Look: you can buy me on Amazon now, for 99¢ cheap. It’s all through this strange new device Amazon is selling, called a Kindle, which is a fancy new e-book reader with some nice display technology and an absolutely evil business model. Now instead of buying books that you can do with as you please, you can lease them and get digital copies all bound up in DRM hindrances. The hardware is a step forward, the software lock-up of all the content is a big leap backwards, one that is going to doom it all to failure.
Kottke seems unimpressed, Business Week likes it, John Gruber hopes it flops. I’m with the nay-sayers.
Hey, is anyone reading this on a Kindle?
So, PZ..are you getting a cut from each subscription? Did they ask for permision to sell/lease your original content?
Let the mega-rich pay for what I can get for free.
And it’s so ugly, and doesn’t look like it’s comfortable to hold. Why can’t they just make an ebook that looks like a book? It opens like a book, it has two pages, a button to turn the page….and that’s really just about all I’d want.
Kindle – I haven’t seen a single snarky comment about why they didn’t just name it F451.
I don’t get a cut, but maybe Seed does (and I don’t begrudge them it). I doubt that it will bring in much revenue, though. How many blogs would you read if you had to pay 99¢/month for the privilege?
Lack of pdf support kills it for me and, I imagine, anybody else who has a great big pile of journal articles in pdf form.
I’m very interested in the answer to #1 as well.
Maybe Seed sold all their blogs?
On the major point, I’m not really the biggest fan of DRM. And I also really resent people feeling that they have a right to monitor what I do on something I paid good money for. I could understand the ad revenue stream being secured if they sold this at $99 instead of $399. But $399 should make them profit on manufacture. Thus, in my world of morality I own the device fully, and should be able to do whatever I want with it.
However, when people criticize DRM, no one has a reasonable alternative. The problem with no DRM and traditional revenue streams is that it’s trivial to copy digital information. It’s non trivial to photocopy a book. AND it’s already very protected against. (Take a published book to Kinko’s sometime and ask for a full copy.) People who say ‘Well, if I buy a book I can give it to a friend Rar Rar not fair.’ are forgetting that when you COPY software / data for a friend, YOU STILL HAVE THE DATA. When you give a book to a friend, you don’t have that book anymore.
Personally, what I would like to see, is a subscription model. I pay X $ a month, and I get access to a given library of books. Say all the C# programming books for $5 / month. All the books in this library whenever I want them. I stop paying, I lose access. It costs them practically nothing for you to access the data. The song business has already switched over to this way of doing things to great success.
I think that the thing looks OK, but the whole thing were everything on it is DRM encrusted and can be revoked by Amazon at any time just makes it irrelevant. John Gruber is right when he says that the killer way to market it would be by giving you the Kindle copy when you buy the real book.
Plus, if I leave a cheap paperback on the seat of the bus, it’s no big deal. Bleah.
So, is anyone selling a little USB-powered whatchamacallit broadcast device suitable for bypassing Amazon and loading this thing with our own files, yet? Or hacking a cable port into it? Silly useless pay-per-view thing otherwise.
I actually like it. I think I will probably get one although its a bit expensive for what it is. It doesn’t look great and the navigation/functionality seems a little clunky to me but this is definitely a device that I would find very useful. The DRM issues are of no real concern to me. Honestly, its difficult to even see how any of the “hindrances” would even become relevant. And .99/month to pay for a blog I read regularly is really a pittance although I don’t imagine that blogs would be my primary content.
Seriously, I travel a lot and something like this will really save me a lot of hassle. I think, in general, I will read a lot more because of this device. I am really surprised by all the negative reaction.
My morning’s notes about the Kindle:
* the lack of .pdf file support is odd, and only partially fixed by the free utility to convert .pdf files to the Mobipocket format which Kindle does support (Google on ‘Mobipocket’). This utility apparently is only for Windows, not Macs. (noted from AMZN’s reader reviews, which are remarkably frank and mixed)
* the Mac newsletter tidbits (tidbits.com) has a full and useful comparison of Kindle to the Sony book reader and to the iPhone. Apropos PZ’s situation here, it includes this wry comment: Kindle’s content offerings include the unique option to pay to subscribe to blogs that are otherwise free.
Wait a minute. Seed can sell the contents of this site without PZ’s permission? How does that work? Do they require you to give up your copyright in order to use scienceblogs.com?
Hey Paul!
Visit my blog sometime and tell me what you think, it’s called Answers in Genesis BUSTED, dedicated to exposing creationist deception.
http://aigbusted.blogspot.com
-Ryan
#12, yes, read the terms of service link at the bottom. You retain the copyright, but you give them the license in perpetuity to use it how ever they see fit…
I’ve been using a Sony Reader for about 6 months. It’s a wonderful device. Small, svelte, aesthetically pleasing, great battery life. I’d replace it immediately if I lost it. It’s nearly a perfect electronic paperback (needs more content on the Sony store).
The kindle looks awful. I wouldn’t give one house room.
Rather than pay 99 cents to read Pharyngula, I’ll just wait and spend thirty bucks on a hardcover of PZ’s magnum opus. . . By the way, when will that be on the shelves of my local Barnes-and-Borders-A-Million? ;-)
Re #9: It has a USB cable and accepts user-loaded files – text and audio. And it has SD memory card support.
6 or 8 years ago, I was thinking about buying a Palm, when I stumbled over the Baen Free Library. No DRM, no nothing – read them, share them. And then, since only the first hit is free, I found the other places that sell books in the required format, and that Project Gutenberg books could be converted…and I was hooked. I describe my Palm as “400 books and a deck of cards”, and I’m never lost for things to read when I’m waiting in a doctor’s office.
That’s the business model I’m interested in.
“by offering any Submissions through the Site, you grant to Seed Media the worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free, irrevocable, nonexclusive right and license to reproduce, modify, edit, publish, display, perform, adapt, distribute, sublicense and otherwise use and exploit such Submissions … in any and all forms and media, now or hereafter discovered, without compensation or attribution to you.”
That’s … disgusting. I had no idea Seed was doing that. I am so stunned that I don’t even know what to say, but it does seem like there may be an opportunity here to create a hosting site that is more respectful of authors rights.
Waaaaaay back in ’99 I got the good ole Rocket eBook for christmas. I *still* use it to this very day. It is a very solid machine and I for one am dissapointed in both the ‘leading’ ebooks for not living up to nearly ten year old tech. The Rocket eBook doesn’t have e-ink, true but it has (queue drumroll) a backlight! Lets me read while my girlfriend sleeps next to me without any light in her face. The battery life after almost 8 years of use is still a hefty 40 hours or so, easy to read one or two full books without recharging. And the best part? The software came with a converter to change any .doc or .html file into a non-DRMed ebook.
It has 8mb of memory on it, enough to keep about 6-10 books on there (depending on length and graphics) and an expansion slot so you can keep 100s of books on there.
The thing that kills me the most when I look at these new products is the interface. The REB (rocket ebook) had two buttons that you could swap functions on (next page/previous page). I have played with the sony ebook and will probably look over the kindle too but just looking at it my little old ebook *still* has the best interface.
/rant
I read the post title and thought it would be an exciting account of how PZ had been abducted by Christofascists and sentenced to burn at the stake. Imagine my disappointment when I saw the actual boring content.
Mark Pilgrim thinks it’s B.S. too…
This in not the iPod/iTunes business model, it’s the (new)Napster business model.
Who wants to rent their books? And use a device that works with only it’s own content.
It’s difficult to figure out how digital payment should work. My society’s journal has gone all digital, and though it’s lovely to be able to search and call up papers in seconds, the whole “stop paying and it goes away” is rotten, too. I have a bookshelf full of what my subscription bought me in years past, but if I lapse just once then everything digital all goes away. There should be something between.
Forgot the link…
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/11/19/the-future-of-reading
Don’t forget that you CAN put your own files on it – it’s not that locked down. And yes, it sucks that it doesn’t support PDF – but there are a bunch of nice, free PDF -> MOBI conversion utilities out there on the ‘net that you can use. I like this a lot more than Sony’s reader. In fact, this pretty much render’s Sony system dead in the water – their DRM-encumbered store is a ghost town. At least Amazon’s DRM-encumbered store is vibrant.
Technically one can read blogs without having to pay Kindle – just browse anywhere using its built-in brain-dead browser and prepaid EVDO service and see what you get for a mostly text-only display of any web page. But it’ll likely be bugly – they intended this to give you access to wikipedia.
OTOH it will display web-mail pages (as text), so it can serve as a ersatz blackberry too.
Instead of berating the Japanese for harvesting what they have harvested for centuries (whales), you throw in a cultural attack to boot; why don’t you do something productive with that blubber of your own, like don’t eat so much and/or sitting on your butt.
Have you ever even been to Japan?
And of course the default assumption from the industry is that everyone will abuse this no matter what, and that the effect of free advertising it gives the industry either does not exist or will be swamped. Yet oddly enough, everyone I know who downloads music, for instance, either picks up a few songs (the equivalent of what they’d hear on the radio) or, if they like the band and want more, starts buying CDs, UNLESS the people receiving the money have clearly identified themselves as someone a reasonable
person would not wish to have their money going to.
We already know why the industry thinks everyone else in the world is a parasite. What’s your excuse?
Personally, what I would like to see is a government-funded free distribution network, strict penalties for copyright violations with monetary gain or intentional failure to properly attribute, maintaining the same basic model for physical copies of information, a simple and effective donation scheme enforced by social pressure, and the promotion of the ethic against the present default assumption of “I should make a buck every time I lift a goddamn finger.”
I think there is a huge market just waiting for e book technology that delivers on the promise. Unfortunately, the Kindle isn’t it.
The Sony ebook reader or the Hanlin v3 seem to outclass this thing. Does one really need to be able to access books off a cellular network when the thing holds 200 books? And what the hell is having to convert PDFs all about. For an extra hundred dollars, I think not.
I read a lot of ebooks and subscribe to Audible, so Kindle is something I’d ordinarily be interested in. I have to say that I was completely underwhelmed. The lack of PDF support struck me as a glaring omission, and paying for blogs that you can get for free is for those who don’t know how to use RSS. My nearly 3 year old iPaq does the trick for me, and it also stores my calendar and the last 5 days worth of email.
About that DRM thing – the technology exists to allow borrowing of digital content, but most publishers have chosen not to enable it.
There should be a happy medium in digital payment business models. For example, eMusic, a seller of (mostly) indie music in mp3 format, works by subscription. Every month you can download a certain number of tracks, based on your subscription level. They’re yours to keep. eMusic also keeps track of what you’ve downloaded so you can download it again if anything happens to your files – even if you cancel your subscription. You can start up again at any time, and still have access to your history just like it was, and get new music.
It seems like science journals could do something similar – if you were a subscriber when a paper was published or at any time after, you should be able to access it. If it was published after you cancelled, it’s reasonable for them to expect you to subscribe again to get it. That way content you’ve already paid for is still available to you in perpetuity.
I guess that’s just the hippy idealist in me, expecting people to be excellent to each other.
400 bucks plus ten bucks a book.
Rip. Off.
If you want your spouse, etc. to read the great book you just read, what do you do?
Hey, honey, you really should get one of these Kindle things. I just read this great book. I’d let you read it, but I’m reading something else now.
These things have been around for years.
No one likes them.
A system that involves people having to pay for access to science journals strikes you as “idealistic?”
The late ’80s called — it wants its industrial design back. Seriously, in the age of Apple, how can anyone put out a device so fugly? And the last thing I want is yet another gadget in my, well, not pocket, unless I’m wearing David Byrne’s Big White Suit.
My preference is far more for convergence — give me a service that provides books for the iPhone and I’m there (at least, once the iPhone comes to Canada…). But don’t give me a clunky, ugly, stand-alone, special-purpose, proprietary content device, ‘cuz I won’t buy it — I’ll go to a library instead.
What I would buy straight away if available would be a version of the Sony reader with a touchscreen and stylus, like the Nintendo DS (and the ability to save changes to the pdf obviously). This would be awesome for scientists, you could carry your pdf library everywhere without having to drag around a laptop and annotate your papers like the hardcopies.. without this feature electronic readers just don’t cut it for me, what’s the point of being able to read a paper if you can’t scribble all over it..
say what?!
here i thought they’d at least have the sense to copy the Gillette business model. i’d buy an e-book for a buck, buy ’em in bulk for 75 cents, and i might stretch as far as five bucks for a text i really, really want in electronic form. but if i can get a paperback cheaper, why on earth would i not just do that?
and yeah, i like the Baen Free Library too. i’ve read most of it on my old PalmOS clone, in mobipocket format. ’tis good, i’d even pay for books that way, but not as much as i’d pay for a paperback. fuhgeddaboudit.
Bezos:
“This isn’t a device, it’s a service.”
This isn’t a device, it’s a pipeline to your pocketbook.
Another happy Baen/PDA/MobiPocket reader here, high-res Sony Clie SJ30, color screen with the jog dial, makes reading possible while walking, climbing stairs, hanging from the strap on the crowded bus. I’ve always got books to read, and much else, loaded on it.
Tools for conversion: RixEdit; TextSoap; PorDiBle; iSilo
I’d rather get an iPhone or a future apple tablet device that you can read e-books on.
Apple has always handled fonts and on screen representations better.
I’m a design nerd… I would get pissed off look at that screen.
…forgot to add: the Baen Free Library has got me interested in authors i might have otherwise never read. as a direct result of that, i have purchased brand-new Baen books — hardcovers, no less! — partly because i knew i’d like the novels, and partly to get the free, un-DRM’d ebooks on CD’s that i knew would be included.
in fact, three of the four hardcovers i’ve purchased the last decade, i made the decision based on that DRM-free electronic mini-library.
so when i hear CEO’s pissing and moaning about how they “need” DRM, i automatically tune the bastards out. my own experience tells me they’re either lying or incompetent. any business that can’t survive without DRM is almost certainly an industry that doesn’t deserve to survive, or that shouldn’t be run as a for-profit business at very least.
Stem cell breakthrough! Stem cells from skin cells:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/20/AR2007112000546.html?hpid=topnews
Am I the only one who thinks the Kindle looks like a prop from the set for Battlestar Galactica? (the original 1978 series, of course) Is it supposed to be ‘retro’??
Um. Do the people selling this know what kindling is used for? I understand that there are other meanings, but there’s some weird dystopian shit going on here.
Either that or from the 80’s buck rogers.
Erin Gray is hot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=Buck+Rogers+TV&go=Go
Heh. My first thought was to wonder if it caused epileptic seizures.
Brendan S: I pay X $ a month, and I get access to a given library of books. Say all the C# programming books for $5 / month. All the books in this library whenever I want them. I stop paying, I lose access.
Sounds like O’Reilly’s Safari. I’ve used it to look stuff up (I’ve even used it to search through books that I have a hard copy of in front of me, know there’s info in it but can’t find it–that’s useful), but really can’t get into reading a whole book online.
Internet content: free.
Library: free.
Hmm.
Someone’s going to have to explain this to me, because here’s how it looks from where I sit:
I’ve spent or am spending:
1500$, give or take, on a laptop
40$/mo on high-speed internet
0$ on an RSS reader.
Now my options are:
a) get pharyngula delivered to my RSS reader for no more than I pay for internet already.
or
b) spend 399$ on a device, and 99c/mo on a service, and get pharyngula delivered to that device.
Is there some magic that makes this not a no-brainer?
When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.
Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild, 2002
You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.
Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service, 2007
cribbed from Future of Reading
Re: #36
What I would buy straight away if available would be a version of the Sony reader with a touchscreen and stylus, like the Nintendo DS (and the ability to save changes to the pdf obviously).
Have a look at the iRex iLiad. iRex are an offshoot from Philips. See http://www.irextechnologies.com/products/iliad
Also check out the MobileRead forums for good eBook info:
http://www.mobileread.com/
Ian
Assuming the price comes down over time something like this could become a viable alternative to expensive text books.
The eInk devices with screens the same size as the Sony Reader, Amazon Kindle, Bookeen CyBook are no good for text books and A4 or Letter sized content. This is especially true for PDF documents in these larger page sizes. They Reader and Kindle et al. should be thought off as electronic paperback replacements. Ideal for fiction. Rubbish at other stuff.
The iRex Iliad is more suitable for displaying A4 content such as PDFs. See this thread at MobilRead:
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=12651
I’d love an iLiad but it’s not in the impulse buy price bracket. The Sony Reader was though :-)
Hopefully Apple will release an A4 sized device using the iPhone/iPod touch technology.
Ian
Assuming the price comes down over time something like this could become a viable alternative to expensive text books.
True, assuming they actually charge significantly less for the book as well, which I doubt.
Libraries should have these. They could be checked out, and would have free access to everything you can get at the library for anyone with a card.
All business models that depend for revenue on the endless repackaging of others’ work with only marginal compensation to the authors will go the way of the RIAA and the dodo bird. (Brutally clubbed to death by the marketplace.)
melior:
I’ve heard of some libraries looking into print-on-demand technology — pay a few bucks, get a printout of whatever rare book you want rather than taking the library’s only non-circulating copy.
And the Sony reader is the first ebook reader I’ve seen that’s actually truly impressive (it was the first time I’ve seen E-Ink in action — it looked like a mockup until I pushed a button), but I do agree that more PDA-like functionality is a necessity.
#3 hit it.
Hell, I have a laptop that weighs about what a book does. (and cost 399… ironic, that!)
If an ebook were two sideways screens, a forward and back button thumb-accessible when holding it at the fold, light enough TO hold at the fold one-handed, and a decent book-getting and/or random-access interface *even if* that interface weren’t convenient to use when holding at the fold – hell, stick a mostly-numeric keypad with a small B&W screen on the front! …
… well, I’d be down for that. Because at that point, the ebook would be more convenient than real books. (Doubly so if it gave me a way to buy books without effort.)
Until then, and even then if the price is too high? Nope, uh-uh, not happening.
Give me an ebook reader that works like a book and is at least as easy to read lying upside-down in bed, and you’ve got a deal. Don’t do that, and I’m not interested.
#28 Azkyroth:
Because I have seen the executives at the company I work for trade GIGS of songs back and forth for their iPods. People for whom $1 per track for what they want wouldn’t make a dent in their personal finances just copy and steal the things.
Sounds fine to me. Except I don’t really trust our government to do this, but that’s a different story.
Personally, I really with that our culture would change and that people would understand that providing ANY service is valuable and worth something. Be it writing a song, diagnosing illness, repairing a computer, or legal arguing.
When “The Right To Read” came out in 1997, I thought it was ridiculously paranoid. It wasn’t many years before I had to change that opinion to “sadly prophetic”.
On the other hand, if history repeats itself, it shouldn’t be too long before someone cracks this. Then, like the other most popular DRM systems for music, movies, and software, it will stop being an inconvenience to anyone except legitimate customers who scrupulously follow the new laws.
I got as far as reading “Amazing new wireless reading device” and realised that this thing is the Segway of literature.
Of course it’s going to fail; it’s proprietary tech and it’s ephemeral.
Books are truly an open information medium, and they have a chance of surviving centuries, provided they’re well looked-after. NASA can’t even read its own 1960s-era Mariner probe tapes any more because they’re fragile and used technology that no longer exists.
Until digital publishing becomes as robust, free and ubiquitous as bound books, it’s never going to be anything more than a gadget for reading periodicals, and for that we’ve got web-enabled cellular phones.
Warren is right. It’s really, really hard to come up with anything to beat a good, old-fashioned physical book. The only form of obsolescence you need to worry about is the language itself. (OK, and cheap bindings, but you can still hold ’em together with rubber bands.)
If those thirty-nine-pound digital photo frames had the ability to display plain text, HTML or PDFs as well as JPGs, they’d be almost perfect. All the software can be had Open Source, too, so no DRM.
The classic example I thought of years ago is, Would you take this to the beach?
If I dropped my copy of “Water for Elephants” in the sand, or got ketchup on it, or any one of a thousand disasters that can happen at a beach, it’s no big deal.
First time I drop a Kindle between the parking spot and the sand, it’s over; $399, down the drain.
It’s really too bad in a way because, you know, all those trees. But I’d feel better about recycling a paperback than a Kindle, that’s for damn sure.
So Steve @ #40….you mean something like this?
Another Palm based reader here. It works with Gutenberg, Baen and a few others. It also has a tide calculator, an appointment calendar, all my recipes, my address book, and other freeware and cheapware. It fits in my pants pocket.
The Kindle is a closed system. That means no tideware, no little Basic compiler, no oversized stopwatch, unless Amazon says so. It’s also big and bulky, and it looks big and bulky. It has the aesthetics of an old fashioned microfilm reader. Besides, what does it have that a laptop doesn’t? DRM?
If Amazon were serious, they’d give the reader away free and sell the books. That’s what the cellphone companies and razor blade companies do. Amazon is just not being being serious.
Of course you realize, if this thing does take off, I’m going to start labeling its users “Kindlegarteners.” :P
Get an OLPC instead–built in ‘screen reader’ better interface. Same price, with half tax-deductible and a matching second goes to a needy child:
http://laptopgiving.org/en/index.php
And no DRM, so freedom remains intact.
[Disclaimer: I work for Amazon; this is a personal opinion.]
Back in 2001, Apple introduced the iPod and iTunes. It had DRM, because the record labels insisted on it. Apple changed the music business, and six years later DRM for music is mostly dead.
To listen to most of these comments, Apple should never have launched the iPod and iTunes, because DRM is so evil.
Take the long view, people. Changing a big, conservative industry takes time.
As for the Kindle’s styling and ease of use, see the review in my blog.