I really want to like ebooks, I really do, however I can't stand the thought of purchasing a device that assumes I am a thief. It's the digital equivalent of employees standing at the door of a store, checking bags and receipts. Except worse. The fact that I can't share books is terrible, I wouldn't be able to read books in open formats even more so.
The kindle is definitely the nicest reader, however it seems to Sony reader is the most open.
This is only an issue if you're buying e-books from Amazon. There are plenty of wonderful texts available in the public domain, already formatted for the Kindle [0,1], and plenty of other options for public domain texts in other supported formats [2,3].
But regardless, the Kindle natively supports PDF, HTML, and plain text, and should you want to, Amazon provides a tool to convert those and other formats (including ePub) to the Kindle's proprietary mobipocket-derived format. They even provide Linux binaries [4].
Don't want to deal with conversions and manually managing your library? Just use Calibre [5]; it's open source.
And that's exactly why I placed my order: I'm not willing to accept Amazon's DRM, which will force me to read older works to get value out of the device. A goal I've had since reading a quote dubiously attributed to Einstein: "Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else."
The quote is not so dubiously attributed, here's how it appears in his "Ideas and Opinions" 1954, Crown Publishers:
"ON CLASSIC LITERATURE Written for the Jungkaufmann, a monthly publication of the Schweizerischer Kaufmaennischer Verein, Jugendbund, February 29, 1952.
Somebody who reads only newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else. And what a person thinks on his own without being stimulated by the thoughts and experiences of other people is even in the best case rather paltry and monotonous.
There are only a few enlightened people with a lucid mind and style and with good taste within a century. What has been preserved of their work belongs among the most precious possessions of mankind. We owe it to a few writers of antiquity that the people in the Middle Ages could slowly extricate themselves from the superstitions and ignorance that had darkened life for more than half a millennium. Nothing is more needed to overcome the modernist's snobbishness."
I have to agree. The receipt checkers at stores annoy me to no end.
But DRM is much worse. It prevents me from doing things that it seems like I ought to be able to do. If the kindle did not use DRM, I would buy one right now. As it is, I am staying primarily with physical books for the moment.
Unimportant tangent: Is checking receipts and looking into bags really legal in the (I would assume) US? It isn't in Germany and if employees hold you against your will they better be damn sure that you actually stole something or they are in serious trouble (as in: possibly going to jail trouble).
" It isn't in Germany and if employees hold you against your will they better be damn sure that you actually stole something or they are in serious trouble (as in: possibly going to jail trouble)."
The USA (or least New York state) has laws against false imprisonment, false arrest, and unlawful detainment.
I can at least understand the convenience objections to DRM. "You bought it, so you should be able to put it on any device you want." I don't agree, but I understand it.
But this moral objection to DRM I don't get. News flash: actuarially speaking, "you" are almost certainly a thief. It's not like Amazon's suppliers are crazy for thinking their property might get stolen.
There isn't any actual property to steal. That's the thing, steal is the wrong word to use, so is thief. I don't think there are words that exist in the english language to encompass the moral implications of downloading media without paying the creator and the producer of that media.
I do firmly believe the negative moral implications of content producers taking so much off the top of content creators take of the transaction to be much worse than the implications of someone downloading a file without paying.
This argument is all about perspective (lots of different right answers). Mine is just one that tends to support the creator not the producer, by attending live shows and book signings. Live appearances are where creators make the money.
Maybe all the content creators need a payment system/network for their web sites that allows guilty parties to pay money directly to them so they don't have to feel bad about downloading their content from sources other than the producers.
I need to change the oil on my lawn mower. I could spend the 45 minutes it would take to get to an approved oil disposal facility--or I could just dump it in the strip of weeds next to my fence.
The latter will cause no measurable harm. Hell, it might even kill some of the weeds that I don't like there, but because of the way the ground slopes down as it approaches the fence I can't reasonably mow. Even if some of my oil makes it the 50 feet or so down to the ditch that carries rainwater runoff to (eventually) Puget Sound, it will be so dilute by then there will be no measurable harm.
So, is it OK for me to just dump my oil?
No, because even though my dumping would cause no measurable harm, if everyone dumped it would cause great harm to public resources, such as Puget Sound.
The situation is similar with intellectual property. We've set up a public resource--the IP law framework--which gives intellectual goods certain legal attributes designed to make them behave similar to real property, so as to allow for the use of the same economic systems that we use for dealing with physical goods to be applied to intangible goods.
When an individual ignores that framework, he's behaving just like someone dumping oil on their weed patch. They cause no measurable harm, but if a lot of people did it, it would destroy a public resource.
No, because even though my dumping would cause no measurable harm, if everyone dumped it would cause great harm to public resources, such as Puget Sound."
Dumping oil cause SO MUCH measurable harm. It is so interesting how oil spread too thin on water(near molecular size, in fact this is a method to measure its size) and enormously change the air-water interface of big quantities of water and so its properties(chemical concentration(oxigen diffusion) and heat transfer, surface tension), killing a lot of biomass,affecting trees(you can kill trees just with oil(I have seen that with just one can of car oil)as it affects its roots, fish, insects and water wells.
Its harm is VERY measurable.
Biological Oil degrade easily, industrial oil not so.
I don't have to wade into the philosophical argument here.
All I have to say is, you're getting offended that Amazon's suppliers think you will renege on the terms under which they provide you books and "liberate" them for the betterment of mankind as you perceive it.
You really have no business feigning outrage here, because the concerns of Amazon's suppliers are obviously well-founded. You might not renege, but given the opportunity, a huge fraction of all readers clearly will. Hell, they'll do it to avoid paying NINETY NINE CENTS to an independent iPhone software developer.
That's a little more pejorative than I would like, but less so than "thief". We all take more than we give (leech) from time to time. Often we do this with the expectation that we will pay it back - or pay it forward. For examples, consider children, or someone receiving welfare, or someone who buys a cup of coffee in a busy cafe and then takes up a table for three hours. This is a spectrum, too: if your community thinks that you have crossed some line, you will be regarded as a thief.
I like the anonymous payback idea: it could be as simple as a paypal link on the author's web site. If that became widespread, it would be interesting to study the data.
Leeching is more appropriate I think, though I still don't like it. It fits, because it encompasses the thought of "I wouldn't spend money on this, but, if it is free I can't complain too much".
"Freeloader" is the best term I think. It even sounds like "download." The problem with piracy is that it's a tragedy of the commons with the people who buy media subsidizing the consumption of the rest, so that seems like a fair word to use.
The assumption is not that you are a thief, but that some of the people who buy it are thieves.
When you visit the mall, there are security cameras. There are security guards, there are those beeper scanner things at exits. There are ink tags, there are locked cabinets. There are display models while the real item hides "in the back". Why are you not up in arms about how the shopping mall "assumes you are a thief"?
I've only been in a mall twice in the last 5 years.
However, point taken. The issue I have with DRM however, is fundamentally different. When someone steals a piece of tangible merchandise, the store is out because they actually borrowed money to purchase that merchandise up front, and has to eat the cost. There is no rational argument that can setup an equivalent with digital media. Additionally, There is absolutely no reason any ebook should cost more than $10 when the hardcover is available for $16-$20. Yes there is overhead in providing these items for download, but much of that overhead is directly tied to keep people from stealing it. Neat, so take $3 off the price of your ebook and more people will be willing to buy it.
Book publishers make enough money off the title to produce _Freedom: A Novel_ by John Franzen in hardcover at $15.
By your logic, they have no business charging $75 for Harris' _Trading and Exchanges_ (a bible of market microstructure); Harris' book has a comparable number of pages and the same binding.
You are essentially advocating for fiat pricing, and against the market. You can make a consistent argument based on that, but it will wildly mismatch the way pretty much all of western civilization works.
I should clarify: I don't mean to say I want pricing to be flat by any means, even if my original post implied it. What I meant to say is that the ebook is not cheaper than the paperback or the hardcover.
Example: Cryptonomicon is $8.99 as a softcover, but, the ebook version is $10.99
The notion that things on computers are less "real" than things in the real world is one of my pet moral crusades; probably not surprising given my background. With that in mind: I don't start from the premise that ebooks should cost less than paper books.
In particular, ebook versions of reference works are more valuable in electronic form.
I start from the premise that eBooks should cost less, because you get less. No right to lend, no right to sell, no way to insure against loss or theft, no guarantee you can even read it a couple of years down the road if the platform fails in the market. In effect, you "buy" something but never actually own it. You'd have to drop the price pretty low to interest me under these circumstances.
(I've picked up a few $5 O'Reilly titles on the App Store, but probably wouldn't even have done that if they weren't basically DRM-free ePubs with a reader wrapped around them.)
I value my electronic copy of _Infinite Jest_ more highly than my physical copy:
* The physical copy is run ragged because you have to flip from the front to the back of the book constantly
* In the electronic copy, if I tap the word catastatic in the text, I'm immediately presented with the definition. In the paper copy, it's just annoying enough to look that up that I'm inclined to try to derive the meaning from context, which is a trap DFW seems inclined to spring mercilessly.
* Similarly, in the electronic version, and anyone who has read IJ will see immediately the value of this, when I tap a footnote number, I'm immediately taken to the text of the footnote, and I can instantly return back to the text. This speeds up my reading time of the book significantly.
Do these factors matter to you? Of course they don't. I'm a dork and I'm just namedropping a prestige book to make a point in the most puffy way possible. But: I value these features a lot more than "right to lend", "right to sell", "insurance against loss", etc.
And in a free market, I'm allowed to do that. And, though this is a stretch and you won't be happy to hear me claim this, I think I'm closer to the opinion of the bulk of the market than you are.
The marginal cost is a lot less for an ebook, though. Sure, the sunk costs are the same (actually writing the book), but the costs to produce, distribute and store the book are significantly less, so I'd expect a discount of a few dollars. And yes, also because I'm foregoing the ability to lend it out or resell it. Oh, also the technology is still pretty new, so I still don't think you're getting the same experience as with a copy of one of Knuth's books, or another well-made hardback.
"Additionally, There is absolutely no reason any ebook should cost more than $10 when the hardcover is available for $16-$20."
The price is what the market will bear, period.
As to manufacturing costs, the cost of producing a hardcover book and a mass-market paperback are negligible, the prices of those editions are not set based on cost of production but on time of availability.
Book pricing is fundamentally broken right now. And the vast majority of authors do not make a reasonable income from their work. Books are priced as commodities, the same as you might see prices for fruit or vegetables in the supermarket. The way that authors make the most money is by milking high demand for their books from the early buyers through hardcover sales. This is why the hardcover comes out first at a higher price, because there's a lot more profit built into the earliest release. But readers would find it unfair if the paperback edition came out first and cost 2x as much as normal paperbacks for the first several months. The perception of value of hardbacks offsets this feeling, even though the price of hardback editions usually falls down to only a few dollars more than the paperback after a while. Much the same as 1st class / coach class on airplanes, the higher paying customers help subsidize the lower paying customers.
However, there is no hardback/paperback differentiator in eBooks. If the eBook price is lowered a few dollars relative to the paperback and eBooks become the dominant form of book then authors and publishers are faced with a crisis, the inability to make a profit on books. Keeping eBook prices close to paperback books helps solve the problem somewhat because the lower cost of production allows for a higher profit margin, though not as high as for hardbacks.
Ultimately, it's not the wad of pressed wood pulp that readers value, per se, but the content itself, so there is a reasonable justification that the paperback price should be the price floor for any edition of the book, regardless of media. So far this seems to have held, as today's eBook pricing still results in very lively sales.
It remains to be seen what the ultimate answer is to this crisis, but it's important to recognize the seriousness of it.
Sadly, lots of them are now $13, up from the flat $10 that Amazon used to charge for all best sellers. Those prices seem high. The fact that e-books involve no printing, binding, shipping, distributing or taking back and shredding unsold copies ought to save you something. And it’s outrageous that you can’t sell or even give away an e-book when you’re finished with it. You paid for it; why shouldn’t you be allowed to pass it on? (End of rant.)
Argh. This isn't how pricing works. If it was, Photoshop would cost 40 cents.
It will be this way until some upstart disrupts the industry taking a smaller cut for routing authors directly to customers side stepping the old publishing houses.
I'll be happy to hear that authors are getting (say) 80% of the $15 that books end up costing, but that doesn't change the fact that book pricing has nothing whatsoever to do with materials and binding and whatnot.
> Argh. This isn't how pricing works. If it was, Photoshop would cost 40 cents.
They aren't saying it should only cost what it costs to manufacture it. They are simply trotting out the discussion of why, when production costs are lower, an ebook has to cost $9.99, when the physical book is also $9.99.
Fortunately, I've been finding quite often that the eBook on Amazon is a sizable discount off a hard copy.
That's right, they're not saying that it should cost exactly what it costs to manufacturing it. But they are saying there's a cost basis to the price of a book. Nonsense. Book prices have almost nothing to do with physical costs. _Trading and Exchanges_ costs $75. _The Nature of Technology_ costs $10. Both are hardcovers currently in print.
The difference in those costs reflects supply and demand. Books are priced by the market, not by cost plus fixed markup.
The music industry lost 10 years believing that DRM works and it may never recover. Now the publishing industry is looking to do the same . . .
Software is the only medium in which DRM has any hope of succeeding long-term, and that's only because it typically needs to be managed as a service. Video can tolerate it for now because the file sizes are too large to conveniently separate from the physical media, but that won't be true for long.
For most people, DRM doesn't bother them at all until stuff stops working.
So far, DVDs pretty much play in every DVD player. (If less PC makers would ship Windows without third party DVD software, more people would care.)
Music was closest to having real DRM problems, but almost every non-hacker I know is perfectly fine with Apple's DRM because they only listen to music in iTunes or on an iPod. If other devices ever really became popular, non-DRM music might finally become essential to the average person.
So as long as the average person only uses the Kindle (or Nook or Sony) and never tries to port their DRMed ebooks to a new, incompatible device, they won't feel the pain of DRM. But first we need average people to start using ereaders for a while, which I think is close to happening.
Sadly, I think book DRM could be successful. Amazon is trying to create a de facto platform - rather than just a device - and so long as they port it to as many devices as they can, it will do well. Many are avoiding Apple's book service for this reason.
Game consoles have been successful so far with closed systems, and they've learned over the years how to improve their security, a key one being forced firmware updates.
That's a very particular case because no one has the expectation of being able to play a game for one system on another, and there are legitimate technical reasons for that being hard to do.
The music industry lost 10 years believing that DRM works and it may never recover.
I think it's fair to say that they still believe it - or rather, they haven't moved on to the only valid business model in this day and age: music as a service.
To wit, pg's advice to wannabe music startups: "Don't do it, and if you do, be prepared for a long and bloody fight".
I don't find the Nook's touch screen to be "balky" at all, at least in comparison to any touchscreen phone. In fact, I think that the use of a touchscreen instead of a hardware keyboard opens the door for a lot more design flexibility.
I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. Based off pictures, it's a good deal smaller and by conjecture lighter than the Kindle 2, which is really quite small and light already. So much so I'm having a hard time saying "no" to one.
I understand the need for keyboard on smartphones where you might want to browse, type text, ssh or whatever... But what's its purpose on a reader?
UPDATE: Thanks for quick response. I really haven't thought of this, these uses make the device better than I thought. I really wish Amazon will start selling these devices here in Russia (and in 100+ other countries as well) so I can wholeheartedly recommend it. Meanwhile, the local market is owned by Chinese knock-offs sold for $300, while Amazon, Barnes&Noble and Sony don't seem to be interested.
I use it to write quick notes/thoughts inside the book as I'm reading -- new ideas, questions I have, follow-ups, etc (amazon stores the location of the note). It's much slower than pencil, but the benefit is that it's synced to the cloud, and you can actually find your notes afterwards (how often do you go through the margins of old books?).
The kindle is definitely the nicest reader, however it seems to Sony reader is the most open.