Kindle?
You named Kindle?
Seriously?
Kindle is never going to succeed in its current form.
Kindle requires DRM. DRM destroys value - it makes things do less and cost more, and means they will break suddenly without warning when the service inevitably goes bust.
When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.
Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild, 2002
You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.
Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service, 2007
As you may have read in the newspapers over the past few days, we’ve been criticized by the leadership of a small, but vocal organization because we sell used books on our website. This group (which, by the way, is the same organization that from time to time has advocated charging public libraries royalties on books they loan out) claims that we’re damaging the book industry and authors by offering used books to our customers.
Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild
Libraries, though, have developed lending procedures for previous versions of e-books — like the tape in “Mission: Impossible,” they evaporate after the loan period — and Bezos says that he’s open to the idea of eventually doing that with the Kindle.
Newsweek, The Future of Reading
Act V: The act of remembering
Another possible change: with connected books, the tether between the author and the book is still active after purchase. Errata can be corrected instantly. Updates, no problem.
Newsweek, The Future of Reading
Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.
George Orwell, “1984″, Book One, Chapter 3
Act VI: The act of learning
If they can somehow strike a deal with textbook publishers, I could see a lot of college students switching to this. Get rid of all your text books and have this single electronic device.
Ankit Gupta
School policy was that any interference with their means of monitoring students’ computer use was grounds for disciplinary action. It didn’t matter whether you did anything harmful — the offense was making it hard for the administrators to check on you. They assumed this meant you were doing something else forbidden, and they did not need to know what it was.
Students were not usually expelled for this — not directly. Instead they were banned from the school computer systems, and would inevitably fail all their classes.
Richard Stallman, The Right to Read
Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate without notice from Amazon if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Software and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service or to Digital Content without notice to you and without refund of any fees.
Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service
-----
from Mark Pilgrim's
The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts) [dive into mark]
All of these illustrate why paper is so good - it can't be altered after the fact, it doesn't have terms of service about who may and may not read, it can be sold and resold, lent, borrowed, and stored without evaporating against the owner's will.
Oh, and CRASH, when you move a medium out of its original context, including store it on a different medium than it originally shipped on, especially a read-writeable format, you destroy it's archeological value in part, because you're damaging the authenticity and verifiability.
Top