What does this mean? I see that in your mind it’s a “bad thing” but I don’t know what DRM is or why it might be a bad approach.
Could you explain a little bit further?
Digital Rights Management.
Generally, the gripe people have with DRM is that it keeps you from copying the media you buy, reselling it, etc, etc. This is, they contend, a violation of traditional norms of “fair use” - the idea that you should be able to produce private back-ups of CDs, for example, without being labeled a pirate. There’s also a broader concern, expressed by people like Stanford Law prof Lawrence Lessig, that the proliferation of DRMed (restricted) movies, music and text could help a lot of our culture get “locked up” into proprietary systems.
I don’t believe that these are bad points, but I do think Cory Doctorow’s Boing Boing criticism of the Kindle’s DRM (and similar DRM) is a bit too harsh. If (hopefully, when) I buy a Kindle, I’ll be going into it with my eyes open. I’ll know that, if I buy books from the Amazon ebook store, I can’t share them with friends, print them out, convert them to different formats, and so forth. But that’s okay. In exchange for giving up those abilities for these particular ebooks, I’m gaining the ability to buy books somewhat more cheaply, have them delivered almost instantly, and carry many dozens (hundred, even!) of them with me wherever I go. It’s a trade-off, and it’s not an irrational one for me to make. Nor is it unethical for Amazon to include this DRM, even though Mr. Doctorow appears to believe so. Remember, the people buying Kindles are making an informed choice - or at least, the information is readily available, and I should hope people would inform themselves before dropping $400. Amazon’s DRM would only be unethical if they were springing it on consumers as a surprise - say, they imposed it in an automatic patch after purchase.
IMHO, of course - your mileage can, and most assuredly will, vary.
Thanks. Very good explanations.
Is there any way to actually see and possibly test a kindle in person?
Buy one, play with it, send it back. Amazon’s return policy is very forgiving.
I’ve been toying with the idea of doing that myself, only knowing myself, I know there’s a better than average chances I’ll like it and want to keep it.
If it takes Mobi as the book source, then you can use webscripions.net [Baen Books, hard SF and Fantasy] and Fictionwise.com [all sorts of books] I just got 5 pratchett at fictionwise for 32$US, or about paperback cost.
With mobi you can also get mobi publisher and make your own books from various source file types. If you so wanted to scan and OCR until your eyes bleed, you can make your entire personal library as it stands today into mobi files.
A couple days ago, I tried to lift my daughter’s backpack and could barely lift it because of the weight of her middle-school textbooks. And those were, she told me, only for half her subjects. The rest would not fit in the backpack.
It occurred to me then that the killer pp. that could mainstream book readers in a hurry would be for school textbook publishers to start offering their wares that way. Far fewer companies would have to get on board for this to be viable than is true of the general book publishing community. Many parents who worry about chiropractor bills for their kids would willingly pay for this option. Schools would love to reduce the amount of physical handling they do in distributing textbooks and facilitating sales and re-sales of them.
And the current generation of schoolkids are already in the habit of carrying fairly fragile electronics gear (graphing calculators, mp3 players, cell phones) on a regular basis. So if the reader can be made as robust as say, the typical graphing calculator, I think this could work.
Apparantly they’re selling like hotcakes: Kindle sells out in 5.5 hours
That’s just a tiny “article” (more like a blurb) about how they’ve already sold out. However, Amazon has not disclosed how many were in the initial batch.
This is a good idea but if it catches on here, I’m out of business!!
Also, people (in this country anyway) like to be able to buy second-hand textbooks at a cheaper rate.
It’s a great idea, but I think the price would have to come down a bit before kids will be skipping off to school with one in their backpack.
For the most part, in the US public school texts are owned by the school district, not the student. They’re expected to be turned in at the end of the year, and there’s no real used book market. Buying one’s own texts usually doesn’t happen until high school, for some classes, and often not until college.
Mr. Excellent, my biggest objection to more traditional ebook DRM has been that there was no way to protect my investment: The DRM I’ve seen associated with most protected ebooks stipulated one, and only one, download of the material, and it was protected such that no copy could be made. It couldn’t even be moved between a portable unit and a home unit, let alone making archival CD-ROM. Amazon’s plan is the first DRM protected ebook I’ve seen that allows multiple downloads of the text. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had too many harddrives die for me to view any single storage media to be secure enough for me to be sure I’d be able to finish the book. Sure, most of the time that’s what will happen - but not all the time.
I’ll admit, too, I’m not thrilled about the nullification of fair use that DRM represents, but my view as a consumer is often to look at things through the prism of my own personal interests first, then to consider the larger issues.
For anyone looking for an excellent rebuttal of the whole DRM argument I’d like to suggest these essays by Eric Flint, originally published with Baen Books’ Jim Baen’s Universe ebook magazine.
Copyright: What are the Proper Terms for the Debate?
Copyright: How Long Should It Be?
There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch
Spillage: Or the Way that Fair Use Works in Favor of Authors and Publishers
Eric Flint takes many of his arguments from two speeches from Thomas Macaulay on the floor of Parliament in 1841 and 1842 when expanding the copyright then available was debated. The text of those speeches are here, and are well worth reading. Some of the arguements are particularly prescient.
*I know this is a large quote, but I believe the speech to be fully in the public domain.
I hope you won’t mind me using your post to springboard for my soapbox… and to point people who might be interested in the issues to a better soapbox orator than myself.
What excites me about the Kindle is that a large bookseller is backing it.
You see, I have a Nokia 770 Internet Tablet that I purchased to read ebooks. In 2 months, I’ve read 13 books on it. I adore it. It is backlit (which I haven’t figured out if the Kindle is) which allows me to read it in bed without using a nightlight. YAY! It also powers off automatically and holds a charge a ridiculous amount of time. (I leave it on all the time and usually charge it ever 5-6 days.
However, it also allows me to view movies, listen to music, play games, surf the web, work on spreadsheets, all sorts of things. And it cost $138.
In other words, it offered me a multi-purpose device that just happens to have software available that makes reading books EASY. Fbreader is a great software package and it is FREE. It reads many formats, it rotates the text on the screen (makes it easy for lefties) and the device itself has a big beautiful touch screen that is beautiful.
But really, thanks Amazon, for supporting the concept of ebooks. Maybe it will help.
I’m rarely in the first wave that adopts a new electronic product, but holy cow, I want one of these things!
Neil Gaiman got to play with one a few months ago, and he really liked it. He likens it to an iPod - he almost never uses it at home, but the moment he’s on the road, it’s indispensable.
I see huge advantages when it comes to textbooks. Most textbooks for the public schools start at $40 and go up quickly from there. Parents often complain about their children having twenty pounds of textbooks in their backpack, and the books themselves take a lot of wear and tear. Teachers, like myself, are often frustrated by students who forget or lose their textbooks. I think if the Kindle manufacturers could come up with an extremely hardy version at a slightly lower price, schools would jump all over it. Private schools and colleges would go first, but even the public schools would get in on the game if they could secure grants or redirect their textbook budgets to this.
The other thing that excites me about this is the possibility of opening up the electronic market to authors. If Amazon and Kindle cooperate and offer writers the opportunity to put their books up in electronic format, then we could see an explosion in publishing, and authors might be able to make a living at what they do.
This has been talked about significantly in the biblioblogosphere this week (that’d be primarily the librarian blogs, y’all).
One person who had some interesting posts was Jason Griffey:
First post, impressed with the Kindle at first glance
Second, looking more closely at the issues
And another librarian blogger’s take on it, raising some interesting points as well: Free Range Librarian
Did anyone buy one, any reports?
The overall design is a bit strange, sort of dated looking. It looks like something you would have seen in an executive toy catalogue in 1992. “Universal Translator Pro” or something like that.
eInk is NOT backlit. You’d have to use one of those little clip-on lights to read in bed. That’s a killer for me, because I LOVE being able to read in bed with the lights out. I use a Palm Zire 71. I’ve currently got more than 50 books and stories on my 512M SD card.
And I’ve downloaded books multiple times from places like Fictionwise.com. Not all ebooks come crippled with DRM, either. And some are multi-platform readable.
I’ve stopped buying eReader (formerly Palm Reader) .pdb format books, because I’m afraid the support for the program is going to go away as Palm continues to falter. But I do have a fair number of Mobipocket (.prc) format books, some of which are DRM’d.
I ordered one of the fool things. It will be waiting for me when I get home for Christmas. I will report on it then.
For Fun, I looked for all the books on my Amazon recommendations in the Kindle store, many popular pulp titles were available. These were not:
Lord of the Rings
Bored of the Rings
Anything by Keith Olbermann
Driven to Distraction
Until Proven Innocent
Nuclear First Strike; Consequences of a Broken Taboo
The GI Offensive in Europe (Modern War Studies)
Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War
The Spice Route; A History
Oxford Companion to Food
Oxford Companion to American Food & Drink
The Penguin Companion to Food
A Thread Across the Ocean
Parting the Desert: The Creation of the Suez Canal
Sweetness and Power; The Place of Sugar in Modern History
The Middle-Class Millionaire
On the Front Lines by John Ellis
Anything by the ‘Real’ John Ellis
Parliament of Whores by P. J. O’Rourke
Anything (save The Wealth of Nations) by P. J. O’Rourke
Katrina Diary
Bird Brains; the Intelligence of Crows, Ravens, Magpies and Jays
Anything by Russell F. Weigley
The Cold War; A New History
Fast Tanks and Heavy Bombers: Innovation in the U.S. Army, 1917-1945 (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)
Consider the Eel: A Natural and Gastronomic History
Anything of the Schott’s Almanac series
The Seeds of Wealth
Coal; A Human History
The Last Days of Democracy
The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need by Andrew Tobias
Anything by Andrew Tobias
Coffee; A Dark History
Only Two books by Garrison Keillor
Not 9.99
America and the World Since 1945 $27.16
The Path Between the Seas $7.99
The Big Oyster $7.96
Homegrown Democrat $9.60
Sea of Thunder $7.99
The freakin’
The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is not available for Pete’s sake!