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Why Amazon's Kindle Should Use Open Standards
Tim O'Reilly wrote in Forbes a while back that he thinks the Kindle only has another two or three years of life left, unless Amazon wises up and embraces open standards. He came to this conclusion, in part, because of his experience deciding how to publish documents on the web back in the mid-1990s.
"You see, I'd recently been approached by the folks at the Microsoft Network. They'd identified O'Reilly as an interesting specialty publisher, just the kind of target that they hoped would embrace the Microsoft Network (or MSN, as it came to be called). The offer was simple: Pay Microsoft a $50,000 fee plus a share of any revenue, and in return it would provide this great platform for publishing, with proprietary publishing tools and file formats that would restrict our content to users of the Microsoft platform. The only problem was we'd already embraced the alternative: We had downloaded free Web server software and published documents using an open standards format. That meant anyone could read them using a free browser. While MSN had better tools and interfaces than the primitive World Wide Web, it was clear to us that the Web's low barriers to entry would help it to evolve more quickly, would bring in more competition and innovation, and would eventually win the day."
No way on Earth I would work hard writing or creating something to have it passed around the Internet for free. I create for my own profit, not your entertainment. Once the Internet community stops (I know it isn't everyone but it is enough to be a major problem) stealing content created by artists for profit, we will finally be able to embrace the open standards we all truly want. Until then DRM will live one in some for or other.
Those who can do... Those who can't get a certification from Cisco or Microsoft.
They should make it support ODF. But I guess its all about profit to them.
"I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google"
They should use open standards so I will buy one.
A better analogue is the iPod and the iTunes Store. The iPod became the dominant mp3 player not because it supported proprietary and non proprietary formats. It became successful because it made the process of acquiring and transferring content (ripped and purchased) seamless and easy. The Kindle has something very similar in its ease with which you can purchase books and put them onto your Kindle.
The trouble with today's society is commercialism driven technology. Just as art is hollow when the artist cares only about money, truly creative science and technology cannot take place when its primary purpose is to line the pockets of some corporation. It's this care and passion for creation that makes open standards superior. Yes. We all know Microsoft can pump marketable features out, but ultimately, Microsoft technology exists to serve Microsoft, not us. As an added side effect, most DRM schemes rely on security through obfuscation. Hence a piece of technology based on open standards ought to be free of DRM. Even if open source DRM could be constructed, most people passionate enough about a scientific community would be very anti-DRM. Conclusion: unless you like being Microsoft's pawn, open standards FTW!
Excuse for why is your room always messy?
But instead... I got a Sony PRS-700. And I love it. Sure the screen could be bigger, but it supports PDF natively and a lot of the tech books I get (probably not going to be the case with most other books - yet) are in epub format, which is at least an open format. I know the Kindle DX supports native PDF, but I actually like the epub format now as it seems to render better on my PRS-700. The PRS-700 also has touch screen and a SD slot; so I can just download the epub's, copy them over to the sd, and then they show up on my 'bookshelf' on the reader. Exactly the amount of control I wanted.
I can see what Amazon is doing here - they're trying to mimic the success of the iTunes music store. I suspect this will work for a while, but at some point, others will come along and force Amazon to open up. Once they do, I might buy a bigger Kindle.
All in all, I think ebooks have finally arrived and I'm ditching all my paper text manuals and never buying another one again..
fail
The Parent poster is right, Art is not something which really works under the model that the GP suggests. There is an element of truth in that being paid to create art provides one with the ability to do so without having to work all day and improves the energy and time available to create the work.
But it comes at a cost that can be quite high. As soon as you start having to worry about being paid, one has to worry about whether or not the piece is going to be marketable and that is a terribly damaging environment under which to create innovative work. It's not really much of a surprise that most of the masters were doing portraits, working for patrons or downright broke when they were turning out works that would later sell for millions. It's rare to say the least to be able to be a professional artist without putting a muzzle on ones own creativity.
DRM isn't going to help that situation out much, in fact it's probably going to hurt by eliminating people that are likely to get work that's somewhat out of the ordinary or in other ways unconventional.
Boy, Kindle is sure getting a lot of coverage on Slashdot lately. You're left to think that somehow the world matters because of it - which it doesn't.
Google getting into book selling is a much bigger deal. Fictionwise's current meltdown where they apparently can't even report and pay royalties on time or properly is a big deal given their size in the eBook market and number of publishers involved. The fact that you don't even need a Kindle reader to buy and read Kindle books seems seldom mentioned. (A free Kindle reader app is available for iPhone/iPod Touch and there are millions more of those out there than Kindle hardware.)
Now another pundit tells us that Kindle must change, or die, in 3 years. Kindle is excellent for its intended uses. It's purpose built to provide eBook reading in a thin format with a very readable screen in bright light, weeks' long battery life, limited browsing, multiple formats, bookmarking, annotation, and sharing the book across multiple devices, and no-worries wireless connection. Also, lots of books available for it from the biggest bookseller on the planet. It's hard to see who is going to beat out that combination easily in the near future. I'd just as quickly predict the iPod demise as the end of Kindle.
Where do I see Kindle in 3 years? Cheaper, if production catches up to sales. Better browsing and better integration of its features into other formats (e.g. annotations on PDFs). Content (e.g. Newspapers) delivered to it by subscription replacing dead tree physical delivery. Or possibly limited to a hardware niche market while their reader software is running on every significant portable device with a screen large enough to read on.
One way or another "Kindle" survives as a brand as long as Amazon doesn't abandon it themselves and keeps developing the product.
My personal opinion? That the people predicting Kindle's demise are the ones who hate it in the first place and are trying to talk it away.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Serious question as I have tried everything else. I have a desktop, a netbook and a iphone. Each are worthless when reading books. I simply cannot stand having a back-lit screen.
I can't see myself spending $200+.
Gone!
I was at a neighborhood party this weekend, which provided something like a random sample of the population. You know, morons. Anyway, someone had a Kindle and they were passing it around a bit, showing it off. At the same time, there were many more people showing each other things on their iPhones. The Kindle didn't hang around for long. Maybe it's just not good at parties. Anyway, it made me think that if and when Apple makes a tablet that does everything an iPhone does AND everything the Kindle does, and costs just a tad more than an iPod Touch, that will hit the ebook reader sweet spot.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
Last time I checked, taking advantage of someone's enjoyment of their work by not paying them is called exploitation. How about, if because you like to program, your employer decided not to pay you.
Artists work. They deserve to be paid for what they do. If you don't want to have art on your computer, you can choose to not pay for it. But if it is valuable enough that you might be motivated to go out of your way to get some DRM breaking device, chances are, that means it is valuable, even to you. That means, don't steal it.
The question isn't whether, for example, Paul McCartney made a billion dollars off of his music, or Steven Spielberg made a billion dollars off of his movies. The question is, is a Paul McCartney song worth a $1 to you. If so, then pony up. Otherwise, don't listen to it.
It's pretty simple, really.
This is my sig.
I submitted the following to the firehose the other day but it has relevance in this context as well:
Encoding Effort by headkase
Within 15 years or so 3D Engines will have reached a point where they are indistinguishable from actual reality. At this time several business models are at risk. Hollywood will see the commoditization of entertainment blockbusters and the infrastructure itself, a 3D engine, will also see standardization. I agree with Richard Stallman in that I do fundementally believe that software should be free. But what is software? Traditionally it is seen as source-code. But its name is evident. It is an encoding of effort into a machine-specific ability. Programmers encode 3D engines, artists encode models, authors encode content. What has seen the first advance into Free is code but other forms of encoding effort will begin to appear as the ecosystem matures. Machinima with a completely realistic output paired with free graphics and sounds and other community developed content will be within reach of any individual with a personal computer. Where I disagree with Mr. Stallman is that I believe that while it is inevitable that Free will eventually win and individuals can use a "stone-soup" analogy to further develop common goals it is not immoral to receive compensation for effort expended in a specific case. This could mean that an artist accepts a bounty and creates a specific piece of content for an entity. The summation of this paragraph is that Free is inevitable but at the same time I'd like to buy some beer.
What Open Source represents is giving your little bit to get a lot in return or the "Stone Soup" analogy. What will enable Open to flourish is creating a finer granularity of effort. In the above example Hollywood studios organize vast pools of talent to create a singular work under wraps until completion. Consider when content creation tools have reached reality. The Open future is many artists creating code, character models, voice profiles, scripts, props and everything in between. The Bazaar will allow us all to remix these building blocks into something greater than we could achieve individually. And your entertainment will be rendered in real-time according to your rig's abilities. All effort that ends up as bits will become a commodity when Open Methods are applied. It is simply a matter of time, different for each niche, until this reality occurs. This does not rule out wealth (potential) however as to get non-virtual things done you will still need that.
Shh.
Kindle will be bigger than iPod because Amazon is so huge in the publishing industry and they appear to be writer friendly. What are you going to do? Write a book for free on the internet? Or write it and sell it on Kindle? A book is a lot of fricking work, but Kindle opens doors to a lot of authors.
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This is why museums were created, and...lets face it, most painters are no da Vinci.
Actually, most painters today in good art schools are better painters than Da Vinci could ever have hoped to become. We don't study old masters because they were somehow better than the people that came after, but, because they broke new ground and showed the way to do things. Seriously, go walk into a good art school, and you'll find 19 year olds kids painting things that DaVinci could never have even dreamed up, but then they get bored and go onto looking for something new.
it doesn't necessarily mean they enjoy paying $10m for the privilege of looking at it.
But to see a DaVinci painting or a painting by any major master is probably not free. In the very least, the musuem has an active and ongoing fundraising drive in addition to charging for major exhibits.
The same is true on a much smaller scale. Someone may enjoy reading Anne Rice, but will go to a library and read The Mummy for free
Yeah, but those people are stupid. They would pay an easy $10 in gasoline, public transportation and possibly a library membership to go to the library and read the Anne Rice book, when could have just gone to Amazon.com and bought the thing and had it delivered to your doorstep.
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Anyone who chooses the solution that fails to balance the need for open and the need to make money has got it wrong. A device like the kindle should support both free and paid-for content. The real issue at stake is that of format. The book is a universal format and all you need is a press to make one, and a bit of effort to copy. An electronic device works on using specific data formats, and if you aren't careful risks locking you in to one solution.
The Kindle might be the first true electronic book reader, but there needs to be an approach that allows anyone to make a book reader, while taking into account the publisher's and author's investment into the work.
I appreciate open source as much as the next person, but I also understand that if we don't reward the authors of our favourite works we run the risk of discouraging them from writing the next book.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
The one true measure of success in writing is money. Not some babbling reviewer from Publisher Weakly. But cold hard cash. It's a measure of how popular and respected your work is.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
when the first iPod came out, it was the smallest player with the highest capacity
Not true at all. It had less space than a Nomad!
And no wireless!!
Amazing actually. I ordered some gifts for a friend then found out they'd moved while the order was in route to their old address.
I informed Amazon of this and they refunded my money before the packages arrived at the wrong address. I've now reordered them and they are on their way to the new address. I was pretty shocked they'd do this.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
What was true for a business in the mid 1990s is not necessarily good for a different business in 2009.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Newspaper content would be great for open (no DRM) format. If download/subscription cost is nominal, who would copy last week's news to save a buck? Neat for public transit commuters.
But this is too obvious. They must have thought of it.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
as the apparent ability and willingness of Amazon to take back content and features at any time that turn me off.
Sure, I like to really own something I bought, ie know for sure that 10 years down the road when Amazon is gone I'll still be able to read my books, and that's open standards.
But with their current policy, I'm not even sure I'll be able to read my books tomorrow.
Don't let the door hit you on your way out.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
You would still turn a profit even if you were using an open standard. You would just have to charge for things like printed copies -- I paid for a printed copy of a book recently, simply because a printed copy is easier to read than a digitized copy. No need for batteries, charges, or whatnot -- just an easy way to access information.
Seriously, why are you so worried about people who trade files? This is a minority of people, and they are probably people who would not have purchased your book anyway, had the content not been available on some file sharing network. Seriously, the publishing industry is not threatened by people downloading books, it is threatened by people not bothering to read in the first place.
Palm trees and 8
A sweet smelling rose bush is worth a $1 to me, for sure. But do you have the right to ask me for $1 to enjoy that rose bush?
If it is my bush, I do. Otherwise, grow your own.
The real question is should we continue to pretend that nonmaterial productions should count as property
Or, you might say, how long do we pretend that just because something doesn't have a mass, it doesn't mean its free. People invest in, create, store, protect, and attempt to trade digital works just as much as any physical work. Of course its real....
And really, while we are at it, just because something is represented by electron states doesn't mean that it is any less real than something that is represented by a more giant assembly of atoms and molecules. You just worship that neutron and proton, don't you. No matter what we little electrons do, spin, absorb photons, spit them out.. you just want to sit there with your buddy the big stupid neutron that doesn't do anything. Ever notice in Physics, that they don't have "neutron volts"... why, it's electron volts. Geez, wonder why that is. That's because neutrons are lazy. Oh we will just hang out and let the protons and electrons makes the atom do all of its interesting stuff. We'll just be stupid mass distorting spacetime and being useless. Let the electrons do all the work..Yeah, you go hang out with your "real" neutron buddies.
SIGNED,
SOB SOB SOB
ELECTRON
PS.. I GAVE UP MY LAST PHOTON FOR YOU, AND NOW i AM JUST THE LOWEST SHELL!
This is my sig.
"No, the fact of the matter is that open standards and this anti-commercialism that you speak of is really just a geeks way of saying that they are self indulgent and want to create for themselves."
No, it is our way of saying that we are tired of being made into cash cows, and even more to the point, tired of being called communists, criminals, and terrorists just because we have a decent understanding of how computers work. We are sick of living in a society where everyone is trying to monetize everything -- now they even want to monetize our friendships with other people.
"It's the guys at Microsoft and Apple that have to sweat deadlines, do focus groups, sift through the complaints of millions of users, the genuinely work for everyone else. They get paid for it."
I am a Fedora contributor, and yet I get complains from Ubuntu, Debian, and Gentoo users all the time. Millions of bugzilla entries have been filed in various open source projects over the past year. The Fedora development list receives hundreds of messages a day discussing how to solve end user problems. We are not getting paid for it, but we still do it.
"Windows is for the people that use it. Mac is for the people that use it. But, Linux is for the people that write it."
No, Windows is for Microsoft and their investors. Mac is for Apple their investors. The fact that they have users is secondary to the fact that they can turn a profit. Linux is for anyone who wants it, for whatever they want to do with it. That is why we give it away, and grant everyone the right to use, study, modify, and share it.
"You can rip me all you want, but just look at all the project managers of various Linux things, and their postings, and the things that strike you is that they are all about 'me' first."
That would explain why the swfdec developers were so busy getting Youtube to work correctly with swfdec back when Torvalds sent them a message about how his wife was having trouble. That would explain why the Fedora developers took the time to create graphical configuration utilities even though we could configure our systems using ed as a text editor. That would explain why the Ubuntu developers bothered with creating an easy to use system. Yes, you certainly know what you are talking about.
"Stallman, Torvalds, etc, are all pretty self-centered people. Me. Me. Me."
Oh yes, that is why Torvalds had it out with Stallman over whether or not it is better for Linux users to deal with GPLv2 or GPLv3.
"This solution is evil, that technology is terrible."
Which is why the NSA uses it for mission critical systems.
"Everything to them is black and white."
Which is exactly why Stallman admitted that not everyone is going to take free software to the extreme that he takes it, and why Torvalds rejected GPLv3 for Linux because he wanted to leave open the option of using Linux for TiVo and similarly locked-down platforms. Yup, real black and white there.
Palm trees and 8
for example Linux Mobile developers can try to port the Mobile version of Linux to the Kindle to replace the default OS and software.
The Linux community could develop a Linux distribution to make a Linux based eBook reader that any company can make the hardware for and sell.
I would recommend the later, I think a Linux based eBook reader would help bring down the costs of eBook readers and make the technology open to all to develop for it.
I think O'Reilly is doing the right thing by adopting open source technology and making their eBooks readable from their web site, rather than pay Microsoft a fee and use a proprietary standard that is limited to only Windows. Reason being that O'Reilly does not just write books about Microsoft technology but Open Source Technology like Linux etc. How can you expect Linux developers to read MSN eBook formats under Linux when Microsoft won't support it? They would have to dual boot to Windows, read the eBook on Linux development, boot back to Linux, when stuck boot back to Windows and read more of the eBook. But if they can read the eBook under Linux it is a lot easier to get work done. Yeah they could run Windows in a virtual machine, but not all Linux developers and users want to do that, and many want a native Linux program to read their eBooks and not even bother with anything Windows based.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
First they came for my digital media rights, I said nothing as I did not rip movies, then they came for my operating system choice, but I said nothing as I always just used whatever came with my PC, then they came for my freedom, and I could say nothing as we were all muzzled and controlled.
Windows is for the people that use it. Mac is for the people that use it. But, Linux is for the people that write it.
Microsoft Windows is for the Microsoft shareholders to profit from. Macs are for the Apple shareholders to profit from.
There, fixed that for you.
You can rip me all you want, but just look at all the project managers of various Linux things, and their postings, and the things that strike you is that they are all about "me" first. Stallman, Torvalds, etc, are all pretty self-centered people.
<sarcasm>Me, me, me! Neener, neener, neener!</sarcasm>
I won't speak for anyone else, but the reason that I got into XEmacs project management was that XEmacs 19.14 was a lovely rose ... that smelled bad. Once it was stable, pretty fast and did everything I needed it to do (XEmacs 21.1) I lost interest. If that's self-centered, whatever.
Since I now support IOS[1] and a host of other proprietary CSCO products, does that make me a better person than the evil open source project manager I used to be? Just asking.
IMNSHO you're painting Linus with the wrong brush. I've long been of the opinion that someone should collect up his postings and edit them into a text book. It could be as important as The Bible - Elements of Programming Style http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Programming-Style-Brian-Kernighan/dp/0070342075 , the most significant computer book ever written.
[1] And use XEmacs doing so ...
Who else should they be working for?
You?
I trust the OSS guys to protect my interests a thousand times more than any random corp.
expandfairuse.org
If you (a producer of entertainment) aren't entertaining , then you won't be making any money.
They also 'helpfully' keep 70+% of the price end-users pay.
Recall the Ask /. about software marketing. One poster named a company which will advertise your product and charge you 25% of every sale.
I though 25% was a bit on the high side...
While there are some who won't pay for any e-books, many more people would buy ebooks if they could get them in a non-DRMed format. Especially if they weren't so overprices. An ebook shouldn't cost more than $2.00. Why? Because an e-book costs almost nothing to produce. Since most writing today is done on computers, the books are already in a computer readable format. There are no printing costs, no shipping costs, and there doesn't need to be a middleman. Selling e-books directly over the internet is easily possible.
Yes, the author should be paid for his/her work. But what we have now is the publishers and middlemen making most of the profits. Also, publishers and the Authors Guild are getting far too greedy!
"I'm not giving anything away for free." "But I expect to be able to do research on the net for free."
So 'you' are lucky to get 20c royalty on books or music but you want $2 on the net. And you aren't even risking the product being remained. And the distributors are risking almost nothing.
If the world was fair a music track on the net would cost X2 the royalty and a book the same. Instead it's either free or way over priced.
Go figure!
At least for some it is free.
Rather than use all this DRM crap, couldn't we just use open formats - PDF or similar and place the purchaser's personal information inside the files?
I know that I'd be much more careful with a purchased file if I knew it had my name, phone, address, and credit card information attached.
Obviously, someone will come up with a method to remove that data, but many won't bother and will live with the consequences after sharing.
A Kindle puts one in the position of being of just plain out of luck if the author chooses to limit the ability of Amazon to act as an authorized seller at some future point in time, or if you manage to mangle or loose your DMR certificates, or if your Kindle breaks and you have to reinstall (read repurchase) all your ebooks, of if all your old ebooks are no longer Kindle 2.0 compatible, because then you no longer have legal access to your prior purchases.
As the Apple approach shows, this kind of system works economically only if multiple corporations (content providers/content distributors) and the "government" collude sufficiently to lock in users and if they can keep the price of the collusion to potential buyers just low enough to keep wanton piracy and open standards at an acceptably low level (of course for some any piracy or open standards at all is unreasonable).
The real threat to Kindle will come when an enterprising young entrepeneur makes a Kindle-llike device that permits artists/writers to register their works by which the artists themselves keep the lion's share of the cost of a download say, 95%, and accept the royalties directly rather than through the Amazon middleman.
Of course, first she will have to find venture capital in order to hire a good enough lawyer to get her product successfully embedded in the marketplace and 1,000,000 friends in her political district to keep her "representatives" from accepting "contributions" from corporations like Amazon to make sale of such a "revolutionary" device illegal or somehow "sufficiently unsafe as to require regulation" lest it fall into the wrong hands and upset domestic tranquility (ie existing corporate profits).
As Darwin in a humorous frame of mind once noted "Its everyone for themselves. Its a jungle out there."
Being french (with a llm), I would like to point that the system the WTO is forcefeeding the world through the TRIPS agreement is not the system currently used in France (we call our system "droit d'auteur", and it's not even close to copyright). As a matter of fact, TRIPS is more a mixed bag of the harshest possible solutions of both copyright laws and "droit d'auteur". It takes the overlong protection time of droit d'auteur, for instance, but seeks to allow this right to be granted fully to a copyright holder who may not be the real author, whereas under french law an author cannot strip himself of all his rights, willfully or not.
This insidious action is a spinning trick for your politicians to tell you "the french had us do this", and our politicians telling us "ah, but the world sided with the US and forced us do this or that".
Mostly, we're all in the same boat where a handful of shody lobbyists from the MAFIAA are having their way by twisting laws at a level where we, citizens, have no elected representation.
Just my opinion, but you might consider it.
"open source or die" is a bad slant and I don't think it really applies to the Kindle. His business and Amazon are infinitely different. The Kindle doesn't need to be totally open at all.
is the extra "zero" in the price tag. Seriously, this thing costs as much as a netbook. A year or two down the road and netbook tablets appear. At that point the Kindle has to be *significantly* cheaper or go extinct. The writing's already on that particular wall.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I realize this is US-centric but I take full advantage of the first sale doctrine by purchasing used books. I know the author doesn't see a dime of those sales but if I have the choice between paying $15 for a book or paying $5 I'm going to wait a bit and buy the less expensive one. I'll probably check the book out of the library first to make sure I want to own it.
Until I can get used copies of books on the Kindle for under $5 then there's no way in heck I'm buying one. And at this point in time there's no financial benefit to me for buying a Kindle and then buying the books since the price is almost the same as buying a paper copy.
So no matter what format the files are in they're useless to me. I'd prefer an open standard/no DRM but that's not going to happen for a while. With a paper copy you completely transfer ownership when you sell it but there's nothing to make you delete and electronic copy if you sell it to someone else. So an open format book is going to hit the torrents within hours of release if it's a popular book/series/author. I'm not sure how many books are on those sites since I don't torrent so someone else with more experience will have to report on that one.
Does the publishing industry make money when you buy or sell used books? Could they potentially make more if they only sold books in a non-transferable digital-only format?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I suggest that the bulk of this conversation has gone wrong .. rights management. The question was "will the Kindle, or any eBook/eReader survive" in the market place, not "is protected content good or bad".
My opinion is NO, the Kindle and similar products will not survive. Not until someone comes to the market with a business plan that involves primarily marketing the reader, not marketing protected content.
I've owned ebooks for the last 11 years, ever since the original "Rocket ebook" came out and I've owned or tried about 10 other models in that time. Currently I still own two Rocket ebooks under the eBookWise name. Despite the difficulty of getting "open" content into it, I rely on them heavily for manuals, reference material, downloaded (open) content such as news and research papers as well as about 10,000 works of fiction ........ most from the Gutenberg project but a couple hundred purchases.
In my opinion no one has ever come to the market place trying to make a successful product out of a reader itself. Every one of them says (effectively) "lets make this device, sell it for top dollar to cover our costs and development then get richer than Gates by licensing protected content for a few cents per copy and selling it for 10x or 20x our cost."
This isn't an economic purchase for the users. It's cheaper to buy hard copy and only gadget freaks buy the reader. If you rely on the reader, you discover that it's fragile enough that it fails drastically around once a year, in my experience anyway, and it's not practical to repair it after the initial warrantee requiring re-purchase. The TCO is astronomical.
I suggest the device must become a commodity, sold primarily for use with "open" content with a price less than $100 and supporting just about every document standard in common use with simple "plug and go" or bluetooth connectivity.. like a flash drive. Then the "paperless office" becomes possible, the devices become universal and the sale of protected content can be a profitable secondary market.
Of course they will still have to resolve the rights management issue.
I don't believe that the sale of protected content will ever be a large, profitable market unless the TCO is less than buying and owning the hard copy.
Just my opinion.
The real question is, while its useful to pretend that "content" is property so long as the results are in the public good, isn't it a problem if we forget we are pretending?
There is no pretending, that's the point. Bits and bytes are undeniably real. Content is real, the embodiment of human thought.
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