Kindle Actions Explain Popularity of Piracy

While the major publishers, studios and labels bitch and moan about how piracy is destroying their business they continue to make decisions that only reinforce the reason people resort to piracy in the first place – and no, it’s not all about price.

Take this for example:

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.      LINK

Now, Amazon has backtracked slightly, claiming these titles had been released without proper authorization but that doesn’t change the underlying issue.  In the good ol’ Industrial Age, if you went to a store and bought a book and took that book home than that book was yours forever.  No matter what some publisher decides later, nobody could come into your home and take back that book without being charged for theft, even if they left a few bucks on the shelf.

In a similar manner, when I acquire a song or film or ebook via a file-sharing service and I download that file to my iPhone or laptop, that file is mine and, without a fair amount of hacking, nobody can take that file away from me.  I can move it around, copy it and even share it with other friends because it is mine.

With a Kindle, the fact is your never OWN anything.  All you really are buying is an extremely limited license to read the book on your Kindle unless Amazon decides otherwise.  This is not the same thing as buying a book.

Unless the major content distributors of the world figure out the difference they will continue to lose to the gray market that allows people to truly own their content.

Gawker Exposes Megan Fox’s Flower-Giver on Facebook

Last week, a very popular photograph circulated of Megan Fox appearantly ignoring a sweet chubby kid trying to give her a flower:

Kodak then announced that it was offering $5000 to anyone who could identify the boy in the photo.

Earlier today, Gawker recieved an email from a young woman claiming to not only know the identity of the young boy but said she was his friend on Facebook.  Eager to confirm this tip, Gawker tried looking up his page but it was set to private.  So, what did Gawker do?

Since the young lad’s Facebook profile was set to private and can only be viewed by his “friends,” we asked Kim to send us some screengrabs of his Facebook page as proof, and she obliged. As you can see from the gallery below, which includes a pic of our boy with one of those little Jonas freaks, it looks as though we may have found the victim of Megan Fox’s smoldering disdain, an 11 year-old Brit named Harvii.

Yup, they posted the whole thing online.  His whole private collection of photos.  All of it.

Now, this is certainly not the first time someone has had their private social media profile published for all the world to see but it is troubling when a major blog, trying to make at least some stab at legitimacy, does it.  We all know that nothing on the web is private but does that mean we should all just disregard anyone’s effort  to even attempt a modicum of privacy.  It’s not like this kid is a legitimate star who’s just asking for attention.

I’d be curious to hear from any lawyers out there if publishing screengrabs of a private Facebook page is in any way a criminal offense.

J.D. Salinger Misuses Copyright Law to Quash Creativity

J.D. Salinger is really only known for a couple of things.  He is a total recluse and he wrote “A Catcher in the Rye.”  Oh, and he’s is famously litigious when it comes to anyone doing anything with the material contained in that book.

So, along comes a guy with a fun literary idea: let’s take this iconic teenager and look at what his life might be like at the age of 76.  Neat, right? Unless you happen to be J.D. Salinger and then you go crying to the courts that this completely original reimagining is somehow infringing on his 58-year-old novel.

Although the new book, “60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye,” by J.D. California, a pseudonym for a Swedish writer (and the book’s publisher), Fredrik Colting, was published in the UK, a US court is blocking its release for at least ten days while a judge, seemingly sympathetic to J.D. Salinger’s case, considers her final decision.

Let’s consider why this is so ridiculous:

1) While Colting’s book is clearly, and unabashedly, drawing from the original novel, his story is completely new.

2) Colting’s protagonist is a 76-year-old man. Holdin Cauffield was a teenager.

3) The publication of Colting’s book will only bring fresh interest, and fresh sales, to Salinger’s work, at a time when it feels like he is slowly falling out of favor – fewer teens I know today have read “A Catcher in the Rye,” than when it seemed to be required reading in my youth.

4) Salinger comes off looking like a mean, reactionary kook.  He might actually be just that, but nobody wants others to think so.

It always saddens me to see one artist trying to shut down the creativity of another artist.  I’m sure J.D. Salinger isn’t thrilled by the idea of someone taking one of his literary children out for some fresh air, but liking something is not pre-requirement for its legal existence.

Also, let’s be honest, Colting’s book is out there and anyone who wants to read it will read it, no matter what happens in this single US court.

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• Salinger sues over Rye ’sequel’ (news.bbc.co.uk)

Kindle Users Learn Difference Between Licensing and Ownership

In the simple days before the internet and digital technology the concept of buying a book was pretty simple.  You went to a bookstore and you gave the bookseller money and he or she gave you a stack of bound paper with words (and sometimes pictures) printed on the pages – a book, if you will.  Once the transaction was complete that book was yours forever.  You could resell it any price the market supported.  You could trade it or loan it or use it as toilet paper.  It didn’t matter.  The book was yours.

Unfortunately, as ArsTech points points out, in the current time of eBooks, the idea of buying a book is not quite so simple:

Amid the general love-fest over the Amazon Kindle, its DRM is beginning to bite some users in the butt as they are getting locked out of their accounts and, subsequently, their e-book purchases. The incidents highlight once again that the customer doesn’t really own the content when it comes to DRM; even when it’s so loose that it’s not apparent day to day, it can still hurt you in the long run.

Whether due to a change in “terms of service” or due to violating exisiting agreements, Kindle-owners have found themselves actually locked out of accessing books they had already purchased.  I like ArsTech’s metaphore:

A bookstore that locks you out because you treated it like a library doesn’t take away the collection already sitting on your bookshelf, after all.

There is a reason that even iTunes has given up on most DRM for music and it won’t be all that long before book publishers will have to follow suit or find themselves fighting a similar losing battle against “pirates” who think it is unfair for a company to control access to content once the customer has completed their purchase of said content.

LINK

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Should Kindle Fear Literate Pirates?

Some Kindle users are upset over the $10+ cost of eBooks for the device and have begun to tag such books in an effort to convince others to boycott them and somehow drive down the price.

I’m not so sure this particular effort will have the desired effect.  However, the guys at Freakonomics are on the right track:

One of the boycotters’ main complaints: you can’t lend out your e-books to friends. When digital music fans were confronted with this problem, they just made illegal copies.

As we have seen ad nauseum in the music world, once a product is no longer controlled by a physical scarcity (i.e. paper books) but can instead be transimited in a purely digital and thus unlimited manner, it becomes very difficult to convince consumers to pay the same amount they once paid for the hard good.

If the publishing industry isn’t quick to respond it is hard to imagine why there wouldn’t quickly be a pirate market that succeeded in meeting consumer needs instead.

LINK

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Amazon Kindle Bows to Idiotic Author’s Guild on Text-to-Speech

Sure, the Kindle 2 eBook reader from Amazon is over-priced and the eBooks themselves are over-priced but its a device who’s time has come and one that will be with us in some form or another well into the future – or at least until our eyeballs become part of a hard-wired internal computing service…

Much like you can do on your own Mac or PC pretty simply, the Kindle 2 offered the option of having a rather digitized and un-emotive voice “read” to you.  This caused a flare-up from some authors who felt this was stepping on their ancillary audiobook rights.  It sounded so absurd that I never imagined Amazon would actually back down.  I was wrong:

The only significant change to the experimental section in the Kindle 2 was the addition of a text-to-speech capability that allowed the Kindle to read content to its users in one of two synthesized voices. Following an extended outcry from some in the publishing business, however, Amazon has backed down and will allow publishers to retain control over whether to expose their texts to this capability.

While there is nothing especially wrong with letting publishers opt out of this feature, none of their logic makes much sense.  First, these synthisized voices are far from what one gets with a true audiobook read by a trained professional.  it’s the difference between hearing a symphony recording of Ode to Joy or listening to a synthisized ringtone version.

They would argue that the voices might not be “real” yet but they could be someday.  They’re right but it still doesn’t justify their complaints.  The truth is that the authors will never stop this process and they are better off understanding that the abilty to listen to a book I bought presumably to read is an added value that can increase sales overall.

I wish Amazon had stood up to the author’s guild but it’s just a matter of time before technology settles the matter for all parties.

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HarperCollins Poised for FAIL with Jeff Jarvis Along for the Ride

While I realize that the publishing industry is struggling in this digital age I just don’t see how HarperCollins is hoping to make things better with what they are calling “VBooks” or Video Books.

Basically, this entails an author sitting in front of a white wall giving one samples and highlights from their actual book.

A few problems I foresee:

1) This is not a promotional device.  Their first offering, a Vbook by Jeff Jarvis, costs ten bucks and it isn’t even the whole book being read.

2) This format does not add anything of value to the actual book.  Not only is there less information provided but it is impossible to notate, link, copy & paste or do any of the other things with like to do with books and E-books.

3) Few authors are truly compelling enough in this sort of setting to be much more than a cure for insomnia.

4) Maybe it’s just the combo of Jeff Jarvis and the white background but I keep thinking, while watching the sample, that this is just a big ad for E-Harmony.

All-in-all, I rate this as a big old waste of time and resources.

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Big Ripoff – Digital Media WAY Overpriced

Here’s what confuses me: How can a publisher charge the same price for a digital copy of a book that requires no printing, binding or significant  distribution costs as they do for an actual hardcopy of the book?  The same thing  goes for the music industy.  The cost of pop music has not dropped at all with digital downloads even though a massive cost element is no longer present.

While I understand the desire to keep up your profit margin imagine how many more copies of a book might be sold digitially if it was priced like at impulse-buy levels.  People buy iPhone apps all the time at 99-cents just to try them out.  Imagine how many new “copies” of backtitles no longer even available in most bookstores could suddenly become profit-drivers for publishers.

Potential digital-book readers aren’t going to shell out $10-$20 for most eBooks but I think thousands would a buck-a-book to, say, get handful of old Stephen King title’s on their iPhone.

I believe one way to profit in the digital age is to take advantage of the massive numbers of potential customers.  With no hard cost associated with e-publishing a book, it is just a matter of sell A LOT of copies at a low price.

Just think aloud…

Good related post on this at Futurismic

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Conde Nast Takes Big Risk Pulling Back Online Efforts

It is being fairly widely reported that dead tree media giant Conde Nast is pulling back on plans to launch new websites for a number of it’s key magazines includng Details and GQ.

Conde Nast recently took a bit of a hit online recently, finally calling it quits on tween-girl site Flip.com – though I’m not sure it was ever a central effort.

The question is, while it is surely a tough time financially for Conde Nast, is it wise to circle the wagons around the shrinking print editions and ignore the obviously expanding world of digitial media?  There are very few reasons left to buy magazines and  the number of reasons is not likely to go up as technology expands.

We will have to see if this is just a calculated delay by CN while they figure out their strategy or is just burying of heads in the sand?

Textbooks Ripe for Pirates – Overpriced and Under-supplied

TechDirt has a little look at the growing fight between textbook publishers and the students who are tired of paying thousands of dollars a semester and are instead finding more and more pirated scans online:

“…rather than responding to the root cause of the downloads, textbook publishers are trying to come up with systems that students can’t get around paying for, such as online subscriptions to “extra” information to go along with a textbook.”

Doesn’t anyone want to learn anything from the failings of the music industry?  The only way the textbook companies will beat the pirates is to offer their books for a fair price in a format that is open and friendly to the students.

Yeah, I don’t see that happening anytime soon, either.  So, expect to see plenty of new textbooks coming to a pirate site near you.  Supply and demand, people.  Supply and demand.

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