Amazon shuts down Lendle
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
Basically, the idea seems to be that once you've used your API ecosystem to grow to a certain size, you can fuck over the developers that allowed you to get to that point by building on top of your platform and by attracting users to it or keeping them engaged. The only way to get around this is to become so big that the platform can't shut you down (Zynga, Twitpic).
Twitter says, stop building clients, build in these verticals. Who is going to stop them from going after the most profitable verticals tomorrow once developers have proved that there's money to be made there? As a developer, why the hell would I want to deal with this?
Open API's seem to be the antithesis of the profit motive, or atleast, that's how it seems to be. Sad.
What's interesting to me is how much these small apps are functioning like slot machines at Las Vegas. 100 slot machines just eat money, and nobody notices. Then one kicks off and makes a big winner and everybody cheers -- thereby drawing more people over to play the slots.
The only thing a situation like that is good for is the house.
Twitters recent moves are disturbing and definitely will have a negative impact on how people view APIs.
The bad decisions by Twitter doesn't mean everything is going to shit.
Amazon is building their ecosystem with consideration of their ecosystem players - http://www.cloudave.com/10992/aws-vpc-and-impact-on-ecosyste...
NPR is retooling their APIs to support partner efforts, licensing, digital rights, etc. - http://www.npr.org/blogs/inside/2011/03/17/134259537/the-npr...
This is some tough shit. No quick answers. Its different for different industries, mediums, etc.
Some API owners are making poor decisions, but there are plenty others like NPR, Amazon, and Netflix that are innovating and sharing their stories on problems they face and what went into their decisions.
The key in any of this is don't get swept up in the short term undercurrents. Step back and look at bigger pictures. I've been using APIs for 10 years. Cloud computing for 5.
I feel like we are just getting going. Lots to figure out.
No reference of master conversation with Title you mention.
Silly?
I still would have posted Amazon link as reference to areas they do confer with partners.
But you are correct I would have provided more discussion about Lendle users.
You open your platform, and people use it. Then LOTS of people use it. And suddenly you're more powerful because of it. And then something threatens your business. And the executive team go "What? They're using OUR OWN TOOLS to weaken our business? That can't be allowed to happen, cut them off!"
The idea that someone could abuse their business through their API originally didn't occur. Then, once it did, there's a backlash because "They" are supposed to be building "Our" business, not their own at our expense.
I'm a serious Kindle user -- I have dozens of books. I've thought about using DRM-cracking software to free up my books, not because of any desire to share or lend but just because it's not right having a book in my possession locked away under a secret key some other bunch of people control.
This announcement doesn't bode well for Amazon. Technology can help you find markets, technology can enable markets, but using technology to force a market to appear where none did before doesn't have such a great track record. Everybody understands that you read a book, you share it (or give it away). There is no further sale. Lendle was simply trying to help Amazon work in a natural way that people commonly understand.
The Kindle iPad app is anus.
More than that, the Kindle app is just ugly. It has this janky animation when you jump to another section of the book that's painful to watch. It's a shame – the Kindle v3 hardware is a pretty badass product. The Kindle iPad app feels barebones, insipid and unpolished. Does a disservice to the brand.
Perhaps it was just a case of familiarity and the majority of the reports at that time being by existing Kindle users. Apple has also pushed out a few good updates since (including proper hyphenation!) so that has probably helped too.
That said, there is a big difference between the "apps" and they Kindle device itself.
I'm happy to play fair so long as they do...
That said, if I think a book is something I'm likely to want to keep long term, I still tend to buy the paper version. My Kindle is for convenience.
As you've pretty much concluded yourself: no you don't.
Which isn't just semantics, it's pretty much the essence of DRM'ed content.
In the future, he may no longer have them, but currently he apparently does.
He currently does have them
In the future, he may no longer have them
They've simply decided that a site probably shouldn't be using Amazon's own resources via the API to make it easy to find a particular Kindle title they might have been considering buying for free. If Amazon perceive it as damaging to sales they'd be insane not to. Noticeably there's a similar site that hasn't been shut down; maybe that one generates decent revenue via links to purchase books they don't have available.
1) Heading down the same road ≠ already at the same destination (pedantry, sorry).
2) I would argue they are in the same boat as entertainment industries (and newspaper industries) in that they are selling artificially (via laws & DRM) scarce “goods.”
"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."
I completely agree, the 'old' model doesn't apply 100% but I don't think that publishers are trying for a new model that's fair. I can give thousands copies for free, yes... But they can SELL thousands at almost no cost. So the whole "You can't just GIVE it away" argument gets significantly weaker.
I think, however, that the end result will be to ignore the pirates. It makes the most sense. People will always want to get their book "NOW", at launch, from the store, not from hunting around for it.
I'm not saying Amazon (and the whole e-book industry) is morally right in restricting sharing like this, but you can't expect them not to stand up for their own interests.
In the long term, I'm sure we'll end up with freely distributable e-books. But that won't happen via Amazon's or Apple's online stores, which are quite clearly on the side of restricting distribution in order to charge for it.
http://lendle.me/amazon-api-revocation/
Quote: Our initial reaction was one of pure surprise.
Me, not so much:
Lending ebooks is a feature demanded mostly by people who don't pay money for ebooks (and don't pay money for movies, music, or videogames if they can possibly avoid it) and will not be induced to pay money by the feature.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1821923
The only use of the service is to turn one purchase of any popular book into the ability to read as many as 26 books per year free. Its essentially the classic music startup model: you don't want to pay money for music, we want to make that happen. Of course it got negative attention.
Does that site exist, or are you exploiting the (obviously false) "ebooks are books" train of thought for a pithy comment?
See also: http://bookmooch.com/
By contrast, Twitter's now suffering as it tries to retro-fit a hard-ass approach (though of course with a similar stance from the beginning it's hard to see them getting where they are now).
Here's the transcript, emphasis mine:
When the web started I used to get really grumpy with people, because they put my poems up. They put my stories up. They put my stuff up on the web. I had this A.) a belief, which was completely erronious, that if people put your stuff up on the web and you didn't tell them to take it down you would lose your copyright - which actually, is simply not true. And I also got very grumpy because I felt like they were pirating my stuff, that it was bad. And then I started to notice that two things seemed much more significant. One of which was [that] places where I was being pirated, particularly Russa where people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading around into the world, I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated. Then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in Russia it would sell more and more copies. I thought this was facinating, and I tried a few experiments. Some of them are quite hard, you know, persuading my publisher for example to take one of my books and put it out for free. We took American Gods, a book that was still selling and selling very well, and for a month they put it up completely free on their website. You could read it, and download it. What happened was sales of my books, through independant bookstores because that's all we were measuring it through, went up the following month three hundred percent. I started to realize that actually, you're not losing books. You're not losing sales by having stuff out there. When I give a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people say, "Well what about the sales that I'm losing through having stuff copied, through having stuff floating out there?" I started asking audiences to just raise their hands for one question. Which is, I'd say, "Do you have a favorite author?" They'd say, "Yes." and I'd say, "Good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book, put up your hands." And then, "Anybody who discovered their favorite author by walking into a bookstore and buying a book raise your hands," and it's probably about five, ten percent. If that, of the people who actually discovered their favorite author, who is the person who they buy everything of. They buy the hardbacks and treasure the fact that they got this author.
Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it, and that's how they found their favorite author. I thought, "You know, that's really all this is. It's people lending books. You can't look on that as a loss of sale. It's not a lost sale, nobody who would have bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free." What you're actually doing is advertising. You're reaching more people, raising awareness. Understanding that gave me a whole new idiea of the shape of copyright and what the web was doing. The biggest thing the web is doing is allowing people to hear things. Allowing people to read things. Allowing people to see things that they otherwise wouldn't have seen. Basically that's an incredibly good thing.
I don't think Lendle set out to be a long term, full time, paying gig.
I'm starting to wonder if it might be best to just keep it invite-only for now.
I hope for a quick resolution of this matter.
This is a really stupid move and I implore others to make it known via the Helpdesk.