When my favorite torrent site, isoHunt.com, was back in the news thanks to yet another lawsuit over illegal downloading, I was reminded of a post on their blog from a few months ago. The poster quoted from Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture to define five kinds of file-sharers, and asked which kind most isoHunters were.
The choices were:
A.) You file-share instead of purchasing media
B.) You file-share to sample media you wouldn’t otherwise buy blind
C.) You file-share to get media that’s still in copyright, but no longer sold or sold at far too high a price
D.) You file-share to get media that’s not copyrighted or that the copyright holder is giving away
E.) You file-share to replace media you’ve previously bought―either you lost the original, or it was too crippled by DRM to be usable
The results of this little poll were quite interesting. Choice A (40%) was the runaway leader, but still less than half of respondents, and followed fairly closely by B (23%) and C (23%). D (3%) was predictably last, but there are many other ways to get non-copyrighted media. E got 8%. (And I couldn’t help noticing that there was no “all of the above” option―I have to imagine many, if not most, file-sharers have done all of these.)
More than half these anonymous, self-selected, admittedly file-sharing respondents described their sharing as not replacing a sale (i,e, not A), or what I would call non-malicious. The reasons behind that non-malicious file-sharing expose a backlash―intentional or not―against age-old media company practices that attempt to manipulate and deceive their customers.
If the RIAA and others really care about file-sharing, they’ll take an honest look at why their customers do it.
David Pogue reports: some Kindle users found today that Amazon had yanked several Orwell books—Animal Farm and 1984—off their Kindles and refunded the purchase price without satisfactory explanation.
As you might remember, we learned that Amazon could remotely alter or kill Kindle ebooks thanks to the text-to-speech debacle, and this is exactly what everybody was afraid of then. It’s very bad, but it’s exactly the problem of digital rights management: DRM means you never fully own the media you buy.
That said, the more interesting question is why Amazon remote-killed these books, and whether they’ll apologize or even unkill them. In the Kindle forum where Pogue found this story, the prevailing theory is that the books were pirated or sold by a party without the proper copyrights. However, the salient sentence of the response from Amazon customer support is this:
Although a rarity, publishers can decide to pull their content from the Kindle store.
That makes it sound like somebody simply changed their mind and Kindle customers got shafted in the process.
TeleRead posted an insight email exchange an affected Kindler had with Amazon, wherein Amazon claims to have discovered a “problem” with the ebooks. Sounds like even customer service isn’t sure what happened.
I have a feeling that if the books were indeed pirated, Amazon won’t quite apologize and definitely won’t reinstate those books. If, however, the publisher simply decided not to sell them, we’ve got a better chance to see some serious Bezos backtracking.
Kindle users should still be concerned. If Amazon’s willing to seriously infringe on buyers’ rights for something as small as a couple 99-cent ebooks, they definitely won’t be shy about revoking books in the future.
Many of the recent entries in the SEPW discuss Open Access, so I’ve decided to share just one here, as well some nice pieces on DRM and author rights. Pieces in academic journals can be a bit dry, but the information they contain is often both fresh and interesting, so I use this post to sieve through some of the more accessible (and reader-pertinent) articles each month. You can read my previous installment of SEPW highlights, which focused on Open Access and digital archiving, here.
First we have “Fair to Whom?”, by Heather Joseph. This article discusses a bill in Congress that could prove very important to public access, at least on the academic side of things. It is also sad evidence of lobbyist effect in Washington.
H.R. 801 actually packs quite a potential wallop and has widespread implications. It is designed to amend current U.S. copyright law, and carves out a subclass of copyrighted works—specifically, those works that are the result of taxpayer funding—and makes it illegal for the government to require that these works be made freely available to taxpayers as a condition of the federal support researchers receive.
Seems like they want the taxpayers to foot the bill but concede rights to access, which doesn’t sound all that fair to me. Looks like another case of the lawyer and the CEO walking on the reader and scholar. … Continue reading »
The second half of our interview swap (at least part 1 of the second half–we have a lot to say) with online magazine Fringe is now available on the Fringe blog. Thanks a lot to Lizzie Stark and the others at Fringe for doing the interviews and asking some great questions. Check out their questions and our responses here.
In what could be terrible news, Lexcycle, the producer of the best (by far) reader app for the iPhone, Stanza, has announced their sale to Amazon. If Amazon uses this move to try and strangle the market and push their proprietary Kindle format on mobile devices, this could be very bad news indeed and indicate a big step backwards for mobile device ereading. If however, they stick to their claim to leave Stanza unchanged, or better yet, they open Stanza to the Kindle format without locking out other formats, it could be a step forward. We’ll have to wait and see, but don’t hold your breath.
While guiltily watching an episode of “Dollhouse” the other day (the reviews lied, it’s not getting better), I witnessed for the first time a pop culture reference to the Kindle.
Some guy (played by Patton Oswalt) is talking about a court case, and he says that, in the age of the Internet, the judge “will throw the Kindle at you.” Now, mostly this is a silly, awkward joke made on a silly, awkward show, but I think it’s also a sign that an average American associates the Kindle—and only the Kindle—with reading digital books.
Language is malleable, but rarely controllable (Stephen Colbert being the exception). Words are constantly entering and leaving the dictionary, driven more by usefulness than design. So, I harbor no illusions that we can do anything at all about whether or not “Kindle” becomes the generalized word for ereader. I just hope it doesn’t happen, because it would play right into Amazon’s hand. … Continue reading »
The art-deco color electronic paper display will surely appeal to a broad audience.
According to rumors stemming from Amazon’s design headquarters, the third version of the Kindle will be available as early as August of this year. It will reportedly have a touchscreen, backlight, full color display, and a host of new features and functions.
Purportedly among the “experimental” functions of Kindle 3 is Amazon’s new “Guess What Book I’m Thinking Of,” with which users will be able to find books they can’t remember the title of by giving Kindle “clues” such as “author probably Russian” and “think the grandmother dies.”
Reading will be easier and more pleasurable than ever, as Kindle 3 has 1024 shades of color, and will come with special Kindle contact lenses, which will display the text of books even while the user’s eyes are closed. … Continue reading »
I can’t remember who you are, but you were probably at my house when I was drunk and I probably lent it to you after gushing about until you were so sick of hearing me talking that you took it so I’d shut up. I hope you’ve read it by now, but it’s probably just sitting in a pile behind your couch. And that’s such a shame, because it’s so damn good. “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.” Have you at least gotten that far yet? Probably not, otherwise you would’ve read the whole book without stopping, then given it back to me, and we could be talking about Humbert and the love/loathe obsession with him we now surely share. ”Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.” How can you not be enraptured with that kind of enrapture?
"All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other's soul..."
Wanted, wanted: Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
Cover: paper; a picture of a girl in mary janes.
Pages: worn and marked.
Age: close to five thousand three hundred days?
Profession: my favorite book.
Okay that was sappy, but if you’d read the book you’d get what I was going for. I’m just lonely for my book. But you know what? I don’t want it back. I want you to read it, and write in it lovingly. Once your tongue’s tip has tripped its steps enough that you don’t need to read it to repeat, give it to someone else to read. That, after all is why books are great. If you gave it back, I’d just put it on my shelf, and it’d once again be my pretty object, there for me to fondle its pages if I so chose. But then I’d be an H.H., confusing an object with an idea. I love Lolita; not the paper it’s printed on. Instead, I’ll get a DRM-free copy, then I won’t need to worry about anything but the perfect language and having it forever. “I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.”
As you might have heard fromoneofmanysources, Google Books has partnered with Sony’s eBook Store to make half a million out-of-copyright books available as non-DRMed ePubs.
This is unquestionably a step forward for the world of ereading, but for people who want to pick up one of these books right now, there are some caveats.
Here’s what going on with this partnership, and what it means for readers. … Continue reading »
The Kindle may as well have an antenna with tin foil on it.
With the launch of the Fujistsu FLEPia next month there’s finally going to be a color ereader on the market, in Japan at least. The specs look pretty good. Not only does it appear to be open to all the major formats used in Japan, but the FLEPia has a built-in Windows OS that allows for basic internet browsing, email, and word processing. It looks a lot like the cross-functional device we’ve been calling for. Too bad it’s being released only in Japan and costs $1000.
You can see a video of the FLEPia in action at the bottom of this post. It’s a bit hard to tell with the glare on the video, but the large 260,000 color touchscreen seems to work pretty well. The refresh rate seems a little slower than grayscale readers, but not awful. So when are we going to get this kind of stuff in America?
A better question might be why don’t we have it already? The E Ink Corporation, the brains behind the tech in most of the current-gen ereaders announced color technology in 2005, long before the Kindle came on the scene. Some one should probably tell Amazon this. When asked by PaidContent.org about color on the Kindle, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos responded:
We would love to have color but electronic ink doesn’t do color.
Apparently Amazon didn’t get E Ink’s press release.
For the most part, books don’t require color to be enjoyed, and the makers of ereaders likely want to keep their production costs as low as they can. Grayscale readers are still selling steadily at premium price points, so they haven’t needed color.
The opportunities flexible electronic paper create are many.
But with netbooks poised to outsell laptops, and smartphones essentially becoming minicomputers, the market is clearly primed for a fully functional intermediary device such as this. The difference between electronic paper and backlit LCD screens is drastic, and when it starts hitting ereaders in color, things will move quickly. E Ink is already shopping their newest flexible, color displays. Here’s hoping the FLEPia will scare Amazon into focusing on bettering their technology, rather than nickel-and-diming users for content that is free on browsers and forced DRM. Then Sony and the rest of the ereader producers can work on selling better, rather than adequate, tech to the ebook hungry masses.
Via bznotes, eink.com, Wired, Crunch Gear, PaidContent.org.
When my favorite torrent site, isoHunt.com, was back in the news thanks to yet another lawsuit over illegal downloading, I was reminded of a post on their blog from a few months ago. The poster quoted from Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture to define five kinds of file-sharers, and asked which kind most isoHunters were.
David Pogue reports
As you might have heard 
