1984 George Orwell and the Kindle

[Ted Gould]

On Fri, 2009-07-17 at 23:00 -0700, Alan Dayley wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 5:02 PM, Bob Elzer<bob.elzer at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Apparently if you bought the George Orwell book 1984 on amazon for your
> > kindle, you actually became part of the story today.
> <snip>
> > Here's the link
> > http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/some-e-books-are-more-equal-than-o
> > thers/
> 
> Amazing.  The holy grail of publishing: licensing for a limited time
> and the ability to pull it back when wanted.
> - No more need to go through the work of releasing a new edition of a
> text book, just take it away from everyone at the end of the semester!
> - Make people sign in to their reader and charge for each different
> person that reads the same book.  Sue anyone who gives out their
> password.

Honestly, I think that it's okay for people to do what they wish with
their content as long as they're upfront about it.  And, I think that
Amazon has been with this device.  I bought a Kindle (which I like) and
on doing that I realized lots of things:

      * No more used books from the used book store
      * No more donating old books to the library
      * No more giving a book to a friend when I'm done

All of these are big negatives for me, but there were lots of positives
and I'm actually impressed with where Amazon has gotten some of the
publishers to go (considering all are probably a hard sell)

      * You can highlight text and that text is saved on your device in
        a text file that is properly attributed.  Easy to add in blogs,
        etc.
      * You can get free samples of books pretty much as soon as they're
        released.
      * You can save clippings of periodicals.  I have tested to see how
        long this lasts and/or what format it's saved in.

Also, not trivially, the books are cheaper and most periodicals don't
have ads in them (all the ones that I've gotten don't).

I think that long term we'll see Amazon start to drop DRM just like
Apple has.  Not because they want to, but because publishers will
realize that they're not in control, Amazon is.  Just like the monster
the music publishers created in Apple.  But, I think the genius here is
that Amazon seems to realize it too.  They're not subsidizing the device
(which makes it expensive) and they have a revenue model when there is
no DRM through WhisperNet (which is a very cool idea).  Plus, they used
the ePub standard for the format and their DRM.  I think that Amazon is
just as happy to get rid of the DRM as soon as the publishers are.
Hopefully soon :)

		--Ted

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