Domo is not a fan of ebooks

Until now I’ve been quite against ebooks. Back when I was in college I had an iPaq and I downloaded the Microsoft reader to it. I bought about 3 – 5 books for it and, at first, I thought it was great. It would allow you to annotate the book and highlight passages. And it was electronic so I could carry a bunch of books in the space of my PDA. But it was one of the first times I was bitten by digital restrictions management (DRM). I had to reset my PDA because it got into a locked state. After that, I couldn’t read my books until I reauthenticated the PDA. After all, everyone out there is out to destroy authors and steal digital books, so they need to make sure I’m the one who paid for it. This worked the first time around, but the second time I needed to authenticate, the server refused to authenticate the device and I could no longer read the books. So I was out around $20. Imagine buying a regular physical book and then having it no longer work because it wasn’t sure if you were the person who bought it. Yeah, it’s pretty ridiculous.

I would be really pissed if I couldn't access this book. Also, most ereaders are currently in b/w making them unsuitable for these types of books.

For the most part, back then we were limited to reading digital books on PDAs or the odd book reading device that only read its own obscure format. And when that company realized that no one wanted to read digital books, you would be stuck with a bunch of locked up files that would only work until your device died. (Maybe less time if it had to regularly phone in) And I disliked reading on the computer because I like to read in bed or while traveling.

A few years ago the Amazon Kindle came out. They licensed the eInk technology that Neal Stephenson had forseen in The Diamond Age and which made it just as easy to read a book on the Kindle as reading a physical book. Three things kept me from buying one. First was the fact that this device, too, used DRM to restrict access to the files. Second, the price was that of a more capable laptop. Third, I couldn’t share books with others. Many of the authors whose new books I buy without reading any reviews are authors I discovered by borrowing a book from a friend or a library. Sharing books is a huge part of our shared American culture. The ability to get a skeptical person to read a new author by allowing them to read your copy for free is a basic idea in the US. Yet publishers are too afraid to allow this to take place. More people need to be like Eric Flint, originator of the Baen Free Library (and an author himself). Here’s a bit of what he writes there:

1. Online piracy — while it is definitely illegal and immoral — is, as a practical problem, nothing more than (at most) a nuisance. We’re talking brats stealing chewing gum, here, not the Barbary Pirates.
2. Losses any author suffers from piracy are almost certainly offset by the additional publicity which, in practice, any kind of free copies of a book usually engender. Whatever the moral difference, which certainly exists, the practical effect of online piracy is no different from that of any existing method by which readers may obtain books for free or at reduced cost: public libraries, friends borrowing and loaning each other books, used book stores, promotional copies, etc.
….
After all, Dave Weber’s On Basilisk Station has been available for free as a “loss leader” for Baen’s for-pay experiment “Webscriptions” for months now. And — hey, whaddaya know? — over that time it’s become Baen’s most popular backlist title in paper!
And so I volunteered my first novel, Mother of Demons, to prove the case. And the next day Mother of Demons went up online, offered to the public for free.
Sure enough, within a day, I received at least half a dozen messages (some posted in public forums, others by private email) from people who told me that, based on hearing about the episode and checking out Mother of Demons, they either had or intended to buy the book. In one or two cases, this was a “gesture of solidarity. “But in most instances, it was because people preferred to read something they liked in a print version and weren’t worried about the small cost — once they saw, through sampling it online, that it was a novel they enjoyed. (Mother of Demons is a $5.99 paperback, available in most bookstores. Yes, that a plug. )
…
Take, for instance, the phenomenon of people lending books to their friends — a phenomenon which absolutely dwarfs, by several orders of magnitude, online piracy of copyrighted books.
What’s happened here? Has the author “lost a sale?”
Well. . . yeah, in the short run — assuming, of course, that said person would have bought the book if he couldn’t borrow it. Sure. Instead of buying a copy of the author’s book, the Wretched Scoundrel Borrower (with the Lender as his Accomplice) has “cheated” the author. Read his work for free! Without paying for it!
The same thing happens when someone checks a book out of a public library — a “transaction” which, again, dwarfs by several orders of magnitude all forms of online piracy. The author only collects royalties once, when the library purchases a copy. Thereafter. . .
Robbed again! And again, and again!
Yet. . . yet. . .
I don’t know any author, other than a few who are — to speak bluntly — cretins, who hears about people lending his or her books to their friends, or checking them out of a library, with anything other than pleasure. Because they understand full well that, in the long run, what maintains and (especially) expands a writer’s audience base is that mysterious magic we call: word of mouth.
Word of mouth, unlike paid advertising, comes free to the author — and it’s ten times more effective than any kind of paid advertising, because it’s the one form of promotion which people usually trust.
That being so, an author can hardly complain — since the author paid nothing for it either. And it is that word of mouth, percolating through the reading public down a million little channels, which is what really puts the food on an author’s table. Don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise.
Think about it. How many people lend a book to a friend with the words: “You ought a read this! It’s really terrible!”
How many people who read a book they like which they obtained from a public library never mention it to anyone? As a rule, in my experience, people who frequently borrow books from libraries are bibliophiles. And bibliophiles, in my experience, usually can’t refrain from talking about books they like.
And, just as important — perhaps most important of all — free books are the way an audience is built in the first place. How many people who are low on cash and for that reason depend on libraries or personal loans later rise on the economic ladder and then buy books by the very authors they came to love when they were borrowing books?

So recently I heard about the Barnes and Noble Nook. Unlike the Kindle, you can share books (although it’s up to the publisher to allow this) and unlike the Kindle you can use the open format EPUB. Now we’re talking. And it’s getting to be within a price range that I might be willing to shell out. So am I about to just start buying ebooks? Well, not quite yet.

First of all, even with the Barnes and Noble Nook, the files are still locked with DRM. Publishers (like the music industry before them) continue to view their readers as adversaries rather than as their clients. They have not taken the lesson from the music industry that legal MP3 sales sky-rocketed once DRM-free tracks were available. Now I don’t know anyone who illicitly obtains music. Before everyone I knew did. And nearly everyone I know illicitly obtains movies because there aren’t DRM-free versions available and I figure the same will happen with books. A quick search online shows that hackers and crackers have already figured out how to break the DRM on Sony and Amazon books. This means that, just as the music industry was doing before, you’re punishing the honest guys while those who would have obtained a copy without paying will still do so. And I refuse to be left holding the bag again with a bunch of books I paid money for and can’t read. I LOVE to support my favorite authors. I WILL pay for books – electronic or otherwise. But I will not be made the fool again.

Second, there’s the matter of Amazon having a little too much power over the Kindle (and perhaps other book reader manufacturers wielding the same power when they also control the store you buy from). You may have seen in the news last year that they removed a book (1984, ironically) from people’s Kindles. That’s right, if the company doesn’t like it (or maybe the government in a country like Iran or China), your books can be remotely removed from your device. This is one of those times where you may be better off with a third party reader like this Viewsonic reader (linke to B&H) where their loyalties are more to you than to a publisher.

Like this....but digital!

Third is the matter of convenience. Books can be read anywhere and anytime. Electronic devices have to be shut off at certain times on airplanes and cannot be brought into some work places. A book can be thrown around casually, but an electronic device cannot. A paperback can be pocket-sized and light – many readers are not.

To see if I can get into electronic books, I have downloaded some books from Cory Doctorow. He provides his books under a creative commons license which allows people to convert his book into every ebook format possible. I also have the Gutenberg project which contains all the classic books for free! I chose to get them on EPUB since it appears to be the book version of the Open Document Format (ODF) that I use with OpenOffice.org. If there’s a compelling reason to use another file format, let me know and I’ll consider it.

I’m at a bit of a disadvantage in that I do not own a book reader or a smart phone. I have my computer and my laptop. But the laptop could have been very useful on a recent train ride. And it can be useful at the airport when there’s power available (my battery doesn’t last long these days). I can even use it in bed – even though it is a bit cumbersome and hot. I installed dropbox on my laptop and main computer so I can keep my library in sync. It won’t be ideal, but it will give me somewhat of a feel for things. I’m using FBReader as it works on Linux and appears to support nearly every format. Who knows, if I can find myself enjoying this non-ideal way to read ebooks, it may inspire me to invest in an ebook reader. All I need now is the reader revolution demanding DRM-free books as they did with MP3s. Make your voices heard!

What kind of books will he end up reading?

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Mark Pilmgim, Python hacker and author, wrote a piece about this in his blog in which he explains the situation to his father.  Here are my favorite quotes.

Bruce Schneier, a famous cryptologist — or at least as famous a cryptologist as cryptologists are likely to get in this century — once described attempts to make digital bits uncopyable as “trying to make water not wet.”

To their credit, if that’s the right word, you can now purchase some music from the iTunes store that is unencrypted and plays anywhere. Apple calls these songs “iTunes Plus”, because it sounds so much better than calling everything else “iTunes Minus.”

To demonstrate the awesomeness of their developer platform, Microsoft opened their own online store, MSN Music, so they could compete directly with their business partners who also offered “PlaysForSure”-compatible music downloads. Because there’s nothing end users love more than fake choices.

At that point — transferring the music files they have “purchased” to another drive or a new computer — the Microsoft music player running on the victim’s PC (like iTunes, but all Microsoft-y instead of Apple-y) will make a call to Microsoft’s validation servers to verify that the music files were legitimately purchased. This call will fail, since the servers are not responding, since Microsoft has intentionally turned them off. The Microsoft music player will then conclude, incorrectly but steadfastly, that the music files were downloaded illegally and that the victim is a filthy pirate, and it will refuse to play them. In this case, the left hand knows exactly what the right hand is doing: they’re both giving you the finger.

Also, he mention that the Electronic Frontier Foundation, of which I’m a member, has posted a letter to Microsoft calling them on this move.

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Tsk, Tsk Microsoft!

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First I installed gtkpod onto my computer.  Then I plugged the Shuffle into Mario, my main Linux computer, and Rhythmbox promptly crashed.  I tried a few different combinations such as plugging in the iPod first or starting Rhythmbox first.  Then I ran gtkpod and realized that something was not setup correctly on the file system of the Shuffle.  So I plugged it into my Windows computer and ran iTunes and the first little setup wizard.  I named it 1UPMUSHROOM to go along with my Mario theme. 

After that everything worked perfectly.  So even though everyone was scared that with the latest updates, iPods wouldn’t work with Linux, the gtkpod people got it working – at least it worked for me with an iPod I just bought from the store.  I’ve been enjoying it for the past week or so and am able to listen to my podcasts at the gym instead of those stupid radio programs they usually play.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: iPod, gtkPod, Mario, Rhythmbox

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The EFF has been doing a lot of work with other things I care about such as opposing the broadcast flag and overall protecting our electronic and Internet freedoms.

Finally, I donated to NPR because I enjoy their programming every day and I thought it was time to help keep them afloat.  This was especially urgent as Congress has recently been reducing the mount of funding they give to public broadcasting, a real shame. 

I was going to donate to the Gnome foundation this year, but after their blunder with their support of OOXML and other moves that seem to legitimize Microsoft’s shady actions, I decided to withhold any funds from them this year.  There are only two ways to vote in the Free Software world, with programming talent and with money.  They get neither from me for 2008.

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I’m not the only one who’s made these claims.  Yet others say, “you guys are just using that as an excuse to malign DRM.  It’s necessary for protecting content from piracy and you just want to pirate stuff.”  Oh yeah?  Well, are you prepared to give up your rights to expect your paid content to work when you come back to it in the future? 

Then I read this on Download Squad via a link on Digg:

…Major League Baseball has deactivated a DRM license server used to verify your worthiness to play back video of games you purchased online.  …MLB’s new content and old content are managed by different license authentication servers. After making the switch, MLB has arbitrarily decided it has no intention of honoring its earlier commitments to fans who purchased downloaded games under the old system, thereby rendering many fans shut-out.  …MLB is completely unapologetic to fans who’ve lost their purchased content to the horrors of DRM death.

“Shame on you Major League Baseball, this is fraud. We’ve warned Download Squad readers that buying DRM “protected” media is a crap-shoot, but when issuing those warnings we were mostly concerned about smaller media sales outlets going out-of-business in an ever evolving digital media landscape. This goes so far beyond those fears, with an active and profitable business making a clear and informed decision to yank the DRM rug out from under your purchased content.Is it any wonder non-drm downloads via P2P are so popular? …it’s …about “freedom”, the freedom to do what you wish with the content you’ve collected. If consumers aren’t given options which allow them to get their content free as in freedom, they’ll take that content free as in beer.

Fans shafted as Major League Baseball revokes DRM licenses – Download Squad

So, basically, these people paid money to download these baseball video clips and now they can no longer watch them.  Why should they get punished in the same way as people who did not pay for these clips?  Is this ethical?  I don’t think so!

I’ve had my own experience with content dying on me.  When I was in college I decided to buy some songs off of the new Napster.  Then my computer died.  When I tried to renegotiate the DRM a few months ago, it said that I can no longer listen to that music because they no longer have a contract with Napster.  What kind of BS is that?  This is not the kind of world I want to live in.  If you agree, you should join me in boycotting all content with DRM!  If you want digital music, buy CDs or buy it on Amazon.com.  (If you want more indie music there’s also DRM free music at Magnatunes)

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Baseball, MLB, DRM Revocation, Napster

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Also, they are MP3s, not AACs, so I can use the music on any computer or portable device and not just the iPod!

Here’s the music freedom and the hope that the rest of the music companies will join in!

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Now let’s take a look at unauthorized video sources such as bit torrent. I can watch this video on any operating system from Linux to Windows to Mac to Haiku OS and any other OS with the appropriate codecs. I can put the video on anything from a Creative Video player to an iPod video. I can burn it to DVD and watch it this way. I can watch it anywhere in the world. Yet, this is free! Oh yeah, and these videos can be used for Fair Use reasons because their lack of digital restrictions management allows me to embed them into reports, projects, etc

So where did economics breaks down? Isn’t capitalism supposed to work that the more money you pay for something, the more value you get? Shouldn’t the videos I pay money for have MORE freedoms than the ones I can download? Quality used to be a problem, but now that people have HD tuner cards, I don’t even get better quality when I pay for something.

Video content producers need to get their stuff into order if they don’t want to get the point where no one will be willing to pay for their content. For me, that means videos without DRM. Don’t worry, I won’t share it with anyone. I just want to be able to watch it whenever and however I want and one whatever OS or portable player I want.

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First of all, it does require me to use Internet Explorer. This is extremely shortsighted. What about those of us who use Firefox? My wife was excited about “watch now” until she found out that IE was required and said, “f&ck that!” So you should open up this service to other browsers.

Second, I use Linux as my main computer and my brother uses a macintosh for his main laptop. This effectively cuts us off from using this service. Sure, Linux and Mac users make up a combined 6% or so of the total computer user population, but these are fast growing categories and you risk alienating us from this service. Dell is now selling consumer computers with Linux preinstalled and Apple sales have been picked up, boosted by the iPod and iPhone.

I understand what your excuse will be – we need to use DRM to ensure that people will not copy the videos. The only secure DRM we were able to find was licensed from Microsoft. However, a quick search on Google will show you that people have already broken it. Then you will change it and they will break it again. You’re on the losing side of an never ending battle.

Shipping costs some amount of money so I can see that the more customers you get using the online services, the more profits go to Netflix. In the end you want everyone to do this instead of ordering DVDs. If you want to be successful at this you’re going to need to support all of the major platforms and browsers.

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Check this page out to see what it may mean.

The Free Speech Flag…..just check out the hex that represents these colours.

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Second, I have realized that the whole scheme – even paying $1/song – is ridiculous. Why would I buy a digital album for $10 if I could buy the same album as a CD for $10. And the CD has no DRM, has cover art, and serves as a backup in case my hard drive gets wiped out. Not only that, but it’s a perfect digital reproduction. The AACs being sold on iTunes are 128kbps. That’s in the middle of the scale – certainly not best quality. For $1/song I should be able to by FLACs, not AACs! For the uninformed, FLAC is a file format which is perfect quality and does not involve any loss of quality while still achieving awesome compression rates.

Finally, it doesn’t cost them anything to have infinite copies of a digital song, but it costs money to make CDs and ship them to best buy. If anything, music bought online should be CHEAPER than CDs. Until then, I will only buy CDs!

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Each time they have been wrong and the new technologies have provided new ways for them to make money. Not only that, but each new technology has enabled a plethora of new industries to spring up. Without the invention of LPs in the early 1900s, there wold never have been the turntablist musical movement and rap would have sounded very different. Without cassette tapes, many bands would never have created that first cheap demo tape to send to the record companies to get signed. Without the ability to copy CDs to the computer, the iPod and all other similar devices would not exist.

Originally there was going to be something akin to CSS on audio CDs, but it was dropped and computers were allowed to read them and rip them. I think this was one of the greatest abilities of all time. Until the invention of MP3 players (and later digital music players), the ability for me to be able to remaster a CD with a full 74 minutes allowed me to be able to have a lot of music in my car without a ton of CDs. It’s a well known fact that more CDs barely push 15-20 minutes, so being able to combine 2-4 CDs onto one was quite a boon! Back in those days I used to create my own CDs with every song an artist ever sang (instead of buying a compilation from the store which had all the songs I already had). Sure, I was keeping them from selling me that compilation CD, but that was a silly thing anyway. If I already owned the license to listen to those songs, why should I have to buy another license to listen to all of them in one CD?

What about file sharing? A study has recently been done by a series of researchers who have proven that MP3 file-sharing of copyrighted music has had a statistically 0% affect on the sales of CDs. So CD sales have simply declined because people don’t like the music being made. So next time they whine about stuff – tell them, “hey you’ve been wrong for 100 years, why should we believe you NOW?”

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