Oh Good Grief; Doesn't She Ever Shut Up About The Kindle?

[catsittingstill]

Moderately interesting news today.  The Kindle DRM has been um, kcahed?  It's not exactly hacked--but someone has written a couple of little python scripts to make it possible to play Secure Mobipocket ebook files on the Kindle.  News here, and more details here. 

I think this is unreservedly a good thing for all honest players in the market.

It's good for Amazon, because anything that increases the number of e-books a Kindle can play makes the Kindle more valuable.  (It might arguably reduce Amazon's ebook sales a little, but I think the extra Kindle purchases, and the fact that they're still very convenient and their prices are quite competitve will counteract that.)

It's good for honest owners of Secure Mobipocket files because there's now another device out there that can play them.

It's good for honest Kindle owners because there's now more sources of e-books for their player.

The only people who will be hurt by this are those who hoped to cheat honest customers out of ebooks they paid for, in hopes their victims would pay again for the same content.  The back of my hand to them; they deserve to suffer.

I do see one downside to all this--I was thinking that the pool of Kindles out there that would be a source of demand for unsecured Mobipocket files will be slightly reduced, and maybe the increase in nonDRMed books that would have resulted from this pool will not happen, or will be reduced.

On the other hand, I wouldn't be likely to run a script on a book I *could* just buy without DRM in the first place, so maybe not.

Fictionwise is already selling nonDRMed Mobipocket books specificially for the Kindle (though I think those were nonDRMed all along).

And I have now bought and paid for 2 nonDRMed ebooks from Baen--their free library is working as advertised.  On the other hand, they were still a couple of dollars cheaper than paperbacks, and I am presently carrying 18 books in my jacket pocket, so I can't complain.

Comments

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

I think amazon's business model for the Kindle depends on selling e-books; their marketing people really aren't going to like this. I wonder if they can make it, ah, kBrick? I know you think this is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I'm really started to getting worried about this technology. Bottom line, I think, is that using a Kindle (or similar) is a public act, not a private act like reading has been historically.

Mark Pilgrams's scathing commentary on the Kindle.

Charlie Stross bitching.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Yes, I've read "The Future of Reading." A couple of times, in fact. I think I've also read what Charlie Stross had to say, unless he's said something new in the last couple of days, anyway. Alas, your link to Charlie is actually a second link to "The Future of Reading." Which is a fine, forceful piece of writing, doubtless well deserving of two links, but leaves me to investigate Stross on my own.

It may be possible to brick a Kindle using the EVDO (provided the owner has left the EVDO on, of course).

But 1) I'm not sure I agree with you about Amazon even being motivated to do this in the first place; I think they price the Kindle according to what it costs to make, and don't need to "pay off" the Kindles by selling e-books.

For one thing, if they did, they'd make e-books everyone could read, because that way they'd sell more e-books. If you need to sell e-books to prop up your business model (because the reader costs more to make than you're charging, for instance) then everyone, Kindle-owner or no, who buys your e-books props up your business model. And .azw format is just .prc format (a pretty common e-book format) with a different DRM--making it compatible with Secure Mobipocket from the beginning would have been child's play and would have opened up the Kindle e-books to a lot more readers.

Plus, at least some of Amazon's e-books that are new release bestsellers, they're either taking a loss on, or taking a lot less than the usual profit on, because the publishers are still selling them to Amazon on the assumption they sell for 16$, even though Amazon's only selling them for 10$.

And the third point against this idea is that it has been possible to buy DRM-free e-books that work just fine with Kindles from the get-go. If Amazon has to sell e-books to make up for selling Kindles, this would be pretty foolish.


But if Amazon does brick Kindles of people who do this--well, then we'll know, won't we? I'll be a lot less interested in a Kindle after that. Maybe a Cybook Gen 3 would be a better buy.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

It's a wild, cynical night, so I'm answering this, and there's more on my own LJ. I hate being this cynical, and the universal library is a fine dream, but, damn, my nightmares have come true too often, so I think I'll share these in the hope that someone will take warning.

Sorry 'bout the link; this is the correct link to Charlie's remarks.

I think you are expecting too much rationality from Amazon's marketeers--it's amazing how nasty these people can be in defending "lock in", as they call it, even when it would be better to just let it ride. Amazon's business is selling books. I think they're planning on taking a loss for some time and then, after they've built up their network, renegotiating their deals with the publishers. But don't expect your price to drop—they've got you; you can't go elsewhere. As for bricking...they can do it any time they want to; they control the reader software, and if you want their new books, you all they have to do is make sure you need the new reader software to read the new books. They don't have to do it tomorrow; they might do it next year or the year after that, after they've cut their deals with the publishers and got a good solid group of customers locked in. Though I suppose it's more likely that they'll simply stop supporting older readers, and the new ones will have better DRM.

And (as I've remarked in my own journal)--do you want to share your intellectual life with Jeff Bezos? Not to mention the DHS, the Russian mafia, the tongs, probably anyone who will pay enough.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I think you are expecting too much rationality from Amazon's marketeers--it's amazing how nasty these people can be in defending "lock in", as they call it, even when it would be better to just let it ride.

I acknowledge your point--it's not like people haven't been known to shoot their business in the foot over things like this. I'm interested to see what happens next, and this is a strong argument for waiting a bit.

think they're planning on taking a loss for some time and then, after they've built up their network, renegotiating their deals with the publishers. But don't expect your price to drop—they've got you; you can't go elsewhere.

Um, well, actually, you can. The Kindle plays unprotected Mobipocket, which happens to be one of the formats that Baen sells ebooks in. And Fictionwise, and Manybooks. Nothing in the TOS forbids buying from other dealers or even hints that it might become forbidden someday. Of course, they could alter the Kindle software to make these files no longer work. If they do that, I certainly won't be getting a Kindle. I expect it would trigger mass disgust among people who read e-books, with a result that Kindle sales would drop generally, but that's just a guess.

As for bricking Kindles--yes, they probably *can*. But the guy who kcahed the Secure Mobipocket books (his name is Igor, amusingly enough--I suppose it may be deliberate) posts on the Mobileread forum. If they brick his Kindle, I expect it to show up on the forum within the hour, and on various gadget blogs within the day. I'm watching to see what happens, believe me.

I'm not quite sure where you're going with the rest of that. They might start selling their e-books in a different format that present Kindles can't read? I suppose they might--it would be a crazy thing to do from the standpoint of trying to sell more e-books, especially since that's the perfect way to get their entire e-book customer base looking around for other sources of e-books, and Baen and Fictionwise are out there, circling like sharks, happy to pick up any e-readership that splits off from Amazon... but it could happen, I suppose.

But isn't that a risk you take with pretty much any seller of e-books that is also tied to a particular reader? Sony Connect, for instance?

do you want to share your intellectual life with Jeff Bezos?
To the extent that I buy my books from Amazon, don't I already do that? I mean, *is* there an anonymous way to pay Amazon for a paper book? Plus, at the very least, I have to tell Amazon where to ship it. "Come to the back of the old high school grounds at midnight and throw it over the fence in a brown paper sack" is nicely anonymous, but it isn't shipping directions.

Frankly, I expect to have the anonymity of the crowd. If 10,000 people are reading on Kindles, who's going to have the time and energy to sort through who's reading what? And if DHS knows I read a lot of Baen books, and favor Eric Flint and Lois Bujold, what's wrong with that anyway? It's not like they couldn't figure that out from my credit card receipts. (Don't get me wrong--I hate this spying on American citizens without cause--but if they're going to do it, better they should fritter their time away on a middle aged white woman who's unlikely to be convicted than on someone who might have a harder time getting a fair trial.)

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Oops, I forgot to say thanks for the link to Charlie Stross's piece, and yes, the remarks you were thinking of were the ones I had read.

1) he thinks it's ugly. Okay, whatever. Personally I think if you're reading a book to look attractive, you're doing it wrong. But it would be nice if it were prettier, sure.

2) he thinks it should have wifi instead of EVDO because everyone has free wifi. I think I don't have free wifi--and EVDO sounds great to me.

3)I agree with him about DRM

4)I don't care as much as he does about Amazon knowing (if they care) which page I'm looking at right now.

5)He thinks everyone plugs everything in every night so power draw isn't a problem and they shouldn't have used an eInk screen. I think I've only been reading ebooks on my Palm TX for a couple of weeks and I've already run out of power three times. Once in the best part of the book.

6) I agree with him (and many other reviewers) that this thing would be wonderful for many kinds of textbooks and that it should be aimed at the student market. I hope that will happen in the future.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Another, rather worshipful review.

...Maybe more later

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link.

I'm not sure Kindle could be described as (to paraphrase) "the internet in a box." Most of the evaluations about internet browsing make it sound like the dancing bear--it's amazing that it can dance, sure, but it doesn't dance particularly *well*.

I had high hopes for the experimental browser in the beginning, and I suppose it could still be made better, but that might be directly counter to Amazon's interest, since at the moment they're absorbing the EVDO cost, and more browsing means more EVDO, of course.

[filkergem.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine has posted why he bought a Sony PRS 505 instead of a Kindle at http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2008/01/19/why-i-purchased-the-sony-prs-505-reader/
I note that he says that there is already a good Open Source program for converting a bunch of formats. The converter runs on just about anything that you'd want, including MacOS.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link.

There is a good open source converter, but it looks like it converts everything to a format only the Sony can read. But it's nice to know there's a converter out there that can run on a Mac and convert things to Sony format.