On 2009-02-19, Jason Olshefsky <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On Feb 18, 7:35 pm, [email protected] wrote: > > ...as we know it? > > > > > http://futurismic.com/2009/02/18/stephen-king-amazons-kindle-and-the-... > > > h-of-publishing-as-we-know-it/ > > > From the artticle: "As has been pointed out before, the principle > difference between the publishers and the record labels is that > publishers haven't yet been forced to innovate by the pressures of > piracy. It looks as if they'd be wise to jump ship and start swimming > for shore right now, rather than waiting to be made to walk the > plank." > > Flaw 1: it wasn't the "pressures of piracy" so much as it was "trying > to force people to pay $20 for a $1 product". Pirating a book in a > usable form would cost you about as much as a brand new paperback > version. > > Flaw 2: the Kindle already screws people in the same way as the record > industry: with digital rights management (DRM) [a quaint term for > "taking your rights away"]. I thought the Kindle was neat until I > realized it meant I could no longer share a book with a friend. And > giving books you've read to people who you think would appreciate them > is very deep and rich way we expand and strengthen our social > connections.
Kindle does seem to support some rudimentary capability to read without it being a Kindle book, but it's not a very open platform, and Amazon has little incentive to make it one. Kindle is basically a shunt from your wallet into Amazon's bank account. They want you opening the stopcock on that shunt instead of passing ebooks back and forth, whether they're pirated, CC or public domain. I find it interesting that Kindle 2 has started to have more web capability; still doesn't seem to have a card slot, though, and still seems to be based on the model of using Amazon as your personal library. (Limited storage -- still only 2GB. So if you get over about 1.5GB of books -- which is a metric buttload, to be sure -- you need to store with them. If you want to use the music player features, you need to store even more with them. And it doesn't look as though it's transparently easy to get stuff that's not Amazonian onto and off of the Kindle.) If the Kindle 2 web capability is good, it could end up being a PDA replacement. (If I had a screen that large and always-on mobile wireless, I could just use a web-based calendar -- no synching, no worries about compatability.) One thing I find frustrating is that it would be fairly simple for Asus or Acer to put out a reference model of an e-reader that's based on one of the new sub-notebook platforms. (People have already hacked them together by re-orienting the screen, remapping the mouse buttons; people have also hacked in wireless modems; in principle, you could probably hack together a Kindle-clone, though what would be the point, I'm not sure.) With keyboards and in clamshell form factor (more expensive), those go for as little as $200 with specs comparable to the Kindle (minus e-ink), and that price with no prospect of downline revenue generated by the device. I suspect you could get a unit price around that of the Kindle with the bonus of external mass storage and a general-purpose operating environment that let you extend the capability of the platform. It wouldn't have a direct line into Amazon, though, so ease of acquisition would be an issue -- to buy and use an ebook, you'd have to do most of what you have to do on the web, now (cutting out the move-to-my-ebook-reader step, because you can just browse the web on your ebook reader). That having been said, Amazon should be charging far less for the Kindle than they are. They "should" be doing what the mobile phone service providers do, and sell on contract, or sell it with some massive discounts for the first x months. Kind of glad they're not, I suppose, because I'd really like to see their fenced-garden [it's not really walled, just fenced] model get some major public battering. ---Jason Olshefsky > > > > -- eric scoles ([email protected]) --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
