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."

Comments

I wouldn't publish on Kindle if it was Open

[drmemnoch]

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.

Re:I wouldn't publish on Kindle if it was Open

[selven]

I create for my own profit, not your entertainment

Good luck profiting or entertaining with that mindset.

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

This statement, especially with the word "once" in it (implying that it's inevitable) is the epitome of the "goodluckwiththat" tag.

we will finally be able to embrace the open standards we all truly want

We will be able to embrace open standards only when the entire internet agrees to do things your way. Nice.

Until then DRM will live one in some for or other.

Given that file sharing is not going to vountarily go away, this statement becomes "information will continue to be locked down until the entire internet is locked down", which is probably true. We can't stop DRM any more than you can stop piracy.

Re:I wouldn't publish on Kindle if it was Open

[hedwards]

No it isn't, and I wish people would stop suggesting that piracy is killing services off. Because it's not. Show me a platform that was killed by piracy and I'll show you a platform that was horribly managed. More often than not the DRM just limits the number of sales and raises the number of copies necessary to break even.

The problem is that customer service stinks and there's a belief in the entitlement to profit. Trust me there isn't one, and as soon as people start to acknowledge that the cost of an item is going to approach the marginal cost of another one, there's going to be no effort that effectively stops the piracy.

Worse still is the fact that piracy goes way up when one has to pirate in order to use the content as one wishes. You have the right to control the distribution of the copies of your work, not what people do with those copies, and as such DRM is a pretty egregious violation of ones rights. I have the right to sell any copies I've bought provided that I don't create any additional copies to sell.

I'm also sorry that you're so terribly misinformed about copyright law, copyright isn't there so that you can profit. It's there to maximize the amount of work being created, any profits you make are purely as a side effect of that goal. Fighting consumers to prevent them from using it on the platform of their choosing in whatever way they wish to is an egregious abuse of that right.

Re:I wouldn't publish on Kindle if it was Open

[davester666]

They also 'helpfully' keep 70+% of the price end-users pay.

Maybe if authors made a bigger stink about getting the shaft from Amazon, they just might get more sales.
Maybe if authors didn't bitch and moan about how they should get paid extra because a machine converted text to speech, they just might get more sales.

The world has changed, maybe consider doing something new instead of trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle.

Re:I wouldn't publish on Kindle if it was Open

[fooslacker]

That's an interesting viewpoint. Let me share another with you. I own a Kindle2 and loved it from day one. I'm totally willing to buy books for it. In fact I don't really have an issue with the prices Amazon charges given the current market but I would expect them to fall as the user base grows.

All of that said, I have decided to stop buying books from one publisher and a specific author due to unreasonable (IMO) DRM restrictions placed on the book when I bought it. Specifically it was a Doubleday book called House of Cards that opened my eyes to how restrictive the Amazon DRM can be. As a result of that experience and the fact that there was no way to know what the restrictions were prior to purchasing, I have started looking for free books and converting various third party books.

I will still occasionally buy books from a known author that I "must" read but I do this with the full realization that Amazon could rip the content away from me at a moments notice. I don't buy unknown authors or books I may want to keep or reread any more on my Kindle. Instead I go to the library or borrow the books from a friend until I'm sure I want to follow that author. I used to just buy everything and anything I was interested in but now I'm much more careful and have started finding ways to read the books for free if I'm not interested in keeping them or they're not a favorite author. So if you're a favorite author of mine your viewpoint works but you certainly won't break into the market at least for me while your works are DRM crippled.

Perhaps piracy is a greater problem that growing your audience for you and if so then good luck with your battle against it but for most authors I suspect growing your audience is the greater problem and at least for me DRM is a non-starter when trying to get me to buy an unknown author or a book I want to keep for multiple reads which leaves me only purchasing stuff that I know I like but don't want to keep and reread over and over again. It has really limited what I buy on my Kindle to just escapist writing that I read for recreation.

Re:I wouldn't publish on Kindle if it was Open

[bcrowell]

How many colleges are using your book as their primary text? My guess is that you are doing it as a hobby, haven't ever been paid for it and if any students are using your text they are probably your own because you run a course and set the textbook to your own.

57. Here is the list.

Re:I wouldn't publish on Kindle if it was Open

[Mista2]

All the DRM does on the kindle is make it harder to move the same book to another device, not impossible. Bus as to only a few years left? Well Talk to Apple about a propietary locked down format for content that can be easily pirated. They won eventually because the device was easy to use, and the content was available WORLD WIDE. Wize up Amazon and the whole publishing industry. E-books have no borders or regions, just like digital music. I live in NZ and would love to get my hands on ebooks from amazons catalog, and I would buy them too, but it is restricted to US only regions, and locked to the Kindle, so I'll keep on pirating the content to get it in a format I can use. Thanks Amazon. You just keep on protecting that content 8)

I almost got a Kindle..

[Lysol]

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..

Kindle Coverage

[Nom du Keyboard]

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.

Re:Artists deserve to get paid.

[tjstork]

. 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.