a CD inside a hardback of everything else the author’s written up to that date. Their argument, which is a valid one, is that eBooks will never be a perfect substitute for print books and are ultimately most useful as promotional tools; if someone reads one and likes it, they’re quite likely to buy a print copy for when they don’t have access to an eBook reader. It’s kind of like donating a dozen free copies to every library in the country, only at essentially no cost to the publisher and with a much wider audience.
At any rate, if there’s a future in charging for eBooks at all, it really does have to be at a price that reflects how much money it actually costs to produce them.
— Jake
>Trust me, if there was compelling content on a 160×160 Palm screen, you’d read it.
And so I have - tens and tens of thousands of pages. It’s better with 320×480, though. ;)
——-
All this quoting from 1984 and Stallman. I wonder if you have had a look around at how the world actually works.
Nobody needs ebook readers to fool the intellectually lazy. Heck, even the intellectually adept have a hard time keeping track of changes in “reality” and “history” for more than a few months, outside their chosen spheres. This is clear from reading the NY Times over the course of weeks. There are simply greater forces at work in any human society than strictly enforced consistency. :)
The idea that data will come from one source and be manipulated by one ruling cabal becomes much _less_ practical with any routine access to data at all. This can be clearly seen in a cursory examination of recent and present societies.
There are great examples of successful dictators (at least for now) that run excellent police states which make the childish simplicity of 1984 seem relatively innocent. Saddam himself was a pretty good example - some ridiculous proportion of the population was part of the secret police apparatus. Look to them to see how the job is done, and has been done for ages.
The methods (old, tried and true) are far more effective than information control (though IC does play a minor part). People won’t act on information if they have a very good reason not to act. The enforcers are given to know their survival depends on loyalty to the rulers, and their subjugation of the populace. The populace are kept in check by suspicion, terror, and acclimation. Anything can seem normal after a while. Info control helps preserve this sense of normalcy, but is not the key component of the strategy. Spin control allows the leadership to poison legitimate trusted sources - but this is old hat. Divorcing parents do that, for cryin’ out loud. It’s part of the human API. Been there forever.
Use of the InterWebs or Kindle or laptops (in Stallman’s tired, transparent tripe) is already a crushing defeat to enforcement societies, because the market conditions that demand such constructs are not possible in a police state. There are too many degrees of freedom to monitor effectively (the same reason that it’s much easier to debug a wagon than to debug an OS). When a dictator runs out of watchmen and collaborators, it doesn’t matter how good their tools are. They lose.
An excellent discussion of the problem occurs in Vinge’s “A Deepness in the Sky”, for anyone interested. Since his name was invoked above, you know. There is far more depth to the problem than Orwell ever appreciated (let alone Stallman - not an intellect for the ages, that one).
——–
Kindle will fail, but serve as a stepping stone for paperlike screens - so there is a purpose. :) I want that screen (actually, something better, but along the same lines) in something built by Apple or its successor.
— I come anon
@Henri -
Failing to remember one’s place in the book consistently is the ONLY reason that browsers are not ideal ebook readers - yet.
Oh yeah, and that they have to load the whole thing unless it’s formatted just right.
These are fixable things.
— I come anon
E-Books do work - if done properly, such as by Baen Books including in the Baen Free Library , and their E-Book reseller, Webscriptions, . If you look at their FAQ at , you’ll see that they make the books they sell available in open formats (including HTML and RTF) with no DRM. A suitable handheld reader seems to be the Bookeen Cybook Gen3, , as suggested by the ‘Not Another E-Book’, , spinoff from the Baen forums (’Baen’s Bar’, ) .
… and here are the links I didn’t manage to include in the actual comment:
Baen Free Library: http://www.baen.com/library/
Baen’s Bar: http://bar.baen.com/
Webscrptions: http://webscriptions.net/
Webscriptions FAQ: http://webscriptions.net/t-faq.aspx
Not Another e-Book: http://naebllc.com/
Bookeen Cybook Gen3: http://www.bookeen.com/ebook/ebook-reading-device.aspx
This was a pretty impressive blog entry.
“But are you really pretending that DRM-free books won’t jumpstart literary Napster?”
Are you really pretending that DRM will prevent people from file sharing?
— Carl Jonard
“At any rate, if there’s a future in charging for eBooks at all, it really does have to be at a price that reflects how much money it actually costs to produce them.”
Agreed. Amazingly, though, “Print Is Dead” author Jeff Gomez thinks that publishers should charge more for a DRM-free ebook than for a bound copy - because, hey, you can read it in different places!
In a way the members of the ebook-hype brigade are their own worst enemy.
— Steven
Act VII - The act of hacking
It came to mind that the reading devices are simple computers, and on the lucky side they even had Linux as operating system. After only a few days the first devices where shipped to the customers, the first hacks appeared, that allowed abritrary content without restrictions. Even additional file formats could be displayed due to the nature of the underlying architecture.
Act VIII - The act of liberation
The time came, where the Creative Commons overwhelmed publishers and brought the knowledge of the future world into the land of the free. Wisdom could be shared among those who had no former access to recent printed media…..
Ok.. one may have dreams… but if *we* want technology *and* freedom, we should encourage the common goods on the intellectual level. Be it software or be it literature.
To have bring a happy end to the sad story of 1984 and alike.
— david
“At any rate, if there’s a future in charging for eBooks at all, it really does have to be at a price that reflects how much money it actually costs to produce them.”
Reminds me of Digital Equipment Co in the early days of personal computers. They were the most successful mini-computer manufacturer out there at the time, but when it came time to dive into the personal computer field they totally missed the new pricing schedule. Their prices were nearly double that of oriental clone makers and the OS didn’t even come with “format” they expected you to buy a preformatted 5 1/4″ floppy for several $$ from them instead of picking up one for < $1 and formatting your own.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation#Personal_computers
— Robert Durtschi
This is right on… Despite the paper waste, until DRM finally expands into something fair (which I am willing to admit might not be Stallman-free, but at the least should include personal copies, lending to friends, provisions for service discontinuance, hardware agnosticism, and no right to freely one-side amend the contract) I will never buy into DRM stuff.
The sad part of Stallman’s militancy is that an open-source, relatively free community produced DRM solution that allowed real fair use rights would have a strong chance, but in general the community is too far out to ever imagine that limited property rights might actually be okay…
But screw the Kindle. Locked down, crappy hardware, expensive hardware, limited selection, and Amazon Big-Brotherness basically tells you everything you need to know.
— akatsuki
Henri Sivonen: It would be nice if Project Gutenberg had HTML versions of all its titles without the reader having to do the scripting to convert the plain text format to something browser-friendly.
There’s a huge backlog to be converted, but there are plenty of titles available in HTML, and the vast majority of new titles are available at least in HTML and plain text, if not other formats as well. Project Gutenberg has also recently implemented a Plucker converter, which might be of use. I don’t know how well it works, as I don’t have a Plucker viewer.
Craig Maloney: Trust me, if there was compelling content on a 160×160 Palm screen, you’d read it.
See the aforementioned Plucker converter, combined with the Project Gutenberg SF bookshelf. I suppose you might not be a fan of old-school SF, but enough people are that it’s silly to say that there’s no compelling content available for Palm readers. (Also be sure to check out Henry Dudeney’s collection of math puzzles.)
akatsuki: The sad part of Stallman’s militancy is that an open-source, relatively free community produced DRM solution that allowed real fair use rights would have a strong chance, but in general the community is too far out to ever imagine that limited property rights might actually be okay…
“Relatively free”? Is that like “a little bit pregnant“? And who the heck comes out against property rights? It’s the mechanism with which those rights are enforced that’s the problem. If every dead-tree book came with a small beady-eyed man who followed you around to make sure you didn’t do anything untoward with it, would you characterize any opposition to the system as being “too far out to ever imagine that limited property rights might actually be okay”? Here, I’ll sum up.
The problem is, as always, one of control. More eloquent commentators than I have explained it, but in short, DRM means giving control over your machinery to whoever sold you the book. Whether or not they promise real hard not to do anything evil with that control is immaterial. If they can enforce their rights with their DRM, your machinery is no longer yours to control. If they can’t, the system is completely useless to them. There’s no middle ground here, no “mostly dead” or “slightly pregnant”. Talking about systems which would “[allow] real fair use rights” is meaningless, since fair use is context-dependent, and by definition an automated system can’t judge your intent. Talk of fair DRM systems falls apart under the most cursory examination.
This post was called ‘Mark Pilgrim at his best’ by John Gruber? The references to Bezos’s opportunistic open letter are illuminating and trenchant, but this 1984 business achieves precisely Pilgrim’s usual level of ‘information wants to be free’-infected polemic. Give us a break: the Kindle will fail and something better will follow, and some devices will impose restrictions, and some will impose fewer restrictions, and some none at all. 1984 wasn’t like 1984, man, and Jeff Bezos sure as hell isn’t Josef Stalin. If you can’t tell the difference between state censorship and DRM in a single piece of consumer electronics, you are hopelessly fucked.
(And as for Act V: you’re not seriously claiming that regular updating is the bane of modern information technologies, are you?)
an open-source, relatively free community produced DRM solution that allowed real fair use rights would have a strong chance
Errm. How is that supposed to work? DRM, by definition, needs to deny knowledge to the user, ie. there must be a shared secret in the software/hardware and the matching data that the user has no access to. Open source, by definition, gives the user full access to all of the software. By their very definitions, “open source” and “DRM” are contradictory.
The correct term for “open-source DRM” is “bug.”
Now consider that implementing DRM successfully necessarily implies denying the user at least two of the four freedoms of libre software (and possibly more – I don’t have the time to think this through in detail right now). Given that DRM is fundamentally and definitionally at odds with libre software, is it any wonder that Stallman is “militant” about it?
Remember DiVX? Videos with a 24-hour (IIRC) shelf life. Brilliant.
— TPinAZ
Nailed on the head. Spot on. Extremely well composed.
— Anton Tagunov
Feature parity with physical books, after all, is surely a reasonable baseline demand.
Extremely unlikely to be supported by publishers. Know why? For publishers the fact that more than 1 person can read a book is a serious misfeature. Go to a presentation about book sales and marketing and you will hear that the average book is read by something like 6 people. A book publisher hears that as 5 lost sales he could be making. Libaries in particular are real thorn in the side of publishers. But with physical books there is little that can be done. DRM is the answer to their prayers: One sale = one reader. Publishers are unlikely to let a solution to the ‘problem’ of libraries and book sharing slip through their fingers.
It’s funny to note that most of the arguments used against file-sharing are also arguments against libraries.
— Brad
The Kindle violates most of the “Principles for Creating Long-Lasting Work” recommended by the Electronic Literature Organization. Not in the best interest of authors who want anything more than 15 seconds of fame.
http://eliterature.org/pad/afb.html
— Heather
Great–especially acts I - III, which make direct points about how important features of the book as reading interface are destroyed / crippled in Kindle.
“For publishers the fact that more than 1 person can read a book is a serious misfeature.”
Yes, that’s a nice way of putting it. ;)
As an author, of course I consider it a feature. I’d go so far as to say the vast majority of us do, even though we theoretically “lose” sales when second-hand books are lent or sold. But we connect with more readers (and maybe they will buy a copy for a friend, etc). The theoretical “losses” in the first instance are a bit like the theoretical losses of the music industry to file-sharing. It’s only a loss if you can show that people otherwise would actually have bought it.
— Steven
Quothe Robbie: “But are you really pretending that DRM-free books won’t jumpstart literary Napster? Copying and sharing is just so effortless.”
Yes, I (we?) are really asserting that. And Baen Books is too, and putting their money where their collective mouth is, and (gosh) trusting their reader base, and (gosh again) still making money at it.
Read some columns in backissues of their Universe magazine and you’ll see how and why it works. If you ever hear a publisher talk about “we need DRM”, tell them to look at Baen Books.
Now, since Universe isn’t DRM’d, I *could* just put it online. But — see? — I’m not. Trust in action. What a concept.
— Larry Clapp
It does look like it’s from 1984.
Act I makes a common implication that is unsupportable: namely that printed books and e-books should be treated identically for all purposes. In reality, physical media (books as well as music records) carry a built-in handicap; they can only be in one place at one time. This fact has always been essential to the unwritten deal between writers, publishers and readers that Bezos refers to: everbody understands that transfer of the physical book (or record) does little harm and should not be infringed.
Electronic media, on the other hand, make it trivial for one copy to be shared universally and can therefore completely undermine the fair compensation of the authors of the underlying works. DUH.
SO: If you insist that all the rights formerly given to the holders of printed books be granted to Kindle readers, please insist also that they inherit the same restrictions. Call for the free and unfettered transfer of your book to exactly ONE other reader, with the resulting deletion of your copy. Make the e-book act like a paper book that leaves your possession once shared.
Fair enough? Or do we really insist on eating our cake and then having it, too?
— Tom
@25: I am living proof of how Baen got it right. I found one of Baen’s Free Library CD’s in the back of a library book once. I now own every book in the Honor Harrington series after reading the first couple off of that CD, and am working on the anthologies.
— David Chuhay
Well done. The DRM apologists are already frothing at the mouth with lame-ass counter “arguments.”
But…it’s a tempest in a teapot. The thing is doomed to “Edselness” to coin a term. For all the reasons people popint out above and more.
One reason the Kindle will fail is the lame promotional / explanatory video they made. I kept expecting the actor to say “aren’t we done yet? Lets do it tomorrow.” Feature feature feature never any pitch on benefits. (is that inevitable?) Horrible marketing, just horrible.
Another reason is the ridiculous name. Had they consulted me, it would have been called the Bibliotech. As it is, the name evokes some perverse and malevolent rereading of Fahrenheit 451. Just what *is* this thing ‘kindling’? The snarky jokes will start flying immediately.
— Peter
Oops - forgot to add a disclaimer: If they had, in fact, asked me, I would have run, not walked, away.
— Peter
Tom,
That hardly covers it. There are many other things you can do with real books. You can, and people do, copy pages to keep for reference. I have, quite often. You can, and people do, rip pages and/or pictures out. I have done this rarely. People also underline them, dog ear them, mark them up. Some books even have errata that gets pasted into them. And some books get lent, returned, and lent again.
The problem with KIndle is that it takes a perfectly reasonable and flexible object - a book - and wrecks it. The point of an electronic book should be to improve on what what books do. Except for the ability to carry around lots of books - admittedly a nontrivial feature - Kindle is a regression to the days before printing presses.
I suspect that most truly avid readers won’t pay 400 bucks for this thing in the first place. And most folks with the available cash will not be so interested in the ability to carry around 200 books unless its ability to copy from and reference those books in any way the user sees fit is absolutely protected and intelligently implemented. As is, it sounds like a Must To Avoid.
As for illegal copying, since I am a consumer, that is NOT my problem. That is the publisher’s problem and I truly don’t care what they do because I have no intention of making illegal copies. What I do care about is whether I can use what I buy in any way I want.
Kindle doesn’t permit me to do what I want with my books and it’s incredibly expensive. I pass.
— tristero
I will follow Mark Pilgrim down any hallway he cares to lead me.
I will carry supplies and weapons.
We will prevail.
How ironic the entry from 2001 linked as “Related Article”
— eduo
All of the ‘Big Brother’ sturm and strang is not necessary. All content is now freely shareable. That’s just a fact. To found a business on the idea that you can fight this, is like founding a business on the idea that you can stop people from looking at each other. Might as well try to sell and control the right to look at your designer clothing. Like everybody else in the new media world, Kindle will change or die. I’m guessing die.
— DBL
Quoth Robbie: “No one is taking their personal book collection to a photocopier, making copies, and leaving them in the center of town.”
They are, actually. There are a huge number of scanned and OCRed books available to those who know where to look. It’s far from mainstream, I suspect largely because most people don’t like reading books on their computer.
eBooks do serve a valuable purpose, as an altervative way of buying and reading books — in exactly the same way that audio books serve a significant market.
When books began to come out on tape and then disk, there was no outcry because ‘you can’t write notes on them’ or ‘you can’t take them to the copy machine’. They are simply another alternative.
The real problem with the eBook market is that makers sell the files in proprietary formats. You can’t read a Sony PRS book on a Kindle and you can’t read a Kindle book on a Sony PRS, for example. You are limited to the limited selection of books offered by that source! That would be like each CD-player maker selling CD’s that can only be played on their systems — or like Amazon selling music that could only be played on a special Amazon audio system.
Until all readers can use a common format, the market will remain a limited, inconvenient niche market.
— Gene
Bravo!
I’m stumped by a personal desire for portability and convergence–and a recognition that we are most certainly headed in that direction–and a need, as a music producer and entrepreneur, to recoup significant investment capital spend on product development.
Carey: They also download them for free if given the opportunity.
cf. Radiohead / “In Rainbows”
Brendan: I mean actually leaving physical, duplicated copies of the book around for people. I’m referring to the natural constraints imposed by duplicating physical media.
Larry: I’m unfamiliar with Baen Books; will look through back issues. I do see that it offers a limited selection to a specific reader base–no Oprah top sellers or Harry Potters. More generally, it’s less about distrusting customers and more about preventing temptation. A system that gives customers the option of paying for your product or acquiring it for free with minimal risk is not a good system.
Tom: Now we’re talking. And it’s nice to see the cake phrase in its correct form for once.
Mark Pilgrim: A wry, gauntlet-flinging post. Hope to hear more from you on this.
— Robbie
tristero: I suspect that most truly avid readers won’t pay 400 bucks for this thing in the first place.
Ding ding ding! (And as an aside, I read Digby as well; how weird is it to see your name here?) Though my gadgetry budget is nil at the moment, I’d be far more inclined to get something like Sony’s reader, which eBay has for around half the cost of the Kindle. (I have no interest in that particular model, but it was the first thing that came to mind.)
You’d have to be insane to use proprietary ebooks, for reasons that have been thoroughly outlined above. A successful ebook reader at this point is something that can read HTML, PDF, Plucker or whatever open formats you can get your books in. Certain tech books come with PDF copies on CD along with the dead-tree version, and of course, there’s the massive collection from Project Gutenberg to boot. I don’t care if the device is free–the books-as-service model is dead on arrival.
As a commenter here said, “I think Amazon doesn’t understand that nobody wants to pay $399 for zero books, just for the chance to pay more money for ANY books”. (To be fair, that commenter’s ignoring the free books that are available, but then, so is Amazon, mostly.)
For a chuckle, you can see Aaron Pressman at BusinessWeek claiming that the Kindle is going to be the greatest thing ever because it “moves the value equation in favor of consumers”, “Bezos has an established track record as a visionary” and so on. Man, am I ever in the wrong field. I should have taken that elective in “empty platitudes”.
@ number 20
Ooh look! A corporate shill!
Just give us the straight dope next time: “Consume, Be Silent, and Die”.
— GreedHater
“The biggest threat we [authors] face isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity”.
- Margaret Atwood
Kindle:2007 :: Segway:2003
— Bill Kidder
Bill Kidder: Kindle:2007 :: Segway:2003
Now, now. They’ll be building cities designed around that thing any day.
Anyone else remember the pathetic claims that no, honest, “Ginger” was something that would really change the world? There was a faint whiff of desperation around that, I recall.
The next step is probably the scenario described in Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451″ !!
— Divya
Absolutely brilliant!
— Martin J. Steer
The thing is, iTunes proves that millions of people don’t (yet) care about DRM. I do hope there will be a backlash on this when enough non-geeks reach a point where they get a non-Apple music player, and discover they can’t use it to play the music they paid Apple for. The crux is whether a non-geek would understand that this is Apple’s fault, and not that their new player is crappy.
Likewise, for a while, people will merrily spend money on books for their Kindle. It’ll be a while before they realise they want to retain that property after their Kindle is superceded.
— John H
Tristero,
You said “As for illegal copying, since I am a consumer, that is NOT my problem. That is the publisher’s problem and I truly don’t care what they do because I have no intention of making illegal copies. What I do care about is whether I can use what I buy in any way I want.”
Of course it’s our problem, all of ours. The market for reading and music is no different than any other - producers exist because of consumers and vice-versa. We’re totally inter-dependent.
Saying “their problem isn’t my problem” makes it OK for Publishers, artists and writers to do the same - your convenience is not THEIR problem either. But once we go down that warpath, refusing to acknowledge or accept the reasonable concerns of the other side, we’ve broken the model completely. If readers and writers can’t work out their differences, each understanding the problems of the other, there will never be any compromise and the escalating war will claim a lot of collateral damage.
— Tom
It is interesting that they chose the name Kindle for their eBook reader. Book burning anyone?
— andrew
“if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement.”
Interrestng, so as long as you comply with just one term, you are safe? :-)
— Grandt
Trying to make this into an Orwellian nightmare is absurd. You were doing fine up until Act IV, but then you dove right into the empty swimming pool headfirst.
— Kesh
grendelkhan: you misunderstood me. I think there was some great content on the Palm (ereader was one of my frequent haunts).
Regarding Act V: In Soviet Russia, you don’t program gadgets, gadgets program you!
— Anders
While I’m all for free information, I’m also all for authors getting paid for their work. If the Kindle supported DRM and an open format for documents that I could easily put works I do have the right to copy, then I’d be interested.
I know it’s an unpopular view, but I just can’t convince myself that authors would be best served if their works were freely available for distribution. Compensation for their work and for future printings of their work through royalties are how writers are able to (barely) make a living. For every Stephen King, there are hundreds of authors making around $40K a year. They can only keep writing because they are receiving royalties.
I know that the ‘net and social networks are destroying the advantage of the publishing industry. I also know that given the choice to pay $5 for a book or to get a copy from a friend, it’s pretty hard to say no to the “free” copy from a friend. How do we create a system where information is free and the creator of that information, whose hard work created that information, gets compensated?
I’d hate to see a system sprout up where only the largest and most established authors can continue to get paid for their work while everyone else has to become a hobbyist because they need another job to support themselves and their families.
— Matthew Dyer
Since pingbacks from blogger don’t seem to work, I’m posting a direct link to my comments
— Spencer
of course George Orwell described a realativly benign society compaired to the one we seem to be moving toward, where GENES will become monitored by the law, where implants will monitore your every THOUGHT and EMOTION from BEFORE birth, where drugs will be mandated by law. Nessesities such as the right to tranportation, employment, and medical care will be forfiet for those who refuse to compliy. No onw will be allowed to be disconected, we will wear a data hub or remain unemployable. The only thing that can forstal this fate is the individual integrety of powerfull people. It dosen’t look good.
— bill wesley
Does no one else find ‘trackbacks’ extremely obnoxious? I don’t want to read “[...] Mark Pilgrim talks about Kindler [...]” for more than half of the comments. I don’t want to go to your blog to read your comments. Write them out here or don’t pollute the thread.
— Brad
[...] Brad complains about the obnoxious number of trackbacks in Mark Pilgrim’s recent post [...]
Just kidding, Brad. Yes, it’s very annoying. Thanks for being the first to say something about it.
— Trackback
Note the price of the Kindle is about the same as the OLPC give-one-get-one.
See http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/214 for details.
A book remains one book (and eventually fall apart).
A digital file replicates. The number of copies in circulation can quickly exceed the largest-ever print run.
Royalties? Perhaps the notion of “author”, as a way of earning a living, has had its day. It was never very lucrative for the majority anyway.
— Bruce Fossicker
You don’t get it Mark. Orwell described a world where people were afraid of being controlled by external powers. Nowadays, people long for that control.
— Whatever
You don’t get it Mark. Orwell described a world where people were afraid of being controlled by external powers. Nowadays, people long for that control.
What ‘1984′ did you read? The citizens embraced Big Brother and authoritarianism to keep them ’safe’ for Eurasia and Oceania.
— rob
You don’t get it either Rob. I’m talking about public sensibilities, not the characters themselves.
— Whatever
Dear Amazon/Sony/Apple/Any other large consumer electronics or computer equipment manufacturer,
Fuck your terms and conditions, I’ll use it how I like.
Regards,
Alastair Moore
View the free library here and think why somebody can think openly but others are closed in there own borders. For the worst the people with closed minds are usually presidents.
— knight
Matthew (Comment 142): That was how it worked before before the Internet was even invented, and it’s probably going to stay that way. And I doubt most ‘hobbyist’ writers really mind that much, because strange as it seems in the world in which we live today, our primary motivation is NOT the money. Mine is creating something for the enjoyment of others, in which I am far from alone, and any financial gain will merely be a bonus.
The only big-name writer I can think of who might disagree is L. Ron Hubbard, the man who compared writing to prostitution. Unfortunately, I get the feeling that far too many publishers think in much the same way, which would certainly explain Dan Brown…
*sigh* Why do I get the feeling that literature is going to go the same way as software seems to be, in that the only people with any concern for craftsmanship or pride in their work are the ones who do it as a leisure pursuit rather than a living?
— Jake
Tom,
“Saying “their problem isn’t my problem” makes it OK for Publishers, artists and writers to do the same - your convenience is not THEIR problem either. But once we go down that warpath, refusing to acknowledge or accept the reasonable concerns of the other side, we’ve broken the model completely. If readers and writers can’t work out their differences, each understanding the problems of the other, there will never be any compromise and the escalating war will claim a lot of collateral damage.”
You are right. My convenience is not their problem. And they have made that abundantly obvious by making technology like Divx and Kindle. I fail to see why my responding in kind escalates a situation like this. It simply makes it clear that I see no reason to participate in the restraint of my legal rights. From a position of strength we can negotiate a workable solution. But unilaterally capitulating to the denial of my rights? No. Let me put it another way:
I do have the right (and can acquire the technology if I don’t have it) to make copies for personal use of a book that I own. Why on earth would I give that up? So I can carry around several hundred books I don’t own? I’ll gladly concede that that amount of portability is, to me, an incentive. But it’s not enough of an incentive. Electronic books need to significantly add value. Portability of mass quantities of books isn’t enough value added to offset what I have to give up.
Can you scan the screen of the Kindle and OCR it? Even if yes, why should I have to go to the trouble? Consider this. I can scan a book, ocr it, and save the text on my computer. On the Kindle, at the very least, I should be able to highlight, copy, save, and alter any passage I like. Not so that I can sell it, or even give it away, but because it is my right to do that with any book I own, for whatever reasons I want.
That’s what Kindle prevents and I don’t think the convenience offsets the loss. Again, the point of an ebook is to add value. It certainly does add lots of value from the publisher’s standpoint by locking up content and making production of books much cheaper. It adds very little value for the consumer and takes away a lot.
— tristero
Tristero:
I’m having trouble following. You say that your convenience is not “their” problem, but then you admit that while Kindle does create convenience, it’s not your kind of convenience. Fair enough, but that’s a superficial discussion. For some, the ability to carry massive amounts of text–that you “don’t own”–in one device adds tremendous value. First-week sales will tell you that much.
The question of legal rights, though, is a better one. Can we sue Amazon for restricting us from writing on the e-book? I don’t think so. The ability to do something is different from the right to do something. Devices and formats may extend and restrict my ability to interact with media, but do they actually dabble with rights? Is it actually my right to re-sell books, or is it simply something we do because the real world does not offer publishers the same control as an e-book?
I hope the next discussion on this topic focuses on the nature of rights vs. abilities in consuming digital media. The comments above are derivative of each author’s implicit views on this, but rarely is it stated explicitly.
— Robbie
As (mostly) always Mark, great post and thank you for the creative commentary.
— Sam Jones
Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Amazon and the book industry are just proving that they are no smarter than the music or movie industries.
— Michael
I have published a book (on Axiom, a computer algebra system). The source code for the book is distributed with Axiom (latex sources). The book is also available from lulu.com. I priced the book at $3 over minimum cost. Curiously I get a royalty check from Lulu every so often. People actually buy paper copies. So I can prove that even in a limited audience with free books, people will still pay money for paper.
I also bought the Sony Reader. I love it. I have about 200 books on it at the moment. All of the books are free books. Why? Not because of costs as I must be one of Amazon’s top 10 customers. I get a new hardcover in the mail every few days. But I won’t buy any books for the Sony Reader. I read their “terms and conditions”. They want to be able to MODIFY the device remotely. And they want to sell me books with DRM. Its’ MY reader and MY books. Sony completely missed that point. Amazon did too.
The worry that I’ll share a book is nonsense at best. I have very eclectic tastes in books (Lisp in Small Pieces anyone?). If I did share a book, even by uploading it, there would still be people who buy the hardcover version. I can prove that from my own example above.
The only features missing from the Sony Reader are an 8×11 inch screen and a larger supply of books.
If the kindle and the reader were both for sale at the same time and the same price I’d go with the Sony reader. Why? Because the kindle is way too “invasive”. I don’t want a relationship, I want a book.
Feed me a large number of DRM free, universal format (ascii) books at $2/book and I’ll make you a rich man.
— Tim Daly
This blog post speaks the truth! I just published a bad review on the Kindle on a wiki where I am an administrator.
-Timothy
— Timothy J. Crowell
Waiting for a device with a similar display and interface but with user control and PDF/JPG capabilities.
— Gored Korea
I don’t think that the Kindle’s going to really catch on for a number of reasons: as I recall, it doesn’t display PDF’s, right?
I mean, one thing I’d totally use it for is keeping a ready-reference of my computer & telecom manuals for work: stuff that I don’t read for fun, but need to reference periodically. Most of those are in PDF format, and a lot of the telecom stuff is internal corporate documents that nobody’s ever going to reprocess into Amazon’s format.
I’ve also been thinking of buying a tablet PC for a while to read in bed: call it a hobby, but I think web-surfing is more relaxing lying down than sitting for hours in a chair (especially after doing that all day at work). The Kindle might come close to that, but it’s thick, bulky, and has a lot of buttons & garbage that you don’t need - a touchscreen would serve all that more effectively.
This thing uses e-ink, right? God, those guys have taken a long time to get to market. The whole premise, also, was that it would be dirt-cheap to produce, so you could make a 50-inch screen (or even wallpaper your house) out of the stuff. What’s the point of using e-ink on paper behind a plastic laminate, then? How is that different than an LCD screen in the first place? E-ink has been in development since at least 1999….and it worked back then. Wondering why it’s taken so long for them to finally start selling a product with it.
I interviewed at Amazon a while back - the corporate lobby was tiled with giant blowups of Time & Newsweek covers promoting Bezos as a (genius, visionary, - insert compliment here). A bit arrogant, I’d say - his dot-com took longer than nearly any other to actually become profitable. Remember back in ‘02, when people were still reminding each other “yeah, Amazon’s big, but they’re still not in the black”. So what exactly was his vision?
That being said, Amazon is one of the FEW places online that I shop, so maybe the guy did have a vision - but I buy real books, not PDF downloads. There’s just a feel to turning the pages by hand that you can’t simulate on a screen.
If I was Amazon, I’d hit the technical manual market first. I’m used to reading certification training documents & code-samples online, and when I read those I’m looking less for a “user experience” and more for something that quickly tells me the information I need to accomplish a task.
In terms of DRM, the more accessible material is, the higher your readership - free * open-source is best for emerging efforts trying to build awareness (like Linux). Unfortunately, for the big established companies, I don’t really know if there is a business model that can compensate the artists & pay the corporate bills while still giving the users freedom of ownership.
But in any case, the best stuff is free already: I love surfing Wikipedia, and the new & emerging music & literature is usually all free because it’s from indy-genres trying to build an audience. When you talk about spending money & DRM schemes, you’re talking about big-media products…and I think that most of the people who are really worried about DRM aren’t giant consumers of big media’s stuff anyways.
Hey –
One quick additional note about “vision”: most of these dot-com millionaire types (the Bezos’ of the world) are actually more dangerous than they are profound, but not realizing the profound truth that the dot-com winners made it mostly through timing and luck.
I was in IT & E-Commerce back in the 90’s, and at the time it was literally a gold-rush to see who could get the funding & launch the enterprise the fastest to capture the emerging market. For every Bezos out there who started in 1996, there were 5 or 6 more like him who were a bit too late or a bit too poor to really compete…..for a while there, everybody was convinced that Barnes & Noble’s foray into e-commerce was going to sink what little momentum Amazon had managed to build.
First: I’m not “pro-Kindle” and am not really interested in arguing about the machine. It’s far from perfect, and I understand the complaint that a book bought for the Kindle won’t work on any other system. That’s a valid complaint. Files should be transferable.
What I don’t understand are the people who bitch about not being able to make copies and/or to redistribute those copies. That’s not legal with traditional books, either (or music, or film, etc.). Nor should it be.
We need to find a better solution than the ones that exist, that seems to be clear. But the conversation so far is too muddied for my taste.
One comment says: “Its’ [sic] MY reader and MY books.” But that’s not completely true: it’s your copy of a book, the purchase of which involves a number of rights and restrictions to which you agree when you purchase it.
Some people seem to believe that everything should just be free, and it sounds Romantic on the surface: the collective wisdom of the past and present, freely distributed for everyone’s benefit. But these people seem to have no understanding of reality and their arguments are childish. We can argue about fair price, certainly (and should). But free?
Labor without profit is volunteer work. If I’m going to spend time doing task X, I have to have enough compensation for that task to meet my needs … otherwise, I need to spend time hunting and gathering instead of doing task X. Basic division of labor stuff here.
The people who produce a book (author, editor, publicists, designers, binders, programmers, etc.) deserve compensation for their labor. To demand that someone give away the fruit of their labor without compensation is slavery. To take someone else’s work from them and give it to another without compensation is theft. Is this so hard to understand?
Again, we can argue about what percentage of the profit should go to whom, but we have to take “freely distributed” off the table if by that we mean the decision to “freely distribute” rests in the hands of anyone other than the author.
I see too much blurring in the conversations surrounding DRM between the use of a file and the reproduction of a file, to say nothing of the blurring between who “owns” what.
Many people seem to imply that consumers “own” the text. This is not true. Consumers buy the right to own a copy of the text, nothing more. The author and/or publisher own the rights to the text, no one else. You aren’t buying those rights when you buy a book, you’re buying the right to own a copy of the book.
“Ideas should belong to no one and to everyone” is, again, very Romantic. However, the particular presentation of an idea (i.e., a book, an article, whatever) most certainly belongs to someone: namely, the creator of that presentation. Must all creators be forced into indentured service? The publishing industry is close enough to that already!
The original owner of a text is the author, and she can give away those rights if she chooses, or sell some or all of them to others (i.e., publishers). But that’s the author’s choice to make, not the consumer’s to demand.
And authors (journalists, musicians, filmmakers, etc.) need to be adequately compensated for their work if they’re going to continue producing quality work. If we believe products of the mind–be they creative or informational–are worthwhile, then we should believe they are worth being monetarily compensated. The distinction between amateur and professional is a valid and valuable distinction. So, if we want quality work, we must be willing to pay for it.
Is the muddy water only in my mind, or do we need to clean up the current of the DRM conversation?
> Labor without profit is volunteer work.
Boy are you new here.
— Mark
> Boy are you new here.
Is that a welcome? Help me out …
I’m old.
I have book cases.
The books on those cases,
have given me knowledge and wisdom,
now they give me aesthetic pleasure.
— Jim Deming
We are at the center of a perfect storm:
1) Bits have to be free.
2) Artists, authors, programmers and musicians have to be able to earn a living.
3) Advertising debases everything it touches and is a gross waste of resources.
If we can resolve all three of those three things our civilisation will take an almighty leap into the future.
Consider: Linux, Project Gutenberg and Wikipedia solve (1) and (3) but not (2). iTunes and mainstream media solve (2) and sometimes (3) but not (1). Web sites that offer great content - but are paid for by advertising solve (1) and (2) - but fail on (3).
In the distant past, artists, writers and musicians had sponsors - the rich and royalty who managed to resolve all three (Although arguably, they were advertising themselves. The works that resulted, although wonderful, were not for everyone because the tastes of the rich and the royal prevented ‘layman’ art from being produced).
National Public Radio (in the USA) almost manages to solve this using a voluntary subscription model - but like the members of the nobility from the past, the result is somewhat elitist - and it’s gradually slipping into an advertising-based system. It’s a start though.
I’ve been reading books on a PDA for 10 years and the experience is wonderful. Being able to carry dozens of books in my pocket along with the entire Websters Collegate Dictionary is just awesome. I wish I had been able to get all my textbooks that way 30 years ago when I was in college.
Doom and gloom speak doesn’t remove the appeal of instantly available information. 1984 was a great book for its time but reality is far more complex than the vision.
— Marc
Eric does have a point, actually; the more money I can make as a writer, the less time I’ll need to spend doing a ‘real’ job, though I doubt I could turn writing into a full-time career without it ceasing to be as much fun. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell the publishers have a choice between losing a certain amount of revenue through the means discussed in some detail above or inconveniencing their customers to the point where they lose a hell of a lot more.
Besides, a website full of downloadable .zip files has to be a hell of a lot cheaper to run than a printing press, so they’re not going to go out of business unless someone posts his entire eBook library on the web and tells people to help themselves. Is anyone seriously proposing to do THAT?
Disclaimer: The private individual who has the contents of those Baen Books CDs available for download as .zip files doesn’t count as Baen were giving them away anyway.
— Jake
I’m surprised that you didn’t reference Snow Crash, where the bad-guy wants to control the data inside his employees’ heads.
— D
One word: segway
— DRH
I just pulled down from my shelf my copy of the manual for Turbo Pascal for the Mac (c) 1986. Borland’s “No-Nonsense License Statement!” starts as follows…
This software is protected by both United States copyright law and international treaty provisions. Therefore, you must treat this software just like a book, with the following single exception. Borland International authorizes you to make archival copies…
By saying “just like a book” Borland means, for example, that this software may be used by any number of people and may freely be moved from one computer location to another, so long as there is NO POSSIBILITY of it being used at one location while its being used at another…
Not bad for proprietary software. I assume this is pre-GPL
— Dick G
How many ways do I hate comments like “1984 wasn’t like 1984, man” by folks who believe themselves to be realistic and intellectual, but in reality ceased to improve their reading comprehension in elementary school?
1984 wasn’t about 1984 - 1984 is a literary work describing Orwell’s contemporary Britain. It wasn’t about some future totalitarian one party system, but about the system of language and thought Orwell saw in effect in the west in the 1940’s and in their colonies. Those tools that conscript the mind in its own repression exists in all political systems - a future totalitarian state is just a plot device to accentuate the substance of the novel.
If you think that Animal Farm was an exposition on agricultural practices, you are illiterate. In the same manner, if you think that 1984 was about a narrow political system, you may as well burn your books right now, because they are doing you no good.
So, yes, 1984 is perfectly relevant to any discussion on the ownership of ideas, on their control, propagation, representation and destruction, whether the context is 1850’s Germany, 1930’s Soviet Union or the US in 2010. As long as we are reading and writing, as long as the dissemination of ideas and words have political power, as long as humans vie for control of the minds of other humans, 1984 is relevant.
If you don’t get that, please limit yourself to solely utilitarian reading. Just stop pretending that you can understand anything more sophisticated than a recipe.
— Orwell's Angry Cousin
Because of the suffocating DRM (not in spite of it), this device will be successful. Any doubters need only to look at the rabid misguided fanboism (and sales!) that the iPod and Apple enjoy.
It doesn’t matter if there are higher quality choices (or in the case if iTunes, better sounding), if this is the new literary bling of choice, it will win.
All they need to do is make it easy to use, pretty, get the support of the major publishers (get the big names) and people will buy it because it’s the only legal alternative to pirating books, or worse, carrying them around. People will fall all over themselves to buy it because most people inherently want to do the right thing and nobody likes carrying books around.
Nobody will use or even want an alternative DRM free system that does not have the backing of the major publishers.
-disgusted
— disgusted
I fail to see how citing literary sources alongside pretty standard contract language is supposed to argue anything. I think if you looked at every T.O.S. you’ve ever agreed to without reading, you’d be surprised as to how much “control” you had just signed away. The language is there to protect the company, not to harm the customers.
Should the Kindle be DRM free? Probably, but then no one will get paid for all of the R&D and risk-taking they are now making. I think the high price of ebooks and DRM are here for the early adoption phase. Both will fade with time, a la Itunes.
Should Amazon collect general usage information like every tech company (including Apple, Microsoft, you cell phone, your tivo)? Yes. Of course they should. No amount of doomsaying and conspiracy theorizing will make this research turn our society into Orwell’s 1984. How can so many intellectuals be afraid of market research? Are surveys on the streets of NY an invasion of privacy? Yes. Does that mean every member of Greenpeace is actually a fascist? Yes, but not because they are gathering information.
I don’t think the Kindle will replace books, nor is that its purpose. I think Amazon is working towards a viable alternative to lugging that backbreaking Complete Works of Shakespeare your grandmother bought you and you’ve never been able to get around to reading around on a crowded mass transit system. And that’s something even crotchety old anti-progress pseudo-intellectual bloggers can get behind.
— Jinglehopper
Because of the suffocating DRM (not in spite of it), this device will be successful. Any doubters need only to look at the rabid misguided fanboism (and sales!) that the iPod and Apple enjoy.
What are you talking about?
The iPod supports DRM-less MP3s, and most music on iPods is in MP3 format, ripped from legally owned CDs – not bought from iTMS. That’s fine by Apple; the iTMS is profitable, but merely a drop in the bucket compared to the cash that the iPod itself rakes in.
The Kindle equivalent would be support for PDFs; no such support exists. Amazon wants to charge even for RSS content.
As for the DRM, Apple’s is hardly suffocating; by DRM standards it’s pretty mild. It even gives you a way out via burn-and-rip. Not that this would convince me to accept their yoke – but they do give their users some sort of an out, unlike most DRM systems.
If you want to make an analogy for the Kindle in the digital music market, you would have to compare it to the Windows Media-based players that were around before the iPod.
(As for my own personal opinion, I am kind of amazed that Amazon managed to get it so right with the MP3 store and then to turn around and get it so gobsmackingly wrong with the Kindle. Either individual units within Amazon can get very isolated or the cognitive dissonance in that company is extremely high right around now.)
Re: Craig Maloney’s comment: “Trust me, if there was compelling content on a 160×160 Palm screen, you’d read it.”
I found compelling enough content on my 160×160 Visor, 320×240 Jornada, and now 320×320 Clie. You don’t need a hardcover-sized device to read a book, you just need an application that makes it easy enough to read, annotate, and save back your DRM-free content.
Re: Disgusted’s comment:
I’ve had an iPod and I use iTunes, and I have no content that uses “suffocating DRM” in either. The success of the iPod is that it doesn’t require DRM, it plays MP3 and MP4 (AAC) audio, and the DRM in the iTunes store is barely “honor system”. Apple even ran an ad campaign a few years back that told you how to bypass it. :)
My eBook reader is a general purpose handheld computer, and I buy my DRM-free books from Fictionwise and Baen Books… as well as convert random plaintext and HTML online documents for reading on the go. I’ve already got a “legal alternative to pirating books” and I’d never buy the Kindle, even if it was 100% DRM-free: it’s half a dozen times the size of my Clie and harder to carry around than a paperback.
— Peter da Silva
Mickey Mouse Copyright, privacy infringement and DRM… It’s hard not to feel like you’re caught in a web. Imagine if you were smart enough to come up with a scheme like that? Genius.
— Vince
As mentioned in one of our ‘rah rah’ amazon.com company meetings in 1997, when asked about e-books, Jeff bezos brushed it aside saying that nobody was interested in electronic books because ‘people like the feel of a dead tree in their hands’ . Quote unquote. That stuck with me forever.
— Xeno
Here is a thought about DRM that just occurred to me. I doubt it is original, but I want to put it up for discussion anyways:
In the discussion about DRM for music, books, or films, both sides seem to agree that now that it is technically feasible to distribute content at virtually no cost, the respective industries, and the individual artists and authors depending on them for a living, are at a crossroad, and there is absolutely no precedence guiding them which direction to take.
But there is precedent: Online publishing of Newspapers, Magazines, etc.
To my knowledge, the only major holdout to paid subscriptions of online content seems to be the WSJ.
Everything else has basically caved in and made its content available for free, some long ago, some, as the NYT, have only r