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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.
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."
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 $1 to you. If so, then pony up. Otherwise, don't listen to it.
It's pretty simple, really.
This is my sig.
In my case, I have a free (tax paid, no memberships) public library 15 *walking* minutes from my house that lets me take the book home for one week.
Amazon takes at least 3 days to get the books to my doorstep, and as I'm never home in the morning when the mailman comes, I have to pick up the books from the post office.
Libraries clearly win in this case.
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You pay 10$ in gas to drive to the library? What do you drive? A Hummer h2?
"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