1984 George Orwell and the Kindle

[Alan Dayley]

On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 12:41 PM, Ted Gould<ted at gould.cx> wrote:
>
> 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 :)

I am hopeful you are correct.  The forces of openness are strong too,
even when it's someone who does not understand but just wants to use
his e-book like a real book.

The big problem with this situation is that, according to the Ars
Technica citation of the Terms of Service[1], book sales are supposed
to be final.  Before now, Amazon has not stated that they could or
would unilaterally pull books from people's devices.

Full disclosure and understanding is fine.  In this case and many
others, full disclosure does not occur.  That's a problem.

Alan

[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/amazon-sold-pirated-books-raided-some-kindles.ars