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Stallman: eBooks Are Attacking Our Freedoms
Barence submitted note of a paper written by RMS called The Danger of eBooks saying "Free software guru Richard Stallman claims consumers should reject eBooks until they 'respect our freedoms.' He highlights the DRM embedded in eBooks sold by Amazon as an example of such restrictions, citing the infamous case of Amazon wiping copies of George Orwell's 1984 from users' Kindles without permission. He also rails against Amazon for forcing people to identify themselves before buying eBooks. His suggested remedy? Distributing tax funds to authors based on their popularity, or 'designing players so users can send authors anonymous voluntary payments.'"
Do what you want 'cos a pirate is free!
While generally I don't share the same extreme views of RMS I must say that I am finding very hard to warm up to ebooks.
I've been considering a Kindle for a while now, but the idea of not being able to *really* own my book is holding me back.
Additionally, I suppose one could accept the restrictive terms of ebooks if the price was substantially lower than their dead tree counterparts, but this does not seem to be the case.
If I'm going to spend my hard earned cash, I prefer to have the physical book mine to read, re-read, share and lend.
In a way, this is a very ironic post. I think that respecting freedoms involves me respecting others' right to give up their freedom if they feel like they want to in exchange for having the cool new device.
Some subsets of humanity, perhaps indeed the largest subset, only learns by experience. It might take them losing all their books, down the road, or having to buy an entirely new device to keep "owning" what they already "own" before they learn. This is a new technology. We can't get upset yet that the general public doesn't get it. They have to get their knuckles rapped before they will realize.
Our job is not to legislate their choices for them, it's to support and sustain better alternatives so they will come over when they see the light.
To address the privacy concerns, how about a system where you pay for eBooks via Bitcoin, and your private key for bitcoin transactions is what is used to unlock the eBook? You can always just generate a new Bitcoin ID per book if you wanted to... (oh wait, you could also transfer all funds out of the bitcoin ID you used to purchase the book, then share the book and the private key that no longer holds any value, so shhh - don't tell the publishers this part)
Who cares
I can't help but be on the fence with this issue. On one hand, this is a work which took effort and time to create, and the author deserves compensation for their time if their work is used. On the other, I can't help but think that the time spent creating such works is finite, and once complete no further time or resources are spent, and considering the infinite resources provided by digital distribution, the cost per unit is extremely difficult to decide upon.
It will take people more intelligent than myself to resolve this situation, but it is a situation which needs resolving.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
According to this guy every technology used for the last 20 years violates our freedoms. Do you really think the average consumers knows (or indeed cares) about the types of freedoms RMS talks about?
For example, 'the ability to look at source code' .. you would have to explain what 'source code' is to a normal person firstly, let alone explain why having the code seemingly written in some foreign language would be in the least bit useful.
I understand the point he is trying to make and it is an important one, but to put it lightly .. lighten up.
I remember when my dad was going to be sent to the gulag in Siberia for a typewriter he possessed. I was a kid and the KGB raided our house. I don't remember the exact details of why but they let him go. I do know the typewriter had the letters removed so it wasn't exactly illegal. He was copying a book that the government considered illegal/immoral. It was something about the Communist party and the mass murders; information that is now public.
With ebooks the copy part is easy these days. It can be distributed within minutes all over the world. Someone will break the encryption and publish it. I don't think we should reject ebooks, just not pay for ones with DRM in them. I doubt a lot of controversial books will have DRM in them anyway. If the information they contain is THAT good, someone will copy it by hand if necessary and distribute it. If you're worried about some cheesy novel and that amazon tracks you, find a warez copy. Information will be free, it'll just be a little harder to find than googling it.
You want DRM-free ebooks, go there. All of them old enough to be out of copyright, no restrictions.
While I agree with Stallman that eBook and eBook DRM have really destroyed our freedoms with respect to books, I am having a lot of trouble understanding his tax fund proposal.
Doesn't distributing a tax fund to authors by popularity mean that I, as a person, lost the freedom to vote with my pocketbook not to pay certain authors? I have no desire for my tax dollars to go to the author of the Twilight books when I would much rather get my money to a deserving less known author who puts out a much superior work. For that matter, how do you measure popularity anyway? If the funding for authors are from a tax-payer fund, then it kind of means that people have no real direct costs to buy books, right? You can't measure it by downloads because people would download all sorts of stuff if they don't have to directly pay for it and not necessarily read it. The voluntary funding may be a good idea and has shown to work in the past - however, each of those successful voluntary funding schemes were aimed towards a rather small demographic who is passionate enough to donate - I have no idea if this idea is scalable or feasible when it's put to the market at large.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
Well, I don't have time to RTFA, but if the summary is correct, Stallman says eBooks "don't respect our freedoms", and his solution is take taxes and distribute them to authors whose books the individual taxpayer may or may not wish to read. Because that really respects our freedoms. What a tool.
The requirement for identification to buy a book may actually stem from the Patriot Act which allows the govt to demand purchase histories from book vendors and records from libraries without a warrant under the guise of 'national security'.
which is surprising in its simplicity: don't buy from Amazon if you don't want their DRM. There are places that sell eBooks without DRM at all (Baen is one of the ones that comes to mind and would appeal to a lot of people on /.), and then there are the other places -- almost the entire market other than Amazon -- who use ePub with Adobe's ADEPT DRM. ADEPT is relatively flexible. It's also, if one is so inclined to do it, very easy to unlock. I tend to view the unlocking of DRM on a book that someone's purchased a bit less dodgy than going onto torrent sites and finding some scanned and OCR'd ruin of a PDF. You get the publisher's version of the book, *and* you've paid the author (although yes, the publishers as well).
What I would like to see though with eBooks:
sane pricing -- no-one will ever convince me that it should cost more to buy an electronic copy than it does to buy a paperback even if I do see the argument that the author, the editor, the type-setters and all the marketing and promotion cost money so it can't be given away *too* cheaply
the dropping of DRM completely -- seriously, if they're happy to use ADEPT then they're basically happy to not use DRM in the slightest, it's so easily broken
standardisation around a set format -- Amazon are the hold-outs here, sticking with Mobipocket formats while everyone else (even Sony) settled on ePub
quality control from the publishers -- I bought "Glue" by Irvine Welsh, and it's so riddled with scanning errors that I may as well have downloaded a dodgy scan and OCR copy. The amount of times "um" became "urn" was quite surprising. Even worse, one of the characters is called "Gally". That became "Gaily" almost every time he was mentioned. For all I know, he was actually "Gaily" and it became "Gally". "Glue" isn't the only eBook I've bought from a publisher that clearly doesn't give a shit, but it's probably the most absurd. If they're going to charge on the basis of the eBook being edited, they should at least fucking edit it.
If, something that is now in public domain, is wiped off of my device by the decision of some corporate whores somewhere, that is an open attack against my freedoms.
Read radical news here
RMS highlights one of the dangers of eBooks with the Amazon case removing 1984 from the users' Kindles. However, I have always felt the bigger danger with eBooks is illustrated in 1984 with the "historical revisions". What if Amazon or the Author wants to change what is written in the eBook, and goes ahead and does it. How would you ever know or prove, that the book you have now, is different from what you originally downloaded. This also invalidates citations, so when other people review what was cited, they don't read what you did, and assume that you were taking the citation out of context, or otherwise distorting it. However, if the source document is changed out from under you, you can legitimately quote it, and it'll be different the next time you read it. I'll note that the same issue occurs with blogs, and people who suspect that the blog writer will change what is posted, will do a screen capture to show that "this is what was said", versus what is posted now. Unfortunately, there isn't a way to do the same thing with the DRMd eBooks.
That's why I steal all my books, and will continue to do so until pricing makes sense and DRM is gone.
that is attacking our freedoms.
Anyone still take this guy seriously? He wants authors to get tax dollars or voulentary payments instead of actually charging for their work? What about the freedom to have a meaningful claim to what you create?
Yet he accepts Arabs telling him who he can and can't talk to. RMS is an ass.
Well kind of
Lets be honest, a lot of people here have priated games in their history, I will admit to say Priating a game called "the witcher" and after playing it for a year finally purchased it via steam when they release the 1.5 update (before that it was just that bad performance wise you could not justify the money). The other day I was looking for an online copy of B&W i could not find one online copy that would let me pay and download so i was forced back in to my own ways to maybe just take it. The point is I would like a website where i could make anonymous voluntary payments to a games company if i so wished to, I have noidea if this would pick up, and might start encourge people to priate more games as demos. From my point of view i would have paid for B&W if i could pay and download there and then but i could not and not waiting for 7 days for a game i want to play for a few hours because i am having a nostalgic moment. Maybe My case is a little specalized, i dont think that many people really have that many requirements to play 10+ year old games
by stumbling upon an accident victim who just happened to be the author of my favorite series of romance novels.
I just took him home and hobbled him and now he writes the most wonderful stories for me. Or Else.
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
you say extreme like it's a bad thing but being extreme on child rape cases is normal. After all, we don't pick a position midway between the "Hang em by the balls" and "Let me fiddle away to my hearts content" and let some little bit of fiddling go unpunished, do we?
So, please explain why RMS's views are both extreme and also wrong.
What might happen if there was a tax fund for free open source software. And people could make a living coding FOSS. That could change the world...
But Just think about the hornets nest in the lobbyist hallway. lol. To bad! FOSS is the way to go.
RMS is just being a clueless idiot again. Amazon doesn't force anything. Hook the kindle to a USB port and drag a PDF onto it. Not deletable, not identified, not tracked.
You can do that on a Kindle without ever giving it a user account.
As usual, RMS has no idea what he's talking about, and just wants attention for somehow being an advocate for the people, even though nobody can ever explain how this actually benefits the people in a way that holds up to even minor scrutiny.
Cue the fanboy downvotes and the recitations of standard text which don't actually address what's been said.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
RMS has fully devoured his own tail.
Or, sell the books without DRM. Baen books at baen.com and their webscription service seem to be doing just fine selling them that way, in any format you want too!
"Distributing tax funds to authors based on their popularity"?????
The heavy hand of government as a solution. That will just end up like the MPAA and RIAA, where the government will start keeping a bigger and bigger portion for itself. And yes, I realize "copyright" itself is the heavy hand of government.
Eventually, it will end up politically like "each to his ability, each to his need".
Maybe closer reality is "each to his POLITICAL ability, each to his caste"
I buy ebooks from www.webscription.net no DRM, and a number of different formats. including HTML
No, seriously.
I understand where RMS is coming from 'cause he's legit. But I want to point out that you can get a Nook Color for 250 bucks and in about 15 minutes have it rooted and running CM7. Once that's done it is a simple matter to PIRATE THE CRAP out of eBooks. That's the funny flip side to all of this. Sure Amazon can remove content from the Kindle... so don't buy one. Instead get a device that can be hacked and turned into something more powerful.
In terms of dissemination of content eBooks are amazing. Go find a torrent with 5000 books in it. In less than a day you can have a veritable library and all for the cost of... well nothing.
Look, I'm not advocating piracy, that's not really my point. My point is there is a flip side and that is as we rely on eBooks more and more the market will shift. When ITunes started everything was DRM. Now I can buy MP3s from Amazon and load them directly into my cloud player and download/upload to that from any computer. These things shift. Time changes as the market changes and piracy is a force towards that. Whether the music industry wants to admit it piracy, and the availability of their content through illicit means, holds more influence on their business model than the artists or publishers do. Same goes for eBooks. It's just a matter of time.
I agree with him in so far as the Kindle store is concerned. Being able to effectively "un-sell" a book as happened with 1984 is basically wrong.
However that's a product of the Kindle store, not the device. About two-thirds of the books on my kindle have no DRM. Some of these are Project Gutenberg books, others are Pragmatic Programmers ebooks which are sold in DRM free formats.
There is nothing to stop you from buying a Kindle and then never buying a single ebook from Amazon if you really want.
As with all these sorts of things, the problems lie in the services and publishers, not with the technology.
Paul Leader
We got an ebook reader at work (to read papers with and reduce printing).
It is quite convenient, especially as a replacement for those books that are unwieldy to carry and/or disposable (in the sense that I have no intention of rereading them). But I did not really find any of the books I wanted for sale in DRM-free formats (though there is some good free stuff around, including project guthenberg of course). So the e-book publishing industry has yet to see a single dollar from me.
It's not just ideological, it's also practical. Will my next ebook reader support the same DRM crap as my current one? Who knows. Can I read a few chapters on my smartphone when I am not carrying the 10 inch reader around? No (N900 user). Can I read it on my computer once in a while, perhaps when I want to search through the text or cite something? No (Linux user). Do I want to bother finding out how to break the DRM, and whether it is even legal to do so in the country I live in? No. Conclusion: no books with DRM. No money to the publishers. And for those same bulky/disposable books: no, I am not buying a paper version either. Too bulky and disposable (especially in hardcover!).
I was ecstatic about the e-books as technology. I am a book rat, always been and always will be. "There is never enough shelf-space" - I learned that law of L-space very early in life. But I will never, ever go towards e-books until this model is the only choice:
1. expensive (WTF?!)
2. registration
3. tracking and data mining
4. it can be taken from you and there's nothing to do about it
The same goes for the cloud thingy, BTW, except point one. That's what I first thought. But at 25 euro per year for the cloud if my "WD pocketbook" of 320 GB survives for more than 2 years I am on profit (price 50 euro). And it is enough for everything I own in digital format. Big as a pack of cigarettes and not much heavier.
No to the e-book, no to the cloud. If somehow this is enforced on us (like the incandescent light bulbs for example- they can use the same excuse for the e-books) I will become political activist.....
Sometimes I wonder if Stallman has anything positive to say about modern computing and technology. Even if he has valid points a lot of the time, a lot of people eventually become tired of his schtick because he's not willing to compromise, and more importantly, even if you try your best to follow similar ideological standards, odds are you'll have compromised somewhere down the line which means (in his mind) you basically shouldn't have bothered despite your best intentions. That's kinda what irritates me about the man most - he doesn't give out partial credit.
The man must surely be very depressed about how the world is moving in terms of technology, and how many closed systems seem to be going from strength to strength despite the problems we see in them. I just want to read something he says is positive for a change. All this "you're losing your freedom" business is getting repetitive, even if it has a basis.
Just buy DRM free ebooks. There are plenty to choose from. I especially like Baen Books. They specialize in Sci-Fi/Fantasy and have a free library where you can get selected full books from authors for free so you can find out which ones you like the best. Smashwords is also good. Their focus is self publishing authors and they sell every genre.
I'm definitely in the minority here, but I *LIKE* my kindle and I dont give a shit if the books have DRM or not. I don't need Richard Fucking Stallman dictating the rules by which I am supposed to live my digital life. This is how the world works - someone produces a product, charges a price for it, and you have the FREEDOM to either buy it or not buy it if you dont think it is worth the price. You do not have the right to steal it just because you think the price is too high or you disagree with the concept of capitalism or with selling an artistic work. That is not "rebelling against the system", that is just being a thieving cheapskate asshole.
Sure, I could go to the trouble of breaking the DRM and sharing it with all my friends, the instructions for doing so are freely available, and its not hard. I'd really rather just read the damn thing.
If you want a book and dont want to give up your name or email or credit card, go to a bookstore and buy a hardcopy with cash. Or, write the author a nice letter and ask him to send you a free copy because you don't believe in DRM and paying for stuff like music and art, I'm sure most authors will run right down to FedEX/Kinkos and send you a freebie straight away.
Another guy wanting to spend our tax money.
I suppose that when he spends as much time as he does twisting himself into knots to explain some of his positions, that it's possible he doesn't actually mean to sound as Orwellian as he does. But really ... force people to spend part of each day (on pain of imprisonment, if they refuse) working to provide food, rent, and iTunes accounts for writers that they'd never in a million years otherwise choose to support? I don't want to spend part of every day laboring on behalf of a guy writing a book about alien abduction and its impact on the arrival date of the antichrist, or about the personal triumphs of Hugo Chavez, or some pedofilic manifesto.
... because how shall we compensate that guy writing a book in a coffee shop in Brussels? Should US tax dollars pay his way through life, too? Or would Amazon have to work with the government in Belgium to tax the people of that country so that people in the US can read the bad Neal Stephenson rip-off the guy's working on? Do US taxpayers also get to pay "writers" who happen to be false personas representing propoganda committees in China, producing books extolling the virtues of censorship in a healthy society?
And of course Stallman will have to expand on the details a bit
Ah. Well, obviously this calls for a single world-wide government to tax one group and provide a living for another group. Not that said government would play favorites or use any sort of capricious policy in deciding which writers get money. Not that anyone would jack up download numbers to skew the how-much-money-should-they-get stats, of course. And if that was a problem, well, all we'd need would be more government monitoring of who's downloading what, right, Richard?
Why do people even listen to this clown? The fact that he'd even mention such an idea shows what a bunch of toxic and mixed/contradictory premises make up the foundation of his world view.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
My wife just bought a Kindle. Evidently you can manage up to 6 Kindles where (in theory) you can share eBooks between the managed devices. We (really she, I haven't used it) only have the one device and haven't tried this feature.
I admit that I'm in the same boat as you -- my favorite authors aren't ePublished and I will never trust the DRM.
FBreader exists for both desktop GNU/Linux and Android. Hell, Okular supports .epub, and has an amusing little checkbox labeled "respect DRM limitations" which is unchecked by default.
RMS is being sufficiently blunt, and proposing a set of possibly-unworkable solutions sufficiently far from the status quo, that he gives off that "extreme" vibe.
What you call extremist is already the status quo in Europe (regarding music, not eBooks). See Spain, Hungary, and I guess there are other European countries doing this as well.
I have no paid e-book content. I find it very useful to gather up free content and Amazon very nicely organizes it.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
E-books are the new mp3s.
E-book reader + bitcoin miner = time spent reading > payment to author.
Otherwise & meanwhile, FUCK DRM.
My wife mentioned last night that our family account had 86 eBooks on it after only a couple of years of owning a Kindle. We share it between us and her parents (using 3 of the 5 devices Amazon allows you to have on a single account).
We read a lot more than we used to (and we read a lot before), particularly because we don't have to bring big books on trips. We can share books between us even though her parents are on the other side of the country. Sure, we can't share them with strangers (not really, anyway), but in my book we're coming out ahead, paying less, using less space, and filling less of our house with books we've read already. Do I miss the bookshelf full of awesome books to talk about? Yes, definitely. But I don't miss it so much that I'd trade it for reading less than we're able to.
I recall a decade ago or so, Stallman was eccentric but interesting. This is just nonsense. Nobody is forcing anybody to use eBooks and we have a long way to go before it becomes at all unusual to own a physical copy. Unfortunately, humans keep reproducing and using more stuff, so it seems to me that we ought to be willing to trade some of the old niceties for improved efficiency and less waste, particularly if the net experience ends up better for some people (like me).
It's a fascinating thing to see a tech person turn status-quo luddite simply because he doesn't care for the manner of the change that is taking place. Even so, DRM and eBooks do have some controversial aspects and it's good to see them discussed, but that's not what's going on here -- the alternatives Stallman is proposing are wildly impractical and would never happen.
reposting after logging in, d'oh...
My wife mentioned last night that our family account had 86 eBooks on it after only a couple of years of owning a Kindle. We share it between us and her parents (using 3 of the 5 devices Amazon allows you to have on a single account).
We read a lot more than we used to (and we read a lot before), particularly because we don't have to bring big books on trips. We can share books between us even though her parents are on the other side of the country. Sure, we can't share them with strangers (not really, anyway), but in my book we're coming out ahead, paying less, using less space, and filling less of our house with books we've read already. Do I miss the bookshelf full of awesome books to talk about? Yes, definitely. But I don't miss it so much that I'd trade it for reading less than we're able to.
I recall a decade ago or so, Stallman was eccentric but interesting. This is just nonsense. Nobody is forcing anybody to use eBooks and we have a long way to go before it becomes at all unusual to own a physical copy. Unfortunately, humans keep reproducing and using more stuff, so it seems to me that we ought to be willing to trade some of the old niceties for improved efficiency and less waste, particularly if the net experience ends up better for some people (like me).
It's a fascinating thing to see a tech person turn status-quo luddite simply because he doesn't care for the manner of the change that is taking place. Even so, DRM and eBooks do have some controversial aspects and it's good to see them discussed, but that's not what's going on here -- the alternatives Stallman is proposing are wildly impractical and would never happen.
With a phyisical book, I can buy it new or used. Once I'm done with the book, I can dispose of it as I see fit:
lend it to a friend,
Unfortunately, all of those secondary dispositions are largely eliminated in an eBook format. When I'm done with a book today, I can throw it on the bookshelf in my family room and then suggest that my wife or one of our kids pick it up and read it. If a friend is visiting, and notices a book that grabs his/her attention, I can say, "Go ahead and take it, and let me know what you think once you've finished it."
Stallman may be jumping toward solutions he can envision, but the problem still remains: the rise of eBooks threatens the way we share knowledge. You may argue that the Internet will never let DRM win, but do we ever want to end up in a world where we have to rely on DRM-breakers to keep knowledge free? eBooks threaten the intellectual vitality afforded us by the first sale doctrine. If we can't preserve post-first-sale rights in a digital world, we might as well go back to an age where books were kept on chains and only accessible to a few.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Businesses operate on voluntary exchange.
When I look for a book I'm generally not looking for pages to read. I'm looking for the book that will most effectively teach me what I want to learn, or a particular piece of fiction. Limiting myself to the geek dogma-compatible selection is not in my best interest. Yeah, I hope the one I buy will have the best utility, but my time is far more valuable than the cost of books, so I'm not going to sweat it if my purchase will ultimately not be able to be resold for pennies on the dollar, or given away. If I'm going to spend hours of my time with it it's far more important that it be the best text for the job.
Stallman posits only 2 possibilities, but there are really 3:
1) Buy the ebook, and subject yourself to the relatively draconian and arbitrary 'ownership' limits granted by the ebook vendors
2) don't buy the ebook
Of course the other option is to
3) steal the ebook (and logically, strip it of DRM)
Granted, there is a significant question of morality here - is the author getting compensated, or are you simply stealing?
I believe that in any society, the wants of a people will be fulfilled. If they cannot be filled legally or at what the public deems a reasonable cost, a black market will develop. In this view, the "sins" - gambling, drugs, prostitution (and now apparently, reading ebooks cheaply) are absolutely endemic to a large enough group of people. Parochial attempts to ban them only raises the price in the black market, they never go away.
It's not irrelevant to note that by any measure, ebook sellers are pricing their books unreasonably. Take a popular title, the first Game of Thrones book:
http://www.amazon.com/Game-Thrones-Song-Fire-Book/dp/0553386794/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1307543608&sr=8-2
Massmarket Paperback: $8.99
Kindle edition: $8.99
(Your link may vary, it's no secret that Amazon 'adjusts' prices based on your cookies and how much you've been "shopping".)
Considering that after the author is paid and the book laid-out for publishing, replication and shipping (which are huge costs for the physical book) are nearly zero for the Kindle that's nonsense. (Go ahead and argue, it's been exhaustively and conclusively discussed @ http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?threshold=-1&mode=thread&commentsort=0&op=Change&sid=2047898 )
I still doubt that absurd pricing justifies stealing, except in the case of profiteering critical goods. But (in my view) it certainly weakens the argument that the seller is 'entitled' to the fruits of his labor, if he's charging $10 for an apple. That's capitalism - if he can get it, great. But if he's colluding to fix prices and prevent the free market from pricing goods fairly, then he loses any moral high ground at all.
But I'll offer this: my local library has ebooks for loan, which is INCREDIBLY convenient. It's a great service, saving me the hassle of physically GOING to the library and checking it out. However, they only offer it for the Nook and a few other readers - not the Kindle. I would have no hesitation to check out these books and strip them of their DRM in order to convert to kindle-readable if that's all I had. As long as I delete the book within the 21-day loaner window, I don't believe anything illegal has been done. However, I'm sure that according to law, it would have been.
-Styopa
I have a Kindle DX, and I very much like it. I also have not purchased any books for it, using many sites like Project Gutenburg which offer high-quality free public domain works.
I will never have a problem with DRM or revocation because I control the content. Amazon did not have the authority to sell 1984 due to different copyright status in different countries. While this highlights issues with global copyright, Amazon really didn't have much choice in that particular instance, since a sure-to-lose lawsuit was the likely only other outcome.
Please, separate the "eBooks" idea from the vendors of digital media. That's what this is really about, and Amazon in particular, not the medium itself. I've embraced eBooks, but I have not embraced "purchasing" or "licensing" or whatever it is you do for them in exchange for money.
The Kindle reads lots of different formats, not just Amazon's own, including the PDF in which he released his rant. I'm sure he'll be happy to know I read it on my Kindle, and it looked fine.
And as usual, the people who would listen to him already know, the people who won't truly don't care because they like being able to 1-click download and read a book, and don't feel a need to be anonymous, and if the book disappears they'll just move on to whatever Oprah is recommending next. And they will continue to get screwed by big businesses and like it.
It's the publishers who demand DRM. You can sell books through Amazon without DRM. For example, if you buy my book, Chasing the Runner's High, it has no DRM.
I somewhat agree with him on the DRM front. I will say that I do like the fact that the DRM is tied to the serial number of the device it's downloaded on, but I don't like the remote wipe capabilities. The nice thing is that my Kindle reads .mobi and .pdf files, so I'll always be able to find/make new content for it. It's nice that he's attempting to suggest possible remedies, but I think the two he's suggested are a little out there.
Oh FFS, Give it a rest will you.
The eBook cat is out of the bag (and has been for a long time), and all your "but it's not free" whining now isn't going to change a single thing.
DRM and sharing are all on the publisher, when the book is published to the kindle the publisher has the option to let the book be DRM free and lendable. So not so much Amazon per say but backwards ass publishers who can't embrace the present, let alone a future.
FTFA:
"Stallman claims that eBook retailers can still support authors and retain buyers' freedoms by distributing tax funds to authors based on their popularity, or by "designing players so users can send authors anonymous voluntary payments".
Ok, so RMS recommends we use tax dollars to pay authors according topopularity?
He recommends we use tax dollars to pay authors?
He WHAT? Who is impersonating RMS? Is he insane?
Now I get the whole Stallman mystique. He looks for solutions to problems that do not exist or do not require resolution, along with looing for solutions to problems that DO exist and also deserve resolution. This time, he is doing the former.
Sheesh.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I bough the latest kindle(wifi version), used some Chinese firmware that let me to read .djvu books........and now I get all the shit for free (courtesy of google). Never purchased even a single book from Amazon store.
I just read the related summary on my Amazon Times e-magazine:
"Free software guru Richard Stallman claims consumers should accept eBooks because they "respect our freedoms". He highlights the DRM embedded in eBooks sold by Amazon as an example, citing the famous case of Amazon returning copies of George Orwell's 1984 to users' Kindles. He also applauds Amazon for allowing people to identify themselves before buying eBooks. His suggested next steps? Distributing tax funds to authors based on their popularity, or "designing players so users can send authors anonymous voluntary payments."
(So for those of you without irony meters, this is a joke referencing Winston Smith's job as a news adjuster in 1984.)
Does he really think that "consumers" are going to give a stuff what he says, in any significant numbers? eBooks are now outselling print books no Amazon, and that's not even including freebies. The tide is already up to his neckbeard.
And is he really labouring under the delusion that any device manufacturer can market a feature-equivalent device to a Nook or Kindle at competitive prices without the subsidy that those devices enjoy? In the UK, the Sony PRS pocket edition (5" screen) is currently GBP 149, compared to GBP 111 for a 6" Kindle. Why would my wife, brother, mother pay (exactly) 1/3 extra for less functionality?
I just can't see who he thinks his audience is. The choir is already singing along, but our long suffering siblings, parents and spouses just want to read their Sparkly Vampires in peace, without some smelly hippy yelling that their convenient, idiot proof device is, uh... ZOMFG-the-corporations-they're-all-corporationy.
Incidentally, the Kindle actually comes with instructions on how to get free (as in everything) books from Project Guttenberg. It's not like you have to use it to prop up the military-industrial junta.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
If you look around hard enough on the internet you'll find every ebook you could imagine with zero DRM...
Why buy e-books if they have drm? CBR, CBZ, TXT, and unencrypted PDFs are out there. Don't support DRM in any form.
I agree in full with the article. I can only see benefits all around should ebooks be treated and dealt with in such "freeing" ways. However I have no issue in identifying myself when I purchase an ebook (part of an account system where I can recover my books in case of disaster and also protect such account from very bad people). It only becomes a problem when the government starts keeping tabs on the type of literature I'm reading (and as a consequence may consider me a political activist/terrorist) or the DRM owning company (ex. Amazon) chooses to erase ebooks without my consent (but possibly through orders of the government).
The problem is accountability. The government is accountable to it's people but no one is enforcing such accountability (yet we seem hellbent on giving them even more power). Should this happen in the way that laws were written and the government dedicated itself to actually protecting it's citizens, we would not be having this conversation.
"I'm taking this loop off." - Jack O'Neill
load up a terabyte drive full of books. If each book is about 4 - 5 megs in size, that should come out to about 200,000 books. If I can read for 70 more years, I would have to read about 8 books a day to plow through all 200,000. The terabyte drive costs all of what - $75? Something like that. People form sub rosa book trading networks. LAN parties where people are trading Lady Gaga tunes AND books by Mielville, Mellville, Machiavelli, and the Adams family: John, Henry, and Douglas... The future is OFFLINE.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
No need to drop ebooks altogether, simply support the ebookstores that sell DRM-free ebooks.
A great example of this is Baen Books. They jumped on the ebook bandwagon quite early on and actually took it a step beyond selling books: They offer a lot of them completely free. Eric Flint pushed for this and convinced Baen it was a great idea. The Baen Free Library introduction is written by him and describes the reasons behind the whole movement (the BFL came online back in late 2000, definitely not a late-comer).
They have continued to uphold the DRM-free ideals and offer their ebooks in many different formats. The Free library project offers many books and new ones get added all the time. The financial idea is pretty simple: If you give away the first (or more) books in a series you've written... if they don't suck, folks will want to buy the rest of the series and a good percentage will buy the original ones simply to support an author who has the temerity to do such a thing as sell books without DRM.
At any rate, take a look at the project. The purchases are done via Webscriptions. I'm a long time supporter of them, but have no affiliation.
The slashdot summary contains a total non sequitur: His suggested remedy? Distributing tax funds to authors based on their popularity, or "designing players so users can send authors anonymous voluntary payments". The part about "His suggested remedy?" implies, incorrectly, that Stallman is suggesting the tax idea as a solution to the DRM problem. Actually there is no logical connection between them, and Stallman hasn't suggested there is. If you want to see what Stallman actually said, here is his analysis of the DRM issue, and here is his proposal about taxes.
I hadn't realized until today that Stallman was politically so far to the left. I assume that I didn't know that for so long because he has tried to keep his left-wing orientation about government and capitalism separate from his libertarian approach to civil liberties and freedom of speech. There are a lot of people in the computer/internet world who are vaguely libertarian, and there's no point in alienating them gratuitously when they actually have common ground. It does, however, seem to me like there's somewhat of a philosophical contradiction between the voluntaristic approach he usually pushes (don't buy products that aren't free-as-in-speech, etc.) and the idea of compelling individuals to pay taxes in order to support ideas that they don't agree with.
Find free books.
I have bought some books from Manning and O'Reilly, and they live on my laptop and tablet. They're in epub and PDF format, w/o DRM of any kind. They (may) have my name embedded in them, but that keeps me honest....
I don't like him, given his Lenin-like intolerance.
The primary reason I purchased my wife an ereader was to save me much physical effort. She gets through a phenomenal amount of books and when we vacation she takes one book for each day of the vacation. A 3 week vacation in Spain last year meant half a suitcase of books and that's heavy.
The ethical considerations of DRM etc paled in comparison to that. It's also saved me about 18 feet of book shelf space and counting.
UNIX: 'cuz you can tattoo it on your knuckles!
Yes, DRM-laden ebooks are bad.
There are plenty of vendors of DRM-free ebooks. Since most of them don't adhere to the ideals of the FSF with regard to content freedom, they probably are also objectionable to RMS, but they provide the same (or more) practical freedom than one enjoys with a physical book. DRM-free seems to be very common with creators/publishers that directly sell their own e-books, while DRM-laden products seem to dominate when large third-party distributors that aren't the contents developer are selling ebooks (B&N and Amazon particularly, and Google to a lesser extent.)
I have a better remedy: people who are concerned about DRM and related freedom issues only purchase e-books that conform to their preferences, and don't purchase other ebooks. Most current e-book readers (both dedicated and software) will support DRM-free ebooks, so this requires neither changes to existing devices, changes to existing software, or changes to existing laws. It just requires people to act based on their preferences.
Since there are profitable companies producing DRM-free ebooks, I think that the idea that there is a "problem" with revenue that needs to be solved by either technical change or imposing taxes that are distributed by the government to content creators if DRM is to be avoided is unfounded, and I think RMS does a gross disservice to the cause of content freedom by validating the position of the pro-DRM camp by implicitly endorsing the existence of a problem of that kind with the "solutions" he proposes.
I can't say about every single book in their store, but any book I've cared to buy at Border's website was available in DRM-free PDF format.
I don't care much for eReaders, though I do keep a copy of my technical books on my phone if I need a reference and can't get internet/3G access (rural Texas, quite frequent). I mostly like them just to have in a digital format. I prefer reading things on my computer, and they're safer than a physical book that way. I keep good backups, including offsite, so if my house burns down, at least I'll have my O'Reilly books...
Actually, now that I look back on this, it seems to be just O'Reilly that offers the DRM-free eBooks. Well damn.
"...Distributing tax funds to authors based on their popularity..."
hahahahahahahaha... no.
If the only person you share books with is your father, then get him a Kindle and add it to your account. You can add up to 5 kindles to one account, and anyone can read anything in your library (even at the same time).
Those are pretty lax terms IMHO. This won't work for people who pass their books to several different people after reading, but for those of you who keep it in the family, it's a pretty good deal.
Also, like you've discovered: you can use a Kindle and get your Ebooks from wherever you want (they just won't be conveniently manageable from your Library...you'll have to copy them to the device yourself). But Amazon offers a free email conversion service, and if that does not suit you, then you can us a more fully-featured tool like Mobipocket.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
I thought of that example as a problem with distributing such funds as soon as I read the summary; you read my mind or something. Yep, many indie-culture folks like yourself can't stand the fact that Stephanie Meyer et al are so popular, and the prospect of paying them is even more offensive. That attitude doesn't seem to work in reverse; the fans of Stephanie Meyer et al likely wouldn't know/care about a bit of cash going to Cory Doctorow et al.
I'm not sure if it would be fair to skew the payments in favor of less-popular authors either. However, another problem with such funds is that in practice they can end up skewed in favor of the popular stuff.
Yeah, I also have doubts as to whether a widespread donate-only system would work.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
"Made some good observations of problems; the problem lies in his proposed solution"
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Doesn't mean we should actually give it any credibility.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
A very concreate reason for the abolishment of DRM:
One of the potential attractions for reading foreign language ebooks would be the ability to copy and paste words and sentences into machine translators (software dictionaries etc). I can't tell you how motivating and efficient this method is when reading standard text such as webpages. Thanks to DRM this simple and staple electronic function is gaffed.
The future never seemed so far away.
So, what about libraries? You don't own those books. Who cares if a book you read disappears ten years down the road. If you like a book enough to read it multiple times, chances are you own it anyway.
i like the un-DRM-ing thought. using to government as a revenue collector is a very bad idea in the US. how about this:
amazon points cards (like nintendo points). buy them in walmart, target, grocery stores, wherever..
use the code/points on the card to make purchases on the web site.
Until recently I've pretty much refused to buy one because I send paperbacks back and forth with my father after one of us gets done with the book and the idea of DRM offends me on pretty much every level.
So just both of you link your kindles to the same account. Problem solved.
How does that solve the problem if his father also shares some paperbacks with someone else, and he also shares some books with a friend. Should everyone share a single Kindle account? Right now, the choices are non-DRM ebooks or real books from dead trees.
In my case, I share SciFi books with one daughter, she shares horse books and murderous math books with my other daughter, and my wife and I share professional books. Both daughters share books with friends at school. Us parents share some books with their teachers. Obviously I'm talking about real books here, not the DRM-crippled "very limited right to read" ebooks. I wasted money on a couple of ebooks several years ago; it won't happen again until ebooks are very different (exception: Baen and similar non-DRM ebooks).
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Richard has lost me here. He fails to mention the environment we help to save by doing away with paper, ink, glue. Not to mention the gas we save from driving to a bookstore to buy. There are multitude of other factors here as well. All to our benefit with eBooks.
This isn't even a valid argument. I am glad paper *everything* is dying and will continue to die until it's all gone.
"Ohh, Richard," I moaned as my Unix beard intertwined with his crusty pubic hair. The crust tasted like three-month-old semen; his cock tasted the same, except with a twinge of urine. It was finally coming true, though.
The day had arrived at long last. I was graduating. I had passed the classes. I had said "yes" to all the test questions by parroting RMS's philosophy; so many others had said "no," and they had flunked out of GNU academy. It was all worth it now. What Richard had really wanted was the thing denied to him all these years -- a warm hole to fuck.
His meaty tool wobbled back and forth, as it must, as did his hips. "AAaaahhh.....unnngh!" cried Richard. It seemed like he wouldn't last very long. It was his first time. The foul-smelling semen began to come out in 1.5 trillion picosecond spurts, covering my beard. We took turns licking it up. It was a good day to be a GNU/gay.
Stallman has this knack of projecting his views of what the world should be onto others, describes the people he's speaking for as 'the community' (just like Marx claimed to speak for the proletariat) and then projects his views on to them.
And what he espouses is so wacko that even the Green Party would potentially have problems w/ it.
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