Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
You know, I see this sentiment on Slashdot quite a bit. Apparently a lot of people around here think the printed word is archaic and is in the middle of being phased out as obsolete.
I can assure you, that books in their physical, paper form are nowhere near being obsolete, outmoded, or about to be left to fall by the side. This isn't about abandoning an old file format of a word processor. To many people the actual physical book is still the preferred method of reading. Hell, send me a long enough document, and I'll print the damned thing and keep it on my desk.
I buy a tremendous amount of books, I don't want an electronic reader of any form, and I'm fairly sure that a larger proportion of the populace does their reading against the old-school dead-tree formats than any form of electronic format.
While your assertion that "electronic reading materials and electronic readers are beginning to be more popular", might be somewhat true, they're only more popular than they used to be. They're simply not more popular than paper.
I would say that people who argue that paper books will go away in the short term have their heads so far up the ass of technology as to not really have a clear view of the world any more. I would say it would be years, if not decades, before we actually see electronic formats really supplant paper. And, you can have my physical books when I'm dead and gone -- I don't personally foresee giving them up any time soon. Books have a warmth and tactile feedback that a cold, digital screen will never offer to me.
There will be people who want electronic books, and they're welcome to them. But, I and countless others want real actual honest to goodness books. Don't look to see them fall by the wayside for a long time.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
1st Objection - How does an author get started? Who is going to pay a penny for an unknown author to write something?
1st Answer - New authors just have to suck it up, the way the majority already do today and give away some of their work in order to develop a reputation.
2nd Objection - How is an author going to make a bazillion gazillion dollars if their book is super-duper popular? The price is fixed before release, what if they under-price it?
2nd Answer - If the book is super-duper popular, by definition that means there will be lots and lots of people who liked it enough to pony up for the NEXT book. So the author can increase their asking price for their next work based on the popularity of their previous work.
3rd Objection - How can millions of people all pay a dollar each to an author's escrow account?
3rd Answer - They can't, at least not without a lot of overhead. Today. But that's just a business opportunity waiting for the right person to come along and start the next paypal.
4th Objection - What if nobody is willing to pay the author's asking price?
4th Answer - That's business. Either lower the price, or cancel the offer. At least this way very little time and money gets spent on creating a product that no one wants to buy. It ain't a perfect system but at least the feedback comes from the actual consumers rather than some intermediate businessman whose only purpose is to sell eyeballs for advertising dollars.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
When you buy a book or, say, a video game, 90% of what you pay is the license.
That is *not* what you buy.
You purchase a copy. That copy is yours. You don't "use up" a license. You use a copy.
The whole idea of copyright is simple: allow the creator of a work to provide limited licenses on *copying.* The only rights the author has is the right to control copying of the creation. That's why it's called a "copy right."
This whole idea of licensing copyrighted works is from the software industry. It involves the *license* to create copies of the work. Of course, in most cases, the work is useless without copying onto a hard drive, so it kinda makes sense, in a strange way.
However, when you purchase a book, you are not making a copy. You are purchasing a copy, and that copy belongs to *you*. You may sell it, lend it, and even copy small sections for purposes of academia or research or review (SEE fair use). You can do anything you want, as long as you don't make a copy, because only the author has the right to authorize ("license") copies.
Please resist the urge to voluntarily give up your rights. Don't let them convince you that sharing is bad. It isn't. That book is yours. That console game is yours. You can sell them, lend them, or do anything else you can do with a physical object. Those are your *rights.*
At least, those are your rights in the United States, and in many other nations. Check with your local government to be sure.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Never attribute to wit that which can be adequately described by typo.
One sad element is that the technician class, of which almost everyone here at Slashdot is a member, has a tendency to the mistaken belief that they will be a part of the plutocracy, just because they can work on the plumbing of the information network that increasingly belongs to the real plutocrats. In reality, they are no better off than the car valet, who believes himself the equal of the jet setter, simply because he is allowed to drive the luxury car from the garage to the curb. The ugly secret is that their salaries, even $100k/yr, in support of their $150k per year lifestyles, is locking them further and further into digital serfdom.
How often I see these newly minted Web 2.0 masters, with their adjustable rate jumbo loans and 42" HDTVs and >$25k in credit card debt, who are convinced they are in charge of their lives and that they are somehow superior to the working-class when in fact the only thing that separates them from the young women sewing shoes in a Vietnamese factory is their enormous debt and high-calorie diets.
I think before the end of the next decade, long before the US sees its first black president, we will come to realize that we have more in common with the illegal-alien day laborers and the North African immigrants who are rioting in France than we do with the Mitt Romneys and George Bushes of the world.
Having become familiar with the plight of the upper-middle or middle-class American who has the ill fortune and bad manners to become sick and require health care and be unable to work, (a story eloquently, and only a tiny bit hyperbolically, told in Michael Moore's "Sicko"), and the middle-aged, advanced degree worker who found himself on the butt-end of the sick joke known as "outsourcing", or the two-income/two kids young professionals who have found that losing one's job to corporate "consolidation" doesn't come with one of those solid-golden parachute exit package, the last decade has served to radicalize me. I no longer see being an enthusiastic consumer as being the same as a loyal citizen, nor do I believe that "what's good for GM (or Microsoft, or AT&T, or Citicorp, or Haliburton) is good for America". I have peeked behind the curtain to find that the free-market orthodoxy that whispers in our ear that 9-figure "performance bonuses" and exploration subsidies to oil companies who have just enjoyed record profits, and a 13000 Dow, and "globalization" will all somehow "trickle down" to the rest of us, and the working-class families who will lose their homes to foreclosure while Countryside gets a nice fat bailout is all part of how a healthy economy works, is really little more than a dodge by those teflon "leaders" who seem to get rich no matter how their corporations perform or how badly the economy tanks.
It's all degenerating quickly. And like battered wives, we continue to pretend that another election is going to "turn things around", and we believe the politicians and their enabling media that it's somehow going to be different this time around. That's why I'm using the little bit of breathing room that my decades of hard work and frugal living have gotten me to do everything I can to subvert the meat-grinder of our corporate magesterium.
You are welcome on my lawn.