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Actually, I'm writing stories about it.

The problem as I see it is two-fold: first, the sudden presence of about a zillion just-as-good-as-the-original digital media files up for resale would collapse the market and put publishers out of business.

Second, and more importantly, there's no way to prevent people from cracking the DRM on their e-books and backing them up before selling the DRM-locked original. You can crack the DRM on library books now just as easily as you can the ones you buy from Amazon. I don't see that changing.

I said much the same thing on TeleRead. There are many, many devices and things that haven't "advanced" in decades but are a such a quiet everyday part of our lives that we couldn't imagine doing without them. Smartphones (and their close relations tablets and e-readers) are becoming just like that. Not everything in our lives has to be replaced by something shiny and new every couple of years.

Now let's be fair. Amazon earned its monopoly (or near-monopoly) legitimately. They didn't muscle anyone else out of the market; they built an amazing product—the proverbial "better mousetrap." No one before or since has managed to make buying and downloading e-books as pushbutton-simple as the Kindle. You push a button, you get an e-book on your device—no fiddling around with sideloading or copying files necessary. That moved e-books from being a super-geek early adopter's toy into something Grandma and Grandpa could enjoy.

The late Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the decision in a landmark antitrust case that explains that companies may legally have monopolies if they earned them fair and square, through their own products or infrastructure—and they can't be compelled to share the fruits of their labor with anyone else.

But even then, I didn't buy from Amazon myself. As one of those super-geek early adopters, I was a member of Fictionwise's Buywise discount club that let me get some great deals on books. But agency pricing effectively killed that club dead, and then killed Fictionwise itself dead, and Barnes & Noble was nice enough to let me copy most, not all, of the e-books I'd bought and paid for over to its servers. (Thank goodness for Apprentice Alf!) And they weren't the only smaller competitors to get knocked out of the market, either.

All because Apple wanted to sell e-books for its iPad, but didn't want to have to wrestle in the low-margin dirt with Amazon. I only wish they'd had to suffer a harsher penalty for it in the end.

It's actually very simple to get Google Services, including the Play Store, on the Fire. You don't even have to root it—just enable developer mode, activate USB debugging, install some drivers on your PC, and sideload a software package. Then, boom: you've got the Play Store and nearly every app I've tried works just fine. (Oddly enough, Google Inbox is one that doesn't.) As a side effect, it also disables Special Offers for free.

I gather you can go further with further hacking, outright replacing Fire OS with CyanogenMod or whatever, but I've never felt the need to. I have other pure Android devices, and this Fire the way it is is good enough.

That's because it's really not necessarily the quality but the NUMBER of reviews that are important at Amazon. The more reviews something gets, positive OR negative, the more it tends to get featured near the top of its category. So by giving something a one-star review, you do it nearly as much good as by giving it five.

So says Chuck Wendig, noting that all the one-star protest reviews of his new Star Wars book helped it become a bestseller.

I think Paul's idea is that this tablet also lets you read books, and it lets you read them even cheaper than an e-ink reader. So if you're on a tight budget, what are you going to do: pay more for something that can only read books, or pay less for something that can read books and do other tablet things, too?

Interestingly enough. Amazon doesn't really have the tablet locked down. It's actually fairly simple to add Google's app store to it, too, which gives you a $50 nearly-vanilla Android tablet.

So far, the previous Fires haven't been too easily rootable, or so I understand.

Note that if you want a $50 plain-vanilla Android tablet, there are plenty of choices in that price range on Amazon.The Fire's going to have better specs, but it's going to be locked to Amazon's ecosystem. You have to be aware of that going in.

It's not as if this idea is exactly unknown, though the outfit I know of (and subscribe to) that's doing it right, Karma, now only gives 100 megabytes for free, then you have to pay for more. (Though if you use your personal referral code, anyone who buys a hotspot saves with it $10, and you get $10, too. Thanks to a couple of blog posts, I've earned nearly $400 worth of free WiFi so far.)

That being said, 100 megabytes is more than enough for someone to hook up for long enough to check his email, do a little social networking, and so on. And they give it to you at the full 4G LTE super-speed. not some super-throttled you-really-should-pay-us-if-you-want-it-faster scheme.

The one problem with the scheme is that the public nature of it means you don't get the benefit of password encryption on your WiFi. But VPNs are pretty cheap these days.

This whole movement came out of the same place as GamerGate. A reactionary minority group, upset that their media fandom was getting too diverse, tried to spark a backlash. It didn't work for GamerGate, and it didn't work for the Puppies either.

The fans rejected the Puppies' attempt to stuff the ballot with their own (largely subpar) works, and now the Puppies are claiming victory with a refrain that sounds an awful lot like "Those grapes were probably sour anyway."

Setting aside Apple for the moment, there's nothing "theoretical" about Amazon engaging in actions of this sort. They've been doing it as long as Apple has, at least.

Using most favored nation clauses and the agency model, which is exactly what got Apple in trouble: http://www.selfpublishingrevie...
Leveraging their near-monopsony to try and gouge the publishers: http://www.teleread.com/ebooks...
Making hard-to-implement immediate demands when the publishers pushed back: http://www.thepassivevoice.com...
Delisting multiple publishers during re-negotiations: http://time.com/110412/amazon-...
Jacking shipping times from a few days to 3-5 weeks: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
The author's guild is outright accusing Amazon of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/...

Spend 30 seconds Googling around. You'll be shocked at what all Amazon has already done when it comes to this industry, and it's only been getting worse in recent years. It's like looking inside the door at a sausage factory: you'd have wished you never looked.

No and no.

How to you get to the conclusion that slashdot hates copyright?

A lot of people here own copyrights (registered or not) and would appreciate some protection. Very few people have said "screw it, download everything".

GPL is advertised as fighting copyright with copyright, and it would be unimportant without copyright. But without copyright, all you have is public domain and trade secrets. There is no requirement to release code changes unless you personally contract with everyone who wants to download your code. Hosting a tarball with a license and expecting people to follow the license does not exist, because there is no basis of enforcement. A license with a public domain download is not enforceable.

I believe the maximum copyright should be no more than 28 years, and several people have come up with 14 as the optimal length. Copyright is only evil because 1) it is excessively long, effectively infinite 2) enforcement such as DRM abridges fair use, especially if the DRM has not been broken when something that uses it is in the public domain.

Copyright is to be respected, at least for a little while.

http://www.teleread.com/copy-right/dumb-by-the-numbers-optimal-copyright-term-of-14-years-time-to-kill-all-the-economists/

Reminds me of a plot point from The Stainless Steel Rat for President ; one of the characters has the hobby of collecting universities - it's noted that the expensive part is travelling to other worlds, because the university itself costs a pittance and fits into a small data storage device.

With the speed in which ebooks are taking off, it's perfect. To quote Rage Against The Machine, "They don't gotta burn the books, they just remove'em!"

Small as far as market share goes. iTunes, as of Dec 2010, had 66% of the total digital music market share. Amazon has 13%. If Amazon wants to cut into Apple's digital music sales they have to do something drastic. Source: http://www.bgr.com/2010/12/17/itunes-now-holds-66-of-digital-music-market/ Kindle is something like 75-80% of the market share. Amazon OWNS that market. It's their's and they have no reason to rock the boat. Even the iPad and iBooks isn't enough to scare them into taking action yet. http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/amazon-has-76-of-e-book-market-survey-reports/ It's frustrating to watch Amazon push hard against the RIAA, and blindly accept anything the book industry shoves at them.

I've got to apologize, but I believe that is a lie that /. let slip because they are anti - Amazon (note the lack of integrity with which they check out Amazon related submissions).

Some people have claimed that Amazon deleted items from Kindles re: the incest items they stopped hosting in their store.

But sorry, as per the complaints regarding it that hit the Kindle forums - this stuff was deleted from the store and archives, not from kindle devices themselves.

http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/amazon-removes-incest-related-erotica-titles-from-store-kindle-archive/ /. subcribers are unfortunately too often tolerant for the crap agenda that they are pushing here. There is some good information, but it sure requires a crap load of salt rather than just a grain of it.

When E-books cost MORE than some hardcovers of course they don't sell. Put them back under $9.99 and I'll stop torrenting and begin purchasing again! The publishers are trying to use E-Books to support their print overhead - and have said as much. MacMillan and others are thieves so far as I'm concerned. As soon as they began setting prices vs Amazon the cost of E-books went through the roof. that they try to make them sound like a bargain because they cost less than LIST hardcover even though they cannot be traded, shared, or sold is a sad sham. some authors are starting to go it on their own and skip the publishers altogether - I wish some of the authors *I* like would do that. You know it's sad when a published author makes MORE money going through Amazon direct and selling for a pittance than they do going through a publisher!

Some reading:

http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/
http://hauntedcomputer.blogspot.com/
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/01/amazon-macmillan-an-outsiders.html
http://www.teleread.com/drm/macmillan-ceo-tells-his-side-of-amazon-spat/
http://blog.macmillanspeaks.com/ Make sure to read ALL of the entries in this one - there are some truly stunning doozies! I wonder what planet this moron comes from?

check out www.teleread.com for another electronic library idea... they want to make commercial works available for free by running a library system that pays authors for use of their books based on popularity