An Acerbic Look At the Future of Reading 318
theodp writes "Using Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' own words against him, Mark Pilgrim offers his chilling take on The Future of Reading with a mash-up of Bezos' Open Letter to the Authors Guild, the Amazon Kindle Terms of Service, Steven Levy's Newsweek article on the Kindle, 1984, and Richard Stallman's 'The Right to Read.'"
Ok, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Nerd = luddite. (Score:5, Interesting)
Part of the nerd world tends to be life on the "bleeding edge" of technology. While a nerd may not always own the latest and greatest, he or she will tend to at least follow the news and allow that to influence their purchases. They probably got involved in the internet, BBSing, mobile internet, and any number of other technologies before their non-nerd friends.
But today, we have DRM. I've bought DRM, and I've skipped purchases because of DRM. DRM really annoys me, because it interferes with my interest in the latest techology. While the Kindle might not have been a "must-buy" item for me at its current price, if it were to be subsidized below $100, it would have entered my consumer radar, had it not been afflicted with the restrictions Amazon has placed. While I currently subscribe to a music service, (Rhapsody, if it matters) I tend to buy music that I wish to keep on old-fashioned CD. I'll rent DVDs, but I'll seldom buy them because I don't want to violate the DMCA to get them on my PMP.
Blu-Ray? HD-DVD? I have no idea; who's farting on my pizza less?
When I go out to eat, I don't have someone screwing up my food on purpose, and when I'm getting a haircut, they don't reserve the right to shave areas I'm not supposed to be able to see - why is it then that all of these great technologies have to come with a little "oh by the way..." restriction?
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:WTF? That's incredibly stupid! (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Fair compensation in a digital world (Score:5, Interesting)
1st Objection - How does an author get started? Who is going to pay a penny for an unknown author to write something?
1st Answer - New authors just have to suck it up, the way the majority already do today and give away some of their work in order to develop a reputation.
2nd Objection - How is an author going to make a bazillion gazillion dollars if their book is super-duper popular? The price is fixed before release, what if they under-price it?
2nd Answer - If the book is super-duper popular, by definition that means there will be lots and lots of people who liked it enough to pony up for the NEXT book. So the author can increase their asking price for their next work based on the popularity of their previous work.
3rd Objection - How can millions of people all pay a dollar each to an author's escrow account?
3rd Answer - They can't, at least not without a lot of overhead. Today. But that's just a business opportunity waiting for the right person to come along and start the next paypal.
4th Objection - What if nobody is willing to pay the author's asking price?
4th Answer - That's business. Either lower the price, or cancel the offer. At least this way very little time and money gets spent on creating a product that no one wants to buy. It ain't a perfect system but at least the feedback comes from the actual consumers rather than some intermediate businessman whose only purpose is to sell eyeballs for advertising dollars.
Re:Is this really news? (Score:3, Interesting)
Fact of the matter is, all those things you mention are there for a reason. You take those away, something else bad happens. Don't just say X is bad and therefore should be taken away. X is also good and you have to make sure that the good is preserved.
This is why I hate op-eds. They only point out the bad without saying anything good and make the solution sound too simplistic. It's also why I hate both extremes of politics.
Re:WTF? That's incredibly stupid! (Score:3, Interesting)
eBooks are also a benefit of membership to the ACM [acm.org].
Re:Ok, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Isn't this sort of like (Score:4, Interesting)
I used to feel the same way about books, until I started one of the Baen.com [baen.com] ebooks online and found myself reading the whole thing in front of my computer. It turned out that this particular book had a sequel that was also part of the Baen's free library and so I downloaded that too. This time, however, I spent a little bit of time coercing the ebook into the plucker format so that I could read it on my palm.
Next thing I knew I had purchased the entire series, including the final version of the book as a $20 advanced reader copy so that I could get it before it came out in print. What's more, I realized that what I really liked was reading, not books. All of a sudden I saw used book stores for the creepy, smelly places that they really are instead of the magical place of wonder that I had built them up to be in my head.
I liked being able to fit an entire library in my pocket. I liked being able to read in the dark without waking my wife. I liked being able to search my book collection with grep. I liked the fact that I no longer got ink on my hands from a cheap paperback, or had to worry about breaking the spine of a book. Most of all I liked the fact that I no longer had to plan time to read. I always had my palm with me, and so whenever I got a bit of time, even just a few minutes, I could make progress on whatever it was that I was reading. You can't do that with a book, unless you happen to be a security guard.
What's more, even including the price of the pda ($70) I was actually saving money by reading ebooks. I did this by only purchasing unencrypted ebooks, which are generally priced at paperback prices (or less), and by utilizing resources like Project Gutenberg [gutenberg.org]
The real reason that ebooks have not taken off to this point has nothing to do with the format, and everything to do with the price of ebooks and ebook readers. The Kindle is a perfect example. Seriously, who wants to pay $400 for a dedicated ebook reader? I will grant Amazon.com that the price of the books for the device are mostly reasonable. They are still a little steep, considering the fact that they will be delivered digitally, but not as bad as most ebook vendors. However, $400 will buy a large pile of hardback books.
Eventually, the ebook folks are going to get things right, and that will be that for books. Oh, there will still be some folks that stick to their books in the same way that some music lovers still purchase vinyl, but the mainstream will move on.
Re:Is this really news? (Score:5, Interesting)
One sad element is that the technician class, of which almost everyone here at Slashdot is a member, has a tendency to the mistaken belief that they will be a part of the plutocracy, just because they can work on the plumbing of the information network that increasingly belongs to the real plutocrats. In reality, they are no better off than the car valet, who believes himself the equal of the jet setter, simply because he is allowed to drive the luxury car from the garage to the curb. The ugly secret is that their salaries, even $100k/yr, in support of their $150k per year lifestyles, is locking them further and further into digital serfdom.
How often I see these newly minted Web 2.0 masters, with their adjustable rate jumbo loans and 42" HDTVs and >$25k in credit card debt, who are convinced they are in charge of their lives and that they are somehow superior to the working-class when in fact the only thing that separates them from the young women sewing shoes in a Vietnamese factory is their enormous debt and high-calorie diets.
I think before the end of the next decade, long before the US sees its first black president, we will come to realize that we have more in common with the illegal-alien day laborers and the North African immigrants who are rioting in France than we do with the Mitt Romneys and George Bushes of the world.
Having become familiar with the plight of the upper-middle or middle-class American who has the ill fortune and bad manners to become sick and require health care and be unable to work, (a story eloquently, and only a tiny bit hyperbolically, told in Michael Moore's "Sicko"), and the middle-aged, advanced degree worker who found himself on the butt-end of the sick joke known as "outsourcing", or the two-income/two kids young professionals who have found that losing one's job to corporate "consolidation" doesn't come with one of those solid-golden parachute exit package, the last decade has served to radicalize me. I no longer see being an enthusiastic consumer as being the same as a loyal citizen, nor do I believe that "what's good for GM (or Microsoft, or AT&T, or Citicorp, or Haliburton) is good for America". I have peeked behind the curtain to find that the free-market orthodoxy that whispers in our ear that 9-figure "performance bonuses" and exploration subsidies to oil companies who have just enjoyed record profits, and a 13000 Dow, and "globalization" will all somehow "trickle down" to the rest of us, and the working-class families who will lose their homes to foreclosure while Countryside gets a nice fat bailout is all part of how a healthy economy works, is really little more than a dodge by those teflon "leaders" who seem to get rich no matter how their corporations perform or how badly the economy tanks.
It's all degenerating quickly. And like battered wives, we continue to pretend that another election is going to "turn things around", and we believe the politicians and their enabling media that it's somehow going to be different this time around. That's why I'm using the little bit of breathing room that my decades of hard work and frugal living have gotten me to do everything I can to subvert the meat-grinder of our corporate magesterium.
I get the problems: (Score:4, Interesting)
This kind of juxtaposition is what I had in mind when I expanded a /. comment in this piece on the Kindle [wordpress.com].
I think the Kindle gets so much press because it's technologically so damn impressive but legally so damn irritating. Until there's a way of solving the hurdles to distributing books, I wouldn't even consider buying the Kindle.
Re:Is this really news? (Score:4, Interesting)
Nicely said.
I personally think that one of the most life-changing decisions you can make (and I have made) is to live without debt. I saved until I could afford my home, then I bought it. I didn't buy something I had to borrow for. I own my vehicles, and I don't accrue credit card or other revolving debt. In this way, my earnings serve my family and I first, my charitable efforts second, and our tax burden third.
Plenty of decisions there that might not be palatable to some; for instance, my house used to be a church, and I had to build an interior for it by hand. I didn't know how - so I learned how and did it. And re-did it, in some cases. I found it quite difficult, but I still have all my limbs and digits, so technically speaking, it went ok. :-) The end result isn't a palace by most people's standards, but by mine, it's a castle. Lots of space, all of it doing just what I want it to, extremely low total cost of ownership, no debt. Plus it looks just a little like a castle, so there are a couple of fringe benefits.
If you don't pay interest, you've really put yourself in a different position as far as supporting the problems this nation has with predatory lenders and all the ancillary hangers-on such as credit agencies and middle-persons. I highly recommend trying this if you think you can pull it off. It takes some of what appears to be sacrifice, in that you don't get what you want when you want it; but then again, you don't get lenders of various stripes taking what can amount to many times the value of the the things you got to have when you wanted them, later on... sometimes interminably if you get too far into the debt loop.
Re:Fair compensation in a digital world (Score:2, Interesting)
It doesn't seem very likely that a single person with a ton of dollars is going to finance a book they have no financial return on. That said, if you can coax your fans to pony up an advance at $1 a piece (for example) you might have a pretty good business model going. Bands like Marillion are doing exactly that with some success right now, so I don't see why it wouldn't work in books.
Here comes the problem, though. What if a writer is quite good, but people decide not to pony up any money for this "up and coming author" simply because the work, free or not, is easily accessible.
It's true that some people will be willing to pay regardless of the availability of the work, but inevitably the DRM issue hinges on the problem of people "consuming" someone's work without providing any compensation. In some formats/genres/styles/demographics, it may be completely viable (Gabriel Garcia Marquez will probably be able to sell books) but in other environments the money may just not be there when the material is so accessible (what if the first Harry Potter Book were released in 2007 instead of 10 years earlier...would the future titles still sell as many copies as e-book technology becomes more viable, particularly with the rise of "smart" devices and wi-fi access, or would a large number of that audience just torrent the book?)
Which really summarizes the state of the whole mess right now. It's not a perfect system but neither are any of the others. Each has flaws and merits and as we're seeing in the world of technology today there is room for many different business models. The key is to recognize that the old way of doing things isn't going to work anymore and to identify approaches that best serve their specific environments.
For my part, I don't like DRM either. I just want to see some viable alternatives that ensure that the content creator receives fair compensation for their work. Kudos for a valid suggestion from the responder that I hope more content creators takes a stab at.