An Acerbic Look At the Future of Reading

theodp writes "Using Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' own words against him, Mark Pilgrim offers his chilling take on The Future of Reading with a mash-up of Bezos' Open Letter to the Authors Guild, the Amazon Kindle Terms of Service, Steven Levy's Newsweek article on the Kindle, 1984, and Richard Stallman's 'The Right to Read.'"

Comments

Support CC authors and related publishers.

[palegray.net]

Support authors who publish their content using Creative Commons style licenses. What little writing I do is published using CC licenses, Wikipedia is moving to CC, and I never would have even heard of Cory Doctorow years ago (still one of my favorites) if not for CC.

I'm considering licensing the majority of the content on my educational resources site under a CC license. Seriously, support these kinds of effort at (1) making high-quality published works accessible to a broader audience, and (2) supporting authors who are willing to try new business models to earn a living.

Re:What the constitution actually says

[fyngyrz]

There's no irony in it at all. You see that "limited time" clause? That's what is changing to the public's detriment. I would know - I own a literary agency.

What I said was "emphasis on copyright benefiting the business interests any any expense to the citizen's interests is the exact same change in emphasis" which is not the same thing as blaming copyright for problems. I don't think copyright, per se, is a bad thing at all. What I think is specifically a bad thing are the changes in copyright law that provide rights far beyond the period where most material will be germane to the culture that has evolved since the material was produced. If the material is no longer germane, it is, by definition, no longer promoting the "useful arts."

Re:Reading free books on these things?

[automag]

Not true. You can load as much content as you want onto the Kindle for free via a USB cable. The only time you pay to get your own content on your Kindle is if you have Amazon download it to your Kindle wirelessly. For that, they charge 10 cents per download. Currently .pdf support is a bit sketchy (it doesn't format complicated .pdf files especially well), but the folks at Amazon are working on changing that. It does support .doc, .txt files, or whatever... Which look just fine on mine when I load them.