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Book Publishers Making the Same Mistakes as Record Labels?
Techdirt points out an interesting query in Slate asking why book publishers appear to be making the same mistake that record labels did with the iTunes service with DRM, and single-vendor lock-in. "Back in 2005, we noted that Apple's dominance over the online music space, which upset the record labels tremendously, was actually the record labels' own fault for demanding DRM. That single demand created massive lock-in and network effects that allowed Apple to completely dominate the market. If the record labels had, instead, pushed for an open solution, then anyone else could have built stores/players to work as well, and it could have minimized Apple's ability to control the market. Yes, everyone is now opening up (including Apple), but it took a long time, and Apple had already established its dominant position. So why are book publishers doing the same thing?"
Publishers don't read.
A vendor means money flow. Non-DRM can, and does, open itself up to free transfer of a product with no money being involved. That's a bigger headache than dealing with vendor lock in when you're trying to make a profit.
Better the devil you know, so to speak.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
We're going to go through the same problem again in about ten years when those 3d printer/modelling machines get really cheap. First music, then video, then books, then "solids" or whatever they'll be called.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Have a look at Baen books: They publish everything also as downloadable without any DRM (HTML/RTF/PDF) and you can buy months (4-6 books) or individual books. Individual books cost about the paperback price, a month costs about twice that. You typically also get the first 1/3 of a book as fee sample. They also have a "free library" where you get older books in the same formats entirely for free.
Eric Flint coordinates the free library. He has a series of postings on the effect and it seems to be very postive, with older books suddenly producing significat income for the authors, which they did not before.
Of course this only works for good quality books, but for them it works. I found myself buying more and trying authors I would otherwise have overlooked.
References:
http://www.baen.com/
http://www.baen.com/library/
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
There is a persistant and politically powerful group of people [1] that state that they shouldn't publish as ebooks until there is a fail proof DRM for books. Just to get a picture how inane people can be.
[1](the guys who decides the Nobel prize for literature)
Greed.
That's all this is about. That's all its ever been about.
-S
Actually sounds like a pretty common mistake.
Audible have already cornered the market in DRM encumbered audiobooks. I've been a regular customer of theirs for years, buying dozens of titles. Yet I have not a single drm file in my collection, thanks to those nice people who packaged up the 'how to strip Audible DRM' set and stuck it on piratebay that is.
I'd prefer if they had no DRM to start with, but for the moment they have lots of titles I want, so I just pipe the downloaded files through the stripping process and discard their drm. It takes all of 20 minutes usually.
If however they changed their DRM to make it harder to crack, I would cancel my account that day and never go back.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Amazon's DRM specifically limits sharing books from the Amazon store. However I dont see ow it would limit other book formats from being loaded other than the lack of software for doing so. I would think some clever hacker would write that software. An alternative is to convert to MSWord file, then load that.
nobody reads anymore. In fact, I'm notrqwh even lookitnag at whwat I'at typing right nwo.
When my last book was made available in electronic form, I asked my editor about DRM. Her reaction, before I'd expressed an opinion on the subject, was 'don't worry - I'm used to authors hating DRM. We won't put any on if you don't want it.' The contract for my most recent book had a explicit clause added preventing the publisher from distributing it in any DRM-encumbered format.
Tech book publishers know that what they provide of value is access to a large reservoir of knowledge. That is why they are creating things like Safari Books Online, which allows you to browse books online and buy DRM-free PDF copies (or get some included with your subscription) if you need to read more than a few pages.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Yes, everyone is now opening up (including Apple), but it took a long time, and Apple had already established its dominant position. So why are book publishers doing the same thing?"
Because book publishers and record executives have the same types of personalities and intelligence that drives people into executive positions. They have the same token MBAs and Law degrees and lawyers that all "Business" people have. They all think-outside-of-the-box the same way.
Kindle
The "Guide" on the other hand...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
No matter where you are, if you are there long enough, you will start to think that what happens around you is normal. That is a very generic way to describe the problem.
To put it more concrete, the more time Bill Gates spend as they head of Microsoft, at Microsoft, surrounded by Microsoft, the more he got to believe that this is the way the world is. He no longer has any connections to the outside world and his own world has become one that agrees with what he thinks because his world ain't stupid enough no to.
Yes-men are liked, get promoted, you make friends with them and pretty soon everyone around you is a yes-men.
I am a volunteer cameraman. The unique thing about this job is that you become a faceless observer, the camera allows you to distance yourself from whatever you are filming yet who you are filming often assumes, because you are focussed on them (Yes, cameraman wit) that you are not just intrested but even part of their world. Once the camera is allowed in, you are part of the family.
It allows me to see parts of the world that I would never see otherwise. I don't mean shocking things like secret societies, well actually I do, because I am still at the early stage but still.
Take for instance, performance art. I have filmed pieces where the artists involved talked about the importance and meaning of what they did and how their new work was affecting the world, while a simple pan would have showed an audience of only other artists and then only because they were waiting for their turn.
It is a common thing, you see property developers talking about new plans when you can see that NOBODY cares about it, architects presenting new exciting buildings that you have seen countless times before and are never going to work out or if they do end up and windy hellholes where nobody wants to work or live.
People live in their own small world.
And so the book publishers, they live in a world surrounded by other publishers and hear the thing from people who want to work as publishers and get promotoed. So you say what you think your boss wants to hear and the boss promotes those that say what he wants to hear and pretty soon you got a system where no outside information can get in. No previous information.
Right now we are debating in the Netherlands about the selling of public utilities to foreign companies. Because that worked out so well in the US. But the people in the banks say it works so it must work. Nevermind the credit crisis caused by the same banks, privatisation is good because...
Trust me, once a system has been in place for to long with nobody to shake things up, you have a small bubble of alternate reality that you have no hope of penetrating.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Book publishers could do some things to get the dead-tree edition people to buy. Off the top of my head here are some suggestions:
1. Customized paper/covers. A person orders a book and specifies what paper they want or cover they want. They could keep the common formats around, and the truly exotic could be print-on-demand (high quality)
2. Paper/electronic combo. Focal Press (a photography publisher) already does this already. Photos look shit on displays which is why their paper books work.
3. upgradeable book. Mail in your old book for a new edition (perhaps for a slight premium). Useful for technical books.
So why are book publishers doing the same thing?
Because the companies are run by old-timer that are still trying to apply a set of rules that no longer apply to a failing business model.
Look, the internet is here, it isn't leaving. Portable electronics are not some sort of passing fad. Dead-tree publishing is an old technology. As things like the kindle and the sony reader start showing people that they don't need to purchase a stack of paper to read a book, they're going to start demanding that when they purchase a book, they own the *book* not the rights to display the text of it on one specific device.
People are starting to catch on to it, too. There is a marketing tool that we use at my work that requires a serial # to activate. Since then, we have installed the software for all of the serials (this is a result of everybody demanding that they need access to it...not just the people we bought it for).
I finally told the boss that we don't have any more serials, we need more, and this is how much it's going to cost. He flipped out. Why was I being so difficult! The receptionist isn't using her copy any more, just use the serial number for that one!
I'm sure this is pretty common. People don't understand how completely and totally ridiculous DRM is until they actually run into it. As digital media becomes more and more ubiquitous, this is happening more and more and people are having their eyes opened.
Another example is when my Dad decided that he wanted to add MP3 playback capability to his home automation system (like what I showed him at my house). Problem was that all(most) of his music had been purchased in the iTunes Music Store and the tool that I was using for music playback ran on linux.
Sadly, it might actually take as long as it takes for some of the people running these companies to retire before things start to change.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
I feel like many industries are afraid of what new technology is going to do to their bottom line. Because of this, you see these very defensive moves that hurt the growth of the industry and hurt the consumer. Really, I think these businesses should be first asking the question, 'what's the best way for the consumer to make use of our products?', and then ask the question, 'how can we monetize it?'.
If you provide a value, I believe people are willing to pay for it. On the other hand, if you fail to provide what people want, you're just asking for someone to step in and replace what you do (or dominate the marketplace, as in the case of Apple and the RIAA).
"So why are book publishers doing the same thing?"
Making a broad generalization, but the answer is simple - because they, like music execs before them, are stupid.
Ok, that's harsh. More accurately, they are ill-informed. Just because you managed to become an executive of a company that deals with IP rights does not mean you are aware of what is going on in the world-at-large. In a perfect world, yes, the upper management of a company should be well-informed and make intelligent decisions based on more than just the digits on their own balance sheets but few executives in these companies truly know what DRM is and all the pros and cons of it, for example. They are simply ill-informed. So it should come as no surprise when the majority of them make stupid choices.
People don't have the attention spans for a full exploration of a theme across an entire novel.
They want one or two really catchy pages at a low price. Something you can dance to.
They don't have to, they hire people to do it for them.
Free Martian Whores!
Relying on a product model that worked well in the past, selling products that they hope to sell, and clueless about the future. Except the government won't be throwing buckets of cash at them since no one cares about the extinction of bookworms.
They are not ignorant of history they are afraid of it and so are trying to cling to what they have for as long as possible.
I don't get it they give you HTML, in what why isn't that ok for eInk displays?
They don't have to, they hire people to do it for them.
Well now that the Kindle 2 has free TTS they don't need keep hiring those people.
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
If so, please provide a profitable business model that they can follow.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
I mean seriously, why can't we have a virtual public library on the internet that lets us read books for free, in the way a public library works?
Why is it fine to lend books at the library, but not ok to download a book and just read it?
Have libraries cost the publishing world billions of dollars in lost revenue? I don't think so.
The Book Publishers better not fuck with the blind over screen readers and other text to speech stuff. The GOV and Americans with disabilities people may come down hard on them.
It may be a mistake from our perspective, but Apple shareholders don't mind too much that the iPod and iTMS are incredibly successful.
Many other companies have tried to break into the same markets (hello Microsoft?) with not much success. And they had even better DRM than Apple's! (from a lock-in perspective)
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Wiktionary defines a monkey trap as "a cage containing a banana with a hole large enough for a monkey's hand to fit in, but not large enough for a monkey's fist (clutching a banana) to come out. Used to 'catch' monkeys that lack the intellect to let go of the banana and run away."
I think the lure of requiring customers to buy new books rather than borrow or buy them used has placed book publishers in a situation similar to that of the monkey who can't get his hand out of the trap because he's too greedy -- or perhaps just not intelligent enough -- to realize it's in his best interests to let go.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
First off, make sure to read the Slate article, not the crappy techdirt page that just summarizes and links to it.
The Slate article makes a lot of oversimplified analogies. One big difference between books and music is that with music, there is only a very tiny difference in utility between a CD and a song bought online and downloaded. Personally, I perceive the CD as having slightly negative utility compared to the download, because it's just one more physical object to clutter up my house. Other people might prefer the convenience of having the CD, since you don't need to make backup copies of CDs. But in general, they're pretty much interchangeable products. With books, however, there are huge differences in utility between paper and download. I can easily make notes in a paper book. I can loan it to a friend to take to the beach. It's never going to become obsolete, whereas a digital book in a specialized e-book format is almost certainly going to become obsolete within 5-10 years.
Because music has nearly the same utility regardless of whether it's embodied in a physical object, there are lots and lots of people who copy their music from other people without paying for it. There's really no such phenomenon in the case of books. Okay, sure, there are people who scan entire books and post them on scribd or something, but it's a very tiny niche, so this is another case where the analogy between books and music breaks down.
The article says $10 is cheap for a digital book. This is both an oversimplification and an irrelevance to their argument by analogy. In the case of music, the huge difference is that if I want to buy one track, I can buy it for about $1 by downloading it, whereas on CD I would have had to pay $10, even if I didn't want the rest of the music on it. That's an order of magnitude difference in price. When it comes to books, there's nothing like that. $10 is ridiculously expensive for a used mass-market paperback. $10 is not cheap for a new mass-market paperback. $10 is about the going price for a trade paperback. $10 would be insanely cheap for an illustrated physics textbook.
If you want to look for a real threat to the book publishing industry that's analogous to the threat file-sharing poses to the music industry, it's not the Kindle, it's the extreme efficiency of the used book market these days. Years ago, one of my favorite things to do on a weekend was bum around used bookstores in a place like Berkeley or New York. It was fun, but it was incredibly inefficient, and the used books weren't particularly cheap. Today, you can get pretty much any used book you want online, at a very reasonable price, and the internet has obsoleted the concept of a bricks and mortar used bookstore. A lot of titles go for something like a buck plus shipping. This is what the book publishers should really be afraid of. They hate the used book market. I see this most vividly at the community college where I teach. The publishers bring out a new edition of the textbook every few years, for the sole purpose of killing off the used book market. The sales reps are now constantly pushing DRM'd books that the students use on a rental basis, meaning that when they stop paying, they can no longer read the book.
Find free books.
Not true. Book publishers are making new mistakes also.
Look at Grove. They have been selling product placements in their novels.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Publishers? Don't you mean one specific bookstore chain, who's doing the classic "let's leverage our way towards a monopoly" schtick?
The publishers left in the world already know the value of making books available free electronically and retaining the right to print them. I'm proud to say that O'Reilly started this with the first edition of my "Using Samba". Other, smaller, imprints like Baen are following suit.
And isn't it this same bookstore that's leaning on their supplier to use one particular print-on-demand service?
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Amazon already has a huge share of the book market. In most respects, Amazon is much better placed than Apple was when it launched the iPod. Imagine if Apple had been the largest single retailer of music CDs when it launched the iPod...that's where Amazon is now.
The cake is a pie
Go read Cyberbooks by Ben Bova. 20 years ago and he got it pretty right.
I did say it is a common thing. We all do it. Except me of course :P
I can't even get myself to agree with my ideas.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Another excellent write up on the subject by Eric Flint can be found at Jim Baen's free library. (along with some free sci-fi and fantasy books-I can personally recommend anything from there-I've read them all)
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
You're just trying to get out of printing costs with that HTML thing. It will never work. You'll see.
You're not fooling us,
Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt Brace jovanovich; etal
Oh my god! The Kindle 2 is responsible for the recession! Depriving the publisher's reading-eye-lackeys of jobs, and therefore money, has a MASSIVE follow on effect. They stop spending money on things like food and music (read 'internet access'), then the supermarkets and the record labels tighten the belt, drive up prices, and push more customers out of the market in an ever worsening spiral of dooooooooooooooooooooom!
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
So why are book publishers doing the same thing?
Because they don't know shit about DRM and invite an "expert" breaking it down to them in one of their stupid meetings. Then they make a decision based on the bullshit he tells them. And for whom would such an "expert" work for? That's right, for a company coding DRM solutions.
If so, please provide a profitable business model that they can follow.
Everyone knows the model. Stop wasting money or DRM development, and sell DRM free books.
You see, the key word there is "sell". They still sell books, and thus still get money.
Some people will loan out books, sure. But that gets other people interested in the author and then everyone makes more money than if they hide content behind an impenetrable wall with a tiny gate. People will pay if costs are reasonable and material is good.
See, Baen Books
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I thought this quote...
"But the dumb and pointless infatuation with 'DRM' and 'protecting' works will basically hand the market over to Amazon for many years, and get many folks locked into to Amazon's Kindle platform, even when more open solutions finally start to become popular."
...in the referenced article was a bit off the mark.
As I have said before, one of the things I am is a small publisher. I publish a business book called "Elevator Pitch Essentials" and a couple of DVDs on baseball instruction (rotational hitting and pitching mechanics). As a result, issues like DRM are highly relevant to me.
I am selling my business book in a pretty much naked PDF "eBook" format, and it's selling pretty well at $9.95, but I've got to tell you that I'm nervous as &*@$ that someone's going to rip it off. I've tried to deal with this a bit by limiting the printing resolution to 150 DPI, but I have heard that some apps don't honor the PDF security settings (WTF?).
I know that most people make money off of speaking rather than the book, so even if the book gets out into the wild it's not that big of a deal.
Right?
Oh, and tell that to my wife.
I also know that in most cases I'm perfectly willing to pay $1 for a song from iTunes or Amazon. About the only time I go to LimeWire is when a song isn't available in a for-pay catalog.
I am thinking about porting my business book the to Kindle format, but that's a bit of a PITA because I would have to strip it down to basically .txt format and I don't know if it's worth my time to do that.
If anyone has any suggestions for how to balance out making things easy for end users to buy and use what I'm selling but also allowing myself to make a reasonable return on my investment, I'm all ears.
Well call it obsession with war then, but you are right there are alot of other very HQ stuff from Baen,
Every fucking day now some moron is posting a Manjoo article to Slashdot. He's the Tom Friedman of tech writers -- paid to tell you the blindingly obvious or the obviously wrong in hyperbolic terms ("Best ever", "ultimate", "game changing"). A David Pogue embryo-in-training. Please, just stop posting this crap!
Entire premise of the article is wrong. The fact that there was no DRM mechanism on audio CDs is what killed the music industry. It allowed everyone to rip music and trade it around without paying for it.
The labels first tried to get "interoperable" DRM from Microsoft because they thought Apple's FairPlay was not restrictive enough. Sony tried to roll out its own. But in the end, it was only Apple's DRM that enabled the labels to actually sell music in competition with widespread piracy. Once iTunes was established, Apple could argue for the removal of DRM and continue to sell DRM-free music to people who were already accustomed to using iTunes.
Apple didn't win the online music wars because it had the tightest DRM, it won because it had the least objectionable DRM. Once Apple gained the upper hand, the labels tried to cut their losses selling MP3s with no protection, because at that point, stronger DRM (Microsoft's PlaysForSure and Sony's ATRAC) had failed, attempts to add DRM to CDs (SACD and DVD-A) had failed, and Apple was putting the labels on notice that keeping FairPlay secured was not feasible, in large part because they labels were already selling DRM-free CDs and MP3s.
So dear Slashdot anti-DRM community: it was Apple's DRM that salvaged any hope of the labels actually collecting any money from their product. It was a lack of DRM on CDs that allowed widespread piracy to destroy music sales. The fact that instituting DRM protection was a forgone option in the music industry by the early 2000's does not mean that DRM does not work to create functional markets.
"Freeing" new types of content from DRM (whether books, movies, or software) isn't a solution and does not logically follow as some successful alternative to selling protected content, just because the music business imploded *due to the lack of any mechanism for securing its product.* No product can be sold in any sort of quantity to the public if they have the option of stealing it without much trouble.
DVD movies have suffered much less widespread piracy because, while not invincible by any means, DVD's DRM prevented widespread piracy by the majority of consumers. People still buy DVDs, while very few buy CDs (witness the closing of most music stores). A lock does not have to be completely bullet proof in order to help prevent theft. The relative ease of shoplifting does not mean stores should not try to stop it with theft protection systems.
Books have long been protected by a form of "physical copy protection" in that its hard enough to photocopy or digitize an entire book and then mass produce copies of it that can compete with paper versions (too expensive to print, and not satisfying enough to read digitally) that it is not practical for consumers to widely pirate written works.
If eBook readers ever take off, the availability of non-DRM ebook versions of popular content will follow the course of CD/MP3 piracy and the publishing market will self destruct just as the music business has. If Amazon's Kindle takes off and establishes a DRM-secured marketplace for reading, it has the potential for duplicating the successful DVD market, or the very successful, DRM-secured market Apple set up for iPhone mobile software.
People who think that they can steal content and widely duplicate it over the Internet without impacting the profit motive that created that original content are self delusional. People who think that open markets can exist without DRM as similarly delusional. DRM is not a tool of oppression, it is a facet of the rule of law and regulation on commerce that *CAN* result in fair markets where and only where users pay reasonable amounts and artists/developers get paid fairly for their work.
The problem is, as with any market, that if the DRM system is operated solely for the benefit of publishers, it will end up too restrictive and demanding of too much profit. That's what killed PlaysForSure and every other system thought up by the music industry itself.
Apple, as a neutral middl
From a business perspective, an ebook with DRM shares nearly all the main characteristics of a physical book. The risks and your control stays the same, excepting that you lose the risk of over/under printing. Physical books are pretty safe, you can make good judgements of risk, have quote a lot of controls over the risks and balance out what remains: for every fail there's a win. The real work a publisher does is all about managing the fails and wins: slightly more, slightly bigger wins against slighly fewer, slightly smaller fails.
Without DRM, you lose that control. It's a completely new ball game. Suddenly it's all too plausable that the latest Harry Potter turns up a week early on a torrent and utterly decimates sales of your big title. You just lost the balancing item against the risks you took on all your other products: unless twice as many other books succeed as marketing estimated, the company is dead. Just like that.
The book industry is in a different set of circumstances to the music industry. They had no choice whatsoever since the market already beat them to mp3 and the industry had to respond. Their epic fail was to take so long - their worst-case scenario was already happening. In the book industry, electronic formats are still optional because the mp3 of books are simply not there. They still have good influence on the market. They are only fighting competitors, not the market itself. Second hand books are merely comparable to second hand CDs i.e. already factored into the present situation.
Thus for them, DRM ebooks retain the status quo other than to open up a new market and potentially reduce the second-hand market. Result = same + win + win%. DRM-free ebooks offer some benefits to their customers, may further widen the new market but entail a very real risk of arriving at the music industry situation: total loss of control. Result = win + win% + epicfail%.
But there's one caveat. The book industry has the benefit of hindsight from the music, game and to a lesser extent the movie industry. Many people have ideas about fairness and will still pay for things they can illegally get for free. Related to this is iTunes, steam and to a lesser extent, netflix. The service has to compare with the illegal version.
If I was a book publisher, to be honest DRM seems like a very obvious choice unless competing firms do otherwise, there's almost nothing to balance up the extreme risk. If I was publishing music, I have no control anyway: DRM is like locking the front door but leaving the back open, plus my primary competitor is piracy and I have to at least match their level of service and quality.
Kindle 2's experimental text-to-speech feature is legal: no copy is made, no derivative work is created, and no performance is being given. Furthermore, we ourselves are a major participant in the professionally narrated audiobooks business through our subsidiaries Audible and Brilliance. We believe text-to-speech will introduce new customers to the convenience of listening to books and thereby grow the professionally narrated audiobooks business.
Nevertheless, we strongly believe many rightsholders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver's seat.
Therefore, we are modifying our systems so that rightsholders can decide on a title by title basis whether they want text-to-speech enabled or disabled for any particular title. We have already begun to work on the technical changes required to give authors and publishers that choice. With this new level of control, publishers and authors will be able to decide for themselves whether it is in their commercial interests to leave text-to-speech enabled. We believe many will decide that it is.
Customers tell us that with Kindle, they read more, and buy more books. We are passionate about bringing the benefits of modern technology to long-form reading.
More Whiny Goodness cast in the "uhoh, business threat" mold
I'm a technophile, but I also insist technology provide a useful function and not be superfluous or more onerous than the previous iteration.
Physical books are not something people will easily abandon.
Publishers have been pushing ebooks since 1997 and going nowhere. This is not like the digital music marketplace where people invented the technology, flocked to it, and dragged the industries kicking and screaming. The industry is what wants to push this format, and for most its very uncomfortable.
e-books are harder to read, harder on the eyes, harder to preserve, cannot be marked with notes or highlighted, are dependent on electricity and expensive readers which, by themselves, could be liquidated and used to buy shelves of books.
there's only one convenience to ebooks, and that's the capacity to search text. Of course, once you find it, it's not possible to really quote it because of the horrific DRM every single ebook has.
The best literary products i've seen are books which have a full digital text and supplementary material on a provided cd.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
In West Texas and Japan. There was a distribution channel. Plenty of distribution channel.
It did not flow.
There are any number of reasons it did not flow, but access to the channel was not one of them. Lots of people going in and out of those gas stations, lots of people walking through the village markets. The stands were quite visible.
Maybe a bad analogy would help.
My wife likes to tell about a visit she made south of the Mexico/California border. Street vendors, many of them very young children. They sold commercial products, mostly candy bars and the like, and they sold things they made.
Care to guess which she bought? Care to guess which the people who were with her bought?
Sure, the candy bar that looked like it had been unwrapped several times didn't look very appetizing. That's part of the point -- an unclean feeling to the transaction.
People who have the money to spare _want_ to support the authors/artists/performers whose works they appreciate. That is a fact in any society that is even marginally healthy.
I wonder, here, if part of the reason the media giants can't see the principle here is not the very fact of the number of artists, authors, and performers they have screwed over. They probably don't respond any more the way people with healthy consciences respond, so they can't understand why ordinary people would respond that way.
Who was it said that the more money you have the less you tend to understand the meaning of money?
Yeah, honesty is what it's all about.
If society is so bad that you cannot depend on enough people doing the right thing, well, if society goes that far south, DRM isn't going to help, either.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Your link does nothing to prove your quote as valid. Please provide another source, preferably from Amazon, which actually states that Kindle 2's TTS is going to be modified so that TTS is enabled only on a book-by-book basis.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
Hmm.
When you point your duplicating device at my car, my briefcase is on the passenger seat. So, now you have my customer list, or my flowcharts, or my business plan, or the manuscript for my novel.
In fact, I'm in the driver seat, and my wallet is in my pocket, so now you have my driver's license and credit cards. Well, that is, if you can get the clone of me to give them to you, I guess.
And, then, there's all those duplicates of me running about.
I wonder what my wife would say to having all those duplicates of me wandering around loose?
(heh)
I think we need a new understanding of just what the word property means.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
But not the most important ones...
They haven't gone on a shooting spree, seeking to sue every user of peer to peer networks who shares a copy of a book.
As far as I know, they haven't sought to sue libraries or used bookstores, at least not in reason years.
Sure, they made some of the same mistakes as record labels, but there are other mistakes they had already made a long time ago, that they hopefully learned from.
DRM may be a mistake, but it's the smaller of the mistakes made by the likes of the RIAA.
I prefer about 5 million-fold when I can get an ebook that is simply raw text, or text with light markup. That way I can refont, reformat, resize, or reflow it to suit a particular screen, or a particular reading posture.
PDFs fail at all of this.
Da Blog
I am so much waiting for the day when DRM will be so annoying that people will use OCR on their Kindles or whatever devices to circumvent those shitty DRMs.
Stupidity is the root of all evil.
Come on - always the same 'it is copyright infringement' bla bla bla
No, Sir. The distinction is (politically) so important that we shouldn't be sloppy about it.
It's about this mad race to fence-off so-called intellectual property and treat is as physical property.
It's not only about the Sony BMGs, but about the far more dangerous Monsantos.
It's about a Brave New World where artistic expression and scientific discovery aren't anymore for the benefit and enjoyment of Humanity, but to satisfy the greed of amok-running megacorps.
If you don't want this world, you should make this distinction.
If, on the other hand, you are a RIAA troll -- well, i haven't polite words for you.
And the best part is that if you forget your reader at the beach, you don't have to bother going back to get it because it will be gone!
these enough?
with $0.99 books on iTunes?
Or is Apple going to integrate an e-book reader into the next iPod?
In the end it all boils down to display resolution and power consumption. The rest is trivial.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
As the author of several technical books (published by a mainstream publisher), let me share my perspective. Each one of my books took the better part of a year of hard work and research to produce. And today, each one is the top-selling book on their respective subject. My books are available in traditional printed form and also as eBooks.
Why did I write these books? To earn some extra money to support myself and my family. I'm just trying to make a living. I know that self-sufficiency and independence is somehow considered evil now that we're in the age of the Obama dead-beat handouts. But I still believe that you should work hard to support yourself and not have to rely on someone else to support you. I didn't write these books just for the fun of it, nor did I intend to give away my hard work for free. They are the result of my work and are my intellectual property. If someone wants to read the information that is contained in my books, they should pay for the privilege.
The problem is that like most books, eBook copies can be found at your favorite "free ebook" pirate site. Each and every download of one of these "free" copies is depriving me of my rightful income. And there's not much that I can do about, other than to hunt down the bastards that host pirated copies of my books and demand that they be removed. I do this using official DMCA takedown notices, which usually results in the pirated copies being removed within a day or two. But the situation is out of control and there are just too many pirate sites to hunt down. Because of this, I've decided to take a radical step for my next book. I am prohibiting the sale of my next book in electronic form. It will be a print-only book. Yes, this will deprive me of the income that I would have received from the legit sale of eBooks. But I'm willing to give up that small amount of income if it will prevent pirated downloads of the book. Now the scum that pirate my books have effectively ruined things for everyone. No one will be able to read my next book in electronic form because of the risk of piracy.
So, if you argue that everything should be open and free, why would anyone write a book? Or more to the point, why would someone write a book with the specific content that you just happen to need? Sure, there will always be some books that are written and given away for free. If you are an author that can afford to do that, more power to you. I can't. What is the incentive for an author to spend a year of their live working on a book just so they could give it away or have it stolen? Authors will not write all of the books that you need unless there is an incentive to do so. Think about that the next time you download a book from a pirate site.