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Ebooks: Another door shut .. ereader?
Mon, 20 Apr 2009

It is an odd world where you want to buy, but you simply cannot; or worse, that after you do buy something the entity may just pull the plug on it and you're out of luck. Its an odd world when your newly purchased full price car only works at 10 miles an hour except on certain entity friendly roads, or when you can only buy entity-branded seat covers. Or you are driving down the road, and yet violate some new term in the Terms and Ungreements that was just added, and they shut you down. Fun times indeed!

I think I have blogged often (or if not, should have, as this topic is close to my heart.) about the horror of DRM (or 'dieing rights movement') -- now, as a content producer myself I certainly don't have a problem with restricting content movement in ways I see fit, but as a consumer it sure makes me mad that I simply cannoy buy anything. The DRM is used to supposedly prevent piracy by the casual user, and to enforce region locking and so forth.. and I must admit in this day and age, region locking does seem a bit silly. As a Canadian I'm forever lamenting that these companies are turning my business away or generally making my life annoying as a consumer, which certainly seems backwards. Go talk to anyone, and they always ask me 'why do you even try so hard? just go download..' -- but its because I am a content producer, and if I want peopel to buy my stuff, it certainly makes sense for me to buy their stuff. And its the right thing to do. But gorramned, 'they' make it hard!

I know we've been burnt a few times by DRM .. buying a book and it later becomes 'unfunctional', or buying music only to have it vanish and be not-downloadable again by the company you bought from, or stop working when the company pulls the plug on that license or service (haha!) or disconnects your account , or be stuck with lower quality encoding value and thus need to rebuy, or any number of issues. I can grin and bear those issues for I've a fairly rigourous backup regime so I tend not to lose my files and I nowadays steer clear of software or platofrm lock-in DRM (ie; I simply will not buy ebooks in a form that ties you to one specific platform, since there is too much risk that platform will go under or be instructed to stop supporting you, or not be carried forward to your new platforms over time. These are not mythical but very real scenarios that _have occurred_, forcing people to lose their media collections. And of course, buying DRM-laden music from iTunes so you can only biuy iPods in the future just seems silly to me..) If you buy all Kindle books, you're stuck with Amazon in the future. If What if you want to buy from 5 different stores (god forbid!), are you supposed to buy 5 players for the media, and carry them all with you? No way. Shouldn't the industries create a common DRM, so people can buy whatever player they _prefer_ and then buy content as they see fit? I mean, you used to be able to buy a ghetto blaster stereo from Radio Shack or Sears or whatever, and it would play any tape casette or CD you bought at any store. Not now.

Anyway, the reason I post today is after reading some news about eReader turning on (or turning more carefully on) region locking, and even more content becoming unavailable to me to buy. ie: As time goes on, my options as a Canadian get less and less.. not more. w-t-f?!

This is really DRM-aside, but comes up in the same breath really. Now we all know there are a fair number of people pirating media out there (and it is a complex topic, where downloading music is entirely legal in Canada, if morally wrong. Thank our government for allowing things to go so wrong :/), but here I and so many people are -- ready to spend real hard won dollars on music, TV, video and ebooks.. and we simply cannot. We can't buy physical Kindle's here, despite the fact you can load your own media onto them. We can't buy the Kindle iphone software here either, nor use the Kindle books/newspapers, etc. We can't buy mp3s at the Amazon music store. We can't get shit-for-all movies on Xbox Live or iTunes Movie Store due to the old school contracts not permitting those outlets to sell. We can't buy books from hardly anywhere. So in Canada we can barely buy music, or books, or TV shows, or video. We can't use Netflix (US only). Seriously, is Canada so irrelevent? And the UK? Its only slightly better to the USians -- they _can_ buy, but of course they're DRM'ed all to hell, so we just pray their media keeps working down the road. People don't want to buy anymore, they want ease of rental and access .. but at least when you 'buy' a DVD, it shoudl keep working for a long long time.

It annoys the heck out of me, but it annoys me more to find over time the restrictions are only getting worse. In this enlightened day and age, and in the face of a bad economy.. you would think they want our money, they want the wider option of distribution. But alas, instead they're stickng to old models, to old agreements and trying to put back the ever popular region lock and enforce 'scarcity' and control on the digital world. They may win, I don't kow.. but whatever. I just want the option to buy something. As a content producer, I have sold my software anywhere that would take it, and given it away when I couldn't. The important thing is having my work, my art, my tools be out there, and I'd like a few bucks when I can. It doesn't make sense for me not to sell it to those with money, does it?

I hope they do not wonder why people are driven to piracy; sure, there are those who do it for various reasons, but I am sure a large base in there do it for there being no other choice. People want to consume, and if your model makes it impossible or impractical or a terrible experience, they will find some other way to do it. If you can go download something with 2 minutes of clickng, most will.

[ Category: / technology / ebooks ] [link] [Comments]

EBooks: The future of mobipocket/Amazon?
Wed, 19 Dec 2007

I've always been a critic of ebooks -- not the concept, just the implementations we have so far. And by that, I mean the DRM (and to a lesser extent, the stores since there is a much more limited supply of ebooks than real books, and they tend to cost a lot!)

I can live with the requirement for batteries (if not for page turning with e-ink, but at least for backlighting, say) and so on and so forth, and one cannot argue with carrying a hundred books in your pocket. But as in most forms, DRM is just plain evil. Buying a locked down file means that someday it might be incompatible with some version of the application you need, or perhaps becomes unsupported as the source company goes out of business.. or maybe the book just times out or other silliness. As such, I've been stuck with DRM-free ebooks which are much harder to come by -- a very few stores and titles, or using the Gutenburg project, or converting from one DRM type to a non-DRM type if software is available. Painful.

Anyway, with that out of the way (I should just make a standard template used as a prelude to ebook posts) the question remains -- is any of this dire stuff really going to happen?

Well, maybe, and big too. Consider..

Mobipocket Reader has been around for probably nearly a decade now, supporting Palm OS, Windows Mobile (CE, Pocket PC, etc and so on), Symbian and others I'm sure. Amazon bought them a few years back and started moving more content over, so a lot of people took this as a sign of confidence in the platform. I mean, it was hard to get a good catalog of ebooks, and here comes Amazon getting in, so obviously Mobipocket could be a good readewr system to go with.

Fast forward to this month, when Amazon released the Kindle product, a new ebook reader using e-ink. Well, as an ebook consumer I thought I'd take a look at the specs and lo and behold, something as silly as Microsofts PlaysForNotSure is potentially going on -- the Kindle uses a new proprietary format (AZW files or somesuch) downloaded over the air, but also supports _unDRM_ed Mobipocket files. So wait, the latest and newest Amazon product doesn't support their own ebook store, Mobipocket. (ie: You buy a new book, its got DRM on it, and thus isn't usable on the Kindle. By which I mean.. any ebook you've bought from Amazon is only good on the existing devices (PDAs and Windows, say).. but not the new device.

So, is Mobipocket to be phased out? All those customers screwed? Or is the Kindle firmware going to get updated to support the format later?

Who knows, but suffice to say -- this is why DRM sucks.

*sigh* Another year where I'd like to buy some ebooks, but can't.

[ Category: / technology / ebooks ] [link] [Comments]

Tech: Whats the case for ebooks?
Tue, 05 Jul 2005

People ask me about ebooks a lot since I've been so close to mobile technology over the last decade, so I thought I'd post with some of the pros and cons and then confuse the issue some more. For now, lets just refer to ebooks as electronic-books regardless of medium -- a PDF on a PC is an ebook, just like an iSilo or Plucker file is. Perhaps the web is an ebook that isn't always available quickly -- you can't argue with the value of wikipedia.

See more ...

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