Google to sell eBooks
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The authors and publishers said Google is stealing our content, violating our copyright. So Google replied that their intent is benevolent. They didn't want to harm the publishers or take their money, they didn't even want to make money. They said they were scanning these books to create searchable knowledge. Then they strike up a settlement so they can sell those scanned in books? Now they want to compete with Amazon to sell ebooks...
It was a lie from the start. They were just scanning in these books because they knew they'd be selling them one day. They wanted a head start. They lied about the race to give themselves an advantage over Amazon now. This doesn't sound "not evil" to me. Lying is not "good." Maybe it isn't evil, but is "not being evil" the standard now? Shouldn't companies rise above merely "not evil" ??
They lied, they violated the law and the copyright holders and now they are going to be allowed to profit from this illegal behavior.
Their words are not matching their behavior and that is a real negative sign in my opinion.
There's no need to make this out to be a conspiracy, though.
You don't generally keep up with the times, do you?
(Is it just me that hears conspiracy theories much more often now than, say, ten years ago?)
Edit: I hope they'll make some open ebook reader, with no proprietary stuff like the kindle.
This ebook selling bit is a new gambit, for new titles, not scanned books.
I think ebooks will go the same way as digital music. Once the market becomes mature enough, consumers will demand the wares without draconion DRM restrictions which currently make the e reading experience unpleasant.
A big part of the problem has been media. Backlit LCD screens are fine for the "workstation" and watching video. But form factors have rarely approached the utility of the sketchbook, (paper) notebook, or scratchpad. The Newton made some inroads here. The high-end Wacom LCD tablets have as well.
To match the utility of paper, the form factors need to be light and thin, approaching the size and weight of a thin standard magazine. They should be always instantaneously available, so should remain on basically all the time. (We can give them 8 hours of charging time back at the desk, but they should still be usable all the while.) The ergonomics of input have to be excellent. If there's a stylus, the feel has to be as refined as the feel of pencils and pens on paper. Interactivity is a must, so long refresh times like with e-ink are unacceptable.
I'm waiting for the day when we can browse and remix our personal libraries with the same facility with which we can browse and remix our music libraries.
Technology seeps into the culture only after decades and lots of false starts. (Alan Kay's "The Computer Revolution hasn't happened yet.")
Kindle books are just HTML with the extension changed and some trivial "encryption" on top. The encryption is there to give the publishers some illusion of security -- but if you want to read your books on a computer or other device, it's easy to remove the DRM. Once you do that, open your web browser on the resulting file, and enjoy. (All of your indexing tools that take HTML input files work quite nicely.)
DRM is "evil" and all that, but I don't worry about it since it's so trivial to remove, and always will be. If you can see it, you can copy it.
Would you want a future without content worth buying? Why can't you just live with the DRM?
Dead tree books have DRM which works, albeit in a shape which isn't digital. It is a pain to copy a 300 page novel, but you can do it (there are of course copyright limitations). But all DRM systems implemented fail in comparison. Of course, comparing the two directly is hard as they are very different media.
Books work well because: - they don't stop working when the DRM vendor goes out of business (see all the music sites now gone) - you can give them and lend them without problems - they are compatible (i.e. you changing to a new computing platform doesn't mean that you can't now read your books)
When the convenience of electronic distribution with DRM overcomes the drawbacks then you are going to see some uptake, but the drawbacks seem too large at this point.
To have a future with content worth buying, then maybe the business model needs to change? However, book readings aren't quite as attractive as touring bands. So that is going to take some good thinking. :)
I think we are entering an age of consciousness. The realization that we can lie is a natural stage of maturation, a later stage is the realization that lying has negative consequences. Maybe we as a digital society need to go through a similar stage of honest consumerism. Buying things, not because we are forced to, but because we want to give producers an incentive to produce.
We could all smash windows, steal cars, bump locks... security is an illusion. We can defeat it if we want to, but we don't have to. We can all win. Life is not a zero sum game.
A balance will be achieved. If it is not achieved, then the producers will simply stop producing and life will be worse for all of us or at least for the producers or perhaps the distributors.
I don't have the answers, but we are raised to know that stealing is wrong. Honesty is the best policy. Golden rule.
Sounds simplistic, perhaps naive, but maybe that's the answer. Personally, I stopped stealing music a long time ago. Now I listen to streaming radio online or I flip through Youtube videos from the distributors' channels or that kind of thing.
My point is, there are "honest" alternatives to stealing products, digital or otherwise.
I don't know why we create this sense of us versus them. We share this planet. If you make my life better, I want you to be around to continue making it better and I know you need to eat. I think that's the answer. Build a sense of community around the product, the producer, the consumer and the future where we all benefit from our shared existence.
In the same way, we are always in "Eternal September." Also, Gallium Arsenide: The Technology of the Future. Always Was. Always Will Be.
Maybe we'll hit a wall at the Singularity. I think it will be like hitting a too-low speedbump at highway speed: by then we'll be going too fast to notice it much.
How about wiping out all forms of artificial scarcity?
Next time, I refuse to inflict DRM on my users. It only hurts the people that actually pay. The people that pirate it aren't inconvenienced by DRM at all. That is pretty fucked up, IMHO.
Really? And what happens when customers refuse to pay the same amount? I've always said, that ebooks are still too expensive. Personally, if an ebook is $10 less than a hardcover version, then I prefer it. Otherwise, not much of a difference.
One example is the case for against copyright protection for authors.
About the same price for a book than an ebook, I suspect they are drunk. People is not going to pay the same price for something that has been manufactured, transported, and stored, for something that cost pennies to sell.Period.
This sounds remarkably like when they tried to reach out and do print, video and radio ads. Even though it looked like something that was related to their core offering, it flopped hugely.
They are overreaching.
To get legs under an ebook-selling project, a company has to devote a lot of resources to promotion, the ecosystem, and making users happy.
That's why Amazon's gotten a much higher adoption rate for the Kindle than Sony has for the Reader. Sony was like "Eh, we'll make an ebook reader" and (seemingly) didn't invest much in the service and ecosystem. The device was fine. But the Kindle whoops its ass because you can order books from anywhere in, what is it, 49 states? And people are used to buying all their books from Amazon already.
I don't really see Google doing things that differently from Sony. They have so many projects going on already that seem neglected.
I think this is a strategy that's going to fail.
Now that's disrupting.