Slashdot Mirror
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."
You're free to make that choice. But:
(1) There are other strategies that may be more to your economic benefit. I write science textbooks and science fiction. In the areas that I'm familiar with, one good example of a highly successful alternative strategy is the Baen Free Library of science fiction books. A couple of other very talented professional SF writers who make their work available for free online are Cory Doctorow and Benjamin Rosenbaum. For a few hundred other (mostly nonfiction) examples, see my sig. (I'm not a particularly well known SF author, but here is where I've done the same thing with my fiction. My nonfiction is free online here.)
(2) History has shown that DRM doesn't work. Back in the 1980s we went through the whole DRM fiasco before. Back then it was called "copy protection." You would buy software on a 5-inch floppy disk, and it would have various formatting trickery that made it hard to copy. Users hated it. For one thing, they couldn't back up their software properly, so as soon as the disk wore out, they had lost their investment. Users voted with their feet, refusing to buy copy-protected software. The result was that copy protection disappeared. Since then, various people have kept insisting on relearning the same lessons over and over. The outcome is always the same. DRM doesn't work, users hate it, and because users hate it, it ends up being a failure in economic terms.
Find free books.
Paulo Coelho is not the literary world's most active Web aficionado, but he's certainly its most prominent. The Brazilian author has sold more than 100 million books, which include 14 short story collections and the novel "The Alchemist." He has been a fan of the Internet since the early 1990s. He spends at least three hours a day online, writing e-mails back and forth with his readers and posting photos on Flickr, MySpace and a blog.
Coelho's online activities also include a somewhat nefarious one: he likes to promote pirated copies of his own books. At the recent Digital, Life, Design Conference in Munich, Coelho told a gathering of tech company CEOs, artists and designers that since 2005 he's been directing his readers to an online site where they can download his books, in languages from German to Japanese, for free. "I always thought that when, at the beginning of your career, you strive to be read, you can't change your mind later and become greedy about it," he said.
Tell that to his publisher, HarperCollins. When reached by NEWSWEEK, a HarperCollins spokeswoman, Patricia Rose, said the publisher knew nothing about Coelho's online activities.
With his announcement Coelho is turning up the heat on an issue that's been simmering in the book publishing industry for years. In supplementing traditional promotional strategies, such as book signings and reviews, with free downloads, Coelho is championing a model that's gaining momentum among his fellow, albeit lesser-known, authors. Writers of technical manuals, academic books and fiction authors, like science fiction writer Cory Doctorow, have been putting their entire books online for free, with the consent of their publishers. Some authors claim that online publishing increases book sales by stimulating word of mouth. Publishers, for the most part, have been reluctant to endorse the practice for fear that it will undermine their sales and contracts for foreign rights and distribution. The trouble is, nobody really knows what effect free online publishing has on book sales, because there's almost no data to go on. "I think the Internet, for [publishers], is a very strange world, still," says Coelho's agent, Monica Antunes, from her office in Barcelona. "They can't make up their minds whether it's good or not good."
Whereas most authors who have embraced online publishing have done so openly, Coelho had been deftly hiding behind the anonymity provided in the digital world. His site, Piratecoelho, culls pirated versions of his books on sites like BitTorrent and eMule. He pays 10 fans scattered across France, Spain, Brazil, Russia and Turkey to find new pipelines for him to gather versions of his books onto the site. Visitors to his blog can click on an image of Coelho, resplendent in a neatly trimmed white beard, scarf and eye patch (he resembles an affable buccaneer in real life as well), and continue on to the site.
Coelho believes his online activities have only increased his already healthy sales. When he first came across a pirated edition of one of his books, in Russian, on the Internet in 1999, he put the link on his site, and the impact was immediate. Bookstore sales in Russia, a market in which Coelho was having distribution problems and where he had sold only 1,000 books, rocketed to 10,000 in 2001. He has since sold 10 million copies of his books, his agent says. His fans have downloaded complete editions of his books, in languages ranging from Spanish to Swedish, more than 20 million times in the past seven years. By publishing online, he says, "you give the reader the possibility of reading books and choosing whether to buy it or not."
Dilbert RSS feed
I buy sw and really like buying sw w/the remnants of a tree in the box printed in ink that becomes toxic when sent to be recycled. I would d/l it if I got the dead tree to read rather than read it from the file and require production of my own dead tree.
The digital format is OK except if you just want to read it, write your notes in it, get it wet while reading, dry it out and later understand your thoughts while re-reading for expansion. Devices li Kindle are nice to have large numbers of books available ... but ... I still prefer the dead tree to reference.
A) It costs a couple of hundred dollars more than the competition.
Back in 2001? I don't think so. There were no commonly available 5 GB devices in the iPods form factor back in 2001. Today, yes, 2001? No.
B) It ripped off the UI from the competition with the exception of the buttons on the case
Not really, the entire UI was basically based off the click wheel which wasn't really used on anything else back in 2001. If you have evidence feel free to show me, but I can't remember (and a quick Google search turned up no results) of any other player having a similar UI back in 2001.
C) The iPod never had as many features as the competition did, you're probably thinking of attachments. D) The competition wasn't crap, I've used the competition for years, and I've never had to send it back for a costly battery replacement.
About the only other digital audio player that came close back in 2001 to the iPod would be the Personal Jukebox and even then it used a larger HD making the entire device itself larger.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
In a way, they kinda did that already.
You can rip the protection from any .azw book on your Kindle. Google mobidedrm.py for more. Sadly, no crack is available for Topaz (.tpz) files - at least, not that I can find. Some online booksellers sell DRMed Mobipocket books that can be stripped of protection in the same way.
Ever actually used a Kindle? It's nothing like reading a book on a computer, which I've done a few times. It's like reading a real book - no eyestrain, easy viewing, no need to be plugged in if you'll be more than a couple of hours.
I get that it's not everyone's cup of tea, and yes, it is really expensive. But if you have the money - and I do, so all you folks out there who depend on early adopters should thank me - it's just an amazing device. I bought my wife a K2 for our anniversary, and liked it so much that I went out and bought a K1, used, not a month later. (The price was too good to turn down.)
CmdrTaco's comments on the original iPod.
Great, can you name a single person who has? No? Then why would you bet millions of dollars on it as a deterrent?
Do you mean someone who has been locked up for violating the DMCA? How about Dimitri Skylarov? You don't need to lock up thousands for the law to have a chilling effect on innovation.
Enigma
No, definitely not ODF. ODF is a format for creating content, not for viewing it. It has all kinds of complicated crap in it that's good for being able to easily edit a document, but if you're just looking at it, you no longer need that. This is why the PDF format was created: to view content on any device and have it look the same.
For viewing book-type content on portable devices, where screen sizes can vary and people might want to be able to change font size, I imagine some type of mark-up language would be best. But content-creation software would need to be careful so we don't wind up with all the problems that HTML has had, where things frequently look like crap on different-size screens.
The charges against Sklyarov were later dropped [..] He was allowed to return to Russia on December 13, 2001.
Way to fail to even read the article you linked to.
Idiot.
How we know is more important than what we know.
"Now another pundit tells us that Kindle must change"
Yeah, Tim O'Reilly doesn't have a great track record on predicting the success and demise of tech. Smart man, love his company, usually has a good analysis, but too often comes to conclusions unsupported by his analysis. He seems to right with an end opinion in mind, not supported by the evidence he's putting forth.
The Kindle isn't going anywhere mainly because of the base it has already, and that base is growing. The Kindle also has the support of the largest bookseller. Even if Google had it's own reader, and publishers flocked to them (they won't), publishers aren't going to stop selling hard copies to Amazon, which in turn is going to make Kindle copies available. The Kindle is also up there now as one of the more technologically advanced e-book readers. Amazon, despite being slow, is "getting" it. They aren't quite there yet, but they have a mass of users and are listening to those users.
Also, as you mentioned, how are open standards going to screw the Kindle? They already support pdf, likely more is to come, they have an auto-update system so they can expand to more open formats if they so choose, they run Linux so that conversion process is likely convenient for them to adapt their mass of users overnight. You can convert any free format to a "Kindle" format.
Worse for his opinion, there was already an analysis of the Kindle 2 hardware, and it seems very clear that Amazon could slice the crap out of the price of the device, and as wireless networking becomes cheaper, this bodes well for the hardware and the network hookup. Amazon has a damn good hook, and as long as Amazon doesn't get too greedy (like that implement that ads in an e-book patent), they'll grow their user base.
Right now, the lead competitor is Amazon. Right now, they are single-handedly driving the cost down or improving the tech. If O'Reilly thinks someone else is going to step up, that's fine, but no one is in position to.
I own mp3 players, but never bought an mp3--I rip. I can order, rip, and put the music anywhere, and I love that. I also use Slacker. Like it, play it, order it. Same with DVDs. I also use crunchyroll. (Although, ordering is a pain since Japanese companies still have their head up their @%% as half the good anime isn't available in the US; I guess DVD manufacturing is still too hard.)
With books, what am I going to do, rip the spine open and put it through a $300 bulk scanner? I screw around with hobby automation, so yeah, I could use a digital camera and construct a page turner, and then OCR the pics, but hell, the other day I couldn't find my paperback copy of Neuromancer, so I just paid and downloaded it.
Convenient. Reads DRM and non-DRM. non-DRM wins, Kindle is still going to get sales out the whazoo. Google wins, Kindle is still going to be a nice device with a minor monthly subscription if Amazon so chooses. Open format isn't going to win this one alone.
.Well, that's *one* excuse. You forgot "teh evil greedy corporation" rationalization, et al, which appeals to those members of the Entitled Generations who've managed to delude themselves into thinking that they're rugged, individualistic Libertarian types while posting from their Mom's basement: They're fighting "The Man", you see, by illegally obtaining their entertainment.
There's others, of course, but it gets tiresome restating them when they all basically amount to the same thing: Greed and selfishness (true irony, by the way).
Welcome to Slashdot in the 21st century, where being a nerd means discussing why one deserves to be entertained by others' creations for free, rather than doing neat and interesting stuff with computers (and other things) oneself.
Well Talk to Apple about a propietary locked down format for content that can be easily pirated.
Uhmmmm. No! Apple supported that format (AAC + Fairplay) in addition to the worldwide unprotected (MP3) format. In fact, they supported the unprotected format first and only added the DRM-encumbered format later as necessary to strike deals with the music-distribution cartel.
You can rip the protection from any .azw book on your Kindle. Google mobidedrm.py for more. Sadly, no crack is available for Topaz (.tpz) files - at least, not that I can find. Some online booksellers sell DRMed Mobipocket books that can be stripped of protection in the same way.
To be honest I haven't looked into the details of cracking it because I'm lazy and have plenty of other stuff to do these days but my main philosophical argument is that I shouldn't have to crack it to use content I paid for in a legit manner (i.e. I want to consume it on either of my devices capable of reading it).
The primary issue I had with the DRM is that they had the download limit set to 1. Hence once I downloaded it to my Kindle2 I could not read it on my iPhone or another Kindle (such as the DX I was considering purchasing at the time). The reason this sucks is that I use my iPhone as a time waster when waiting on movies to start or waiting at the dentist or doctor by reading my Kindle books. The built in "Whispersync" functionality lets both my devices know where I reached while reading either device and jumps me forward to that point. I really like this functionality because it means I can read most of my stuff on the Kindle but don't have to carry it with me when I'm out and about daily.
While I could crack the DRM such that I could manually load it on the other devices I suspect that the Whispersync functionality that makes the iPhone Kindle app so useful as a time waster when away from the larger device would fail to function and I'd have to manually track pages read on each device. (I speak only speculatively and without any real knowledge here)
All the big readers use e-Ink dispalys. Very different from OLED. Your point about the expense is still true.