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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.
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..
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."
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.
One of my parents neighbors walks to the library and reads the paper. I think he even enjoys the exercise.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Quoth the OP: "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."
Or just walk there from work, which takes all of 3 minutes each way, and get a stack of books on subjects with many currently out-of-print and unavailable in the commercial market. Plus I get the book immediately and don't have to wait for Amazon to deliver it - or the postal service to decide to keep it at their depot while I have to go and collect it. I can even check online if it's available which is cool and saves wasted journeys.
If I really want a book to keep, I'll pay for it. No problems there. But quite often, I just want to use one for reference for a few things so the library is a God-send to me. I must have taken out over 20 books in the last month or so which would have cost hundreds of dollars as many of these were heavy-weight text books, and yes some were out of print and over-priced (ie, collectable) on the second-hand market. Total cost to me of all this lending: zero outside of a few pennies in taxes and the knowledge that culture is being preserved for anyone to access.
So what's stupid about me doing this? More books, better choice, lower cost? I fail to see what I'm doing that's so dumb. Please enlighten me.
. By publishing online, he says, "you give the reader the possibility of reading books and choosing whether to buy it or not."
That's good for Coehlo, but the issue here is that the work is his. Like it or not, the US and the rest of the world has adopted the French model of copyright and in that model the artist reigns absolutely supreme first. If Coehlo wants to give his work away to promote himself, that's fine. But, that is his choice to make and not something that should be imposed on him - unless you want to change the law.
This is my sig.
The question is, is a Paul McCartney song worth a $1 to you. If so, then pony up. Otherwise, don't listen to it.
You seem to have completely failed to grasp the supply half of supply and demand economics. Where did this magical $1 figure come from which you must pay or else not listen to the music? If going to a movie isn't worth the $10 the big theatres charge to me, am I not allowed to go see it in the second run theatre for $2? If I go perform music in the street can I then insist that everyone who enjoys it has to pay me? Just because you produce something doesn't mean you have some intrinsic right to make money from it - unless there's some reasonable way to ensure the scarcity of what you're selling, you need to resign yourself to the reality that you can't really sell it.
Copyright exists to promote creation of art. Right now, most artists make very little money from records and depend on live performances to make their money. With the exception of a few mega stars who don't need extra money to make it worth their while, copyright is protecting businessmen and lawyers rather than artists here, and on the whole increasing the total cost to society, while doing very little to encourage art. Why, as a society, should we make it possible for Paul McCartney to make yet more money, rather than making art widely and freely available to people?
If recordings of Paul McCartney's music were in limited supply things would be different, but introducing artificial scarcity unbalances the economic system for no good reason that I can see.
Not really. They are not entitled to be paid only because they create art, since, at any level, any one creates art in the modern sense, even unconsciouslly.
Artists who sell their works and find buyers for said work are the ones who are entitled to receive payment. But they they are not artists anymore, they are just doing commerce.
And this is why the work of agents and intermediaries has some worth on this economic system, because many artists suck at finding buyers.
Of the content I download, an extraordinarily small fraction of it is ever imported in to my media library. Most of it I download simple so that I am then in turn able to help other people obtain it for free. I download and distribute because I want to cause harm to companies and individuals that stole from the commons. I have zero interest in most of what they produce and will never personally watch/listen/read the vast majority that I download.
As I am coming from a highly cynical POV that has decided civil disobedience is the best path to defending the commons, I can easily understand your own cynicism and difficulty in believing that "piracy" is ever anything other then selfishly motivated. However I assure you that one can in fact be both a cynic and an idealist.
First of all, open source and open standards are two totally separate things.
Second, I'm fairly certain that the biggest cost in those things is the screen, followed by the hardware, followed by the name recognition mark up(Sony, Amazon), the percentage of the cost that the OS creates on a device whose entire purpose is to store, index, and display documents in a limited subset of formats is just not even worth mentioning. Half of slashdot could knock that kind of system up in a couple of months on their own.
E-book readers are expensive because the OLED screens which are so necessary for them to be even remotely comfortable to read are really new technology and still really expensive and because the hardware is specialized largely to the purpose. Eventually we'll get economies of scale and that will drop the price quite dramatically, but OS licensing fees aren't even in it, Linux doesn't have code to run an ebook reader, and everything that isn't about running an ebook reader isn't necessary, so there's not much gain.
- "open standards" pretty much guarantee that you can port software, and interface hardware, to newer stuff. And that somebody will do it. I have 15+ year old ISA cards that still work in recent PCs. I'm 100% sure that my .txt, .jpg, .rtf, .html, ... files will be readable by my grandchildren, if they care. They might be able to hack my old parallel printer to actually print stuff on paper, and laugh at the idea.
- "Popular" used to guarantee pretty much the same thing - I can still read my CP/M Wordstar Docs ! Except now with DRM and DMCA, it's harder, and it's a crime. I'm fairly sure you won't have a kindle reader + Windows 2035 / Ubuntu 40.10 synch software + amazon authentification server to access your Kindle books 25 years from now, and that Amazon won't be around, or willing, to help. And forget about the children ^^
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
"I download and distribute because I want to cause harm to companies and individuals that stole from the commons."
That's a BS argument. Even if copyright were a mere 7 or 14 or 20 years, I bet 90% of the content you steal and distribute is less than a year or so old, and as such would STILL BE PROTECTED UNDER LAW.
And you may think it's some sort of civil disobedience, but I'll also bet that the vast majority of the people you're supporting could care less. They simply prefer to steal music and movies and software because they can and then spend the money saved on beer.
And if you REALLY want to help the "commons", then spend a year or so writing a book or producing great music or a movie and then give it away under Creative Commons. Create something worthwhile, if you can. Hell, any pea-brain can run a torrent server and delude themselves that they're "making a difference."
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.