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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"
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..
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."
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.
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.
This is my sig.
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!!
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
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
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.
All the big readers use e-Ink dispalys. Very different from OLED. Your point about the expense is still true.