Tag Archives: Kindle

Macmillan vs Amazon, Round One

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According to Huffington Post, after the iPad launch Walter Mossberg cornered Steve Jobs to ask a pertinent question:

Mossberg asks why users would want to shell out $14.99 for an ebook on the iPad, when they can buy ebooks for Amazon’s Kindle for $9.99.

Steve Jobs’ retort: ‘Well, that won’t be the case.’ Mossberg presses him on whether that means Apple’s prices will go down, or Amazon’s will go up, to which Jobs offers a cryptic, non-committal, ‘The prices will be the same.’

On Friday, this exchange was explained. Macmillan demanded that Amazon jack up the prices of e-books to $14.99. In response, Amazon stopped selling Macmillan books. That includes all books from Tor and Forge, the science fiction and fantasy publishers.

As it happens, next month’s book at the book club I go to is published by Tor. I went to buy a copy on Friday, not knowing about the dispute. I had seen it available for Kindle before, and wondered why it was no longer available.

Then I shrugged, and bought a dirt-cheap used paperback copy instead. If Amazon had given in and upped the price to over $10, rather than refusing to sell it, I’d have done the same.

The thing is, a book is something I rarely read more than once. There are so many good books out there, I feel like it would be crazy to re-read when I could read something new to me. Hence $15 for a book is expensive entertainment, compared to $15 for a CD I’ll listen to many times, or $3 for a movie rental.

I suspect that I’m not unusual in this respect, and that Amazon have done the market research, and concluded that DRM-crippled e-books are never going to sell for more than $10–particularly not when you can pick up a paperback for $5 including shipping. Rather than devalue the Kindle and allow other publishers leverage to introduce their own disastrous price increases, Amazon is playing hardball and opting not to sell Macmillan books–which is their right in a free market, isn’t it?

Apple did the same thing with the music industry, pushing them to keep prices at 99¢ per track. Later, the big music companies were allowed to increase prices in return for dropping DRM. Everyone loved it when Apple forced prices down, but this time there are some angry voices.

John Scalzi is one of them. He’s pretty angry at Amazon. Reading between the lines, I think he’s pretty angry at his publisher too, for trying to sell his books at a price he doesn’t think most people will buy at. Meanwhile, Cory Doctorow proposes the iTunes Music Store solution: allow publishers the freedom to set prices however they like, if they drop DRM and abusive EULAs. (Sounds good to me, as it makes the problem somewhat self-correcting–if publishers jack up the prices too high for the market, copyright violation ensues.)

I can understand why Macmillan’s authors are upset by what Amazon have done, but fundamentally, I think this is a very simple problem: Macmillan has decided to set its prices higher than Amazon thinks it can sell books at, so Amazon is choosing not to sell Macmillan books. If you’re an author published by Macmillan, I think the people you really need to be directing your ire at are at your publishing company, for attempting to raise prices in the middle of a terrible recession. In the mean time, well, I guess I’ll buy your books used.

Underneath the spreading chestnut tree

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Another day, another round of bad media coverage for the Amazon Kindle.

The story as originally reported: Publisher changes mind about having an e-book edition of George Orwell’s books. Amazon remotely deletes them and refunds the purchase price.

What actually happened: A third party illegally published editions of George Orwell’s books, which they did not have the right to publish. Amazon remotely deleted those illegal copies and refunded the purchase price.

Of course, Pogue’s speculations are now half way around the planet as fact. Thanks, mainstream media.

The only thing that’s new here is the discovery that Amazon can remotely remove DRM-protected books from the Kindle. That enables them to recall illegal product. Previously, in the world of physical goods, stores who discovered that they had sold illegal products would request that customers return them for refunds, but they were not able to force the issue.

Now, it can certainly be argued that the ability to recall illegally-sold product is a misfeature, but of course nobody has to buy DRM-encumbered books, even if they want to read them on Kindle. Nobody has to keep the wireless connection to Amazon enabled, even. Nevertheless this story has led all the usual FUD to resurface, so I refer back to my previous articles about the device.

Still, the continuous bad press might have the positive effect of making Amazon open up and support open standards better, right? It would certainly be nice to see Open eBook support in the next firmware revision.

Kindle DX thoughts

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My initial thoughts about the Kindle DX:

The price seems surprisingly reasonable. The iRex with an A4 size screen was over $800.

I’m not convinced that textbooks are workable on an e-book reader. You don’t read textbooks linearly. (Or at least, I never did.) The ability to flip around between marked locations is limited on the Kindle 2, and I’m guessing it will be on the DX as well.

On the other hand, the size and weight benefits are hard to deny. However, I never used to carry multiple textbooks around with me. Maybe American students’ habits are different?

It wouldn’t work for me as a general purpose device for reading novels as well as PDFs, because it won’t fit into a shoulder bag or reasonable size backpack. With a screen that big, it’ll be scarily easy to break by banging your bag against the corner of a table, unless you get some kind of metal hardcase.

Newspapers? Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t see the ability to display text in multiple columns as that big of a win. Consider that most people under the age of about 50 get their written news from the web, where a single column for the stories is the rule. We went through all the madness of trying to make electronic pages look like newspaper pages ten years ago; it didn’t work as well as a simple clickable table of contents. I bet the newspaper guys think going back to multiple columns is a great idea, though. As for diagrams, the existing Kindle can display those fairly adequately, it’s mainly being held back by the content producers failing to include them.

What about magazines, which generally require color? If I’m going to be spending a big chunk of cash on something with an A4 screen, I want to be able to read Scientific American on it without compromises.

Overall, I’m more skeptical about this than I was about the original Kindle. I think I’d advise waiting to see what Pixel Qi come up with, not to mention the CrunchPad.

Book: “The Status Civilization”, Robert Sheckley

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If you’re a Douglas Adams fan, Robert Sheckley is probably a good bet. He wrote mostly SF with a satirical comedy bent, and was widely acclaimed for it.

I’ve found a few of his novels disappointing–”Options“, for example, seems to fall apart part-way through and meander around. “The Status Civilization“, though, is excellent. It does have a few visible seams from its original publication in magazine serial form, but they don’t detract too much from the story.

I read it on Kindle, via the wonders of Project Gutenberg.

Kindle and Amazon and the DMCA

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Amazon have misused the DMCA to demand takedown of a file called azw-0.1.zip. Since I have both the archive file and a Kindle, and have used both together, I can explain what’s really going on. Hopefully this will clear up some of the misinformation floating around.

The code in the disputed zip file is written in Python. It calculates the Mobipocket PID for your Kindle, based on the serial number written on the back. You can then provide this PID to any e-book store that sells e-books in DRMed Mobipocket format. They can sell you encrypted Mobipocket e-books, and you can then run a second Python script which flips a flag in the e-book file, making it readable on your Kindle. (The flag is just one that says “This is encrypted for Kindle”; no encryption is broken.)

This works because Amazon bought Mobipocket a few years ago, and used their DRM scheme and e-book format as the basis of the Kindle’s e-book format. The basic Mobipocket format is pretty simple. It’s HTML inside a Palm OS PDB database. That’s it. The DRM just adds a layer of encryption.

So, why are Amazon upset about this?

One theory is that they don’t want Kindle owners buying books anywhere other than Amazon.com. Well, if that’s the case, they’re playing a losing game, because Fictionwise (recently purchased by Barnes & Noble) sells e-books in DRM-free Mobipocket format, which you can just drag-drop onto your Kindle.

A second theory is that Amazon don’t want people to be able to create DRM-encumbered e-books for Kindle themselves, bypassing whatever fees Amazon may be charging for the service. I don’t know how true that may be, as I have no interest in creating DRM-encumbered anything, so I’ve never investigated how much Amazon charges.

My personal theory is that the real reason Amazon don’t want people finding out their Kindle’s Mobipocket PID is a fear that people will then find out how to decrypt their DRM-encumbered Mobipocket books.

And indeed, there is a completely different set of Python scripts floating around on the web that will decrypt a Mobipocket e-book given the PID used to encrypt it. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone; DRM is fundamentally flawed. Clearly the e-book reader software has to have all the information necessary to decrypt the book so that it can show it to me. That being the case, it’s inevitable that the decryption code will be reverse-engineered if enough people are motivated enough to do so.

But make no mistake: the azw-0.1 files do not break any copy protection or reveal any secret codes. They just calculate the PID of your Kindle, based on the serial number that’s written right on the back of the device in plain sight. They are interoperability tools, and the DMCA explicitly allows for interoperability tools. I suspect that the EFF could take on this case and win easily.

While I’m writing, here’s a quick summary of a few Kindle myths that I see repeated a lot in coverage of the story:

  • The Kindle traps you into buying everything from Amazon.

    Not true. Even if the azw scripts were illegal, you could still buy as much DRM-free content as you liked, load it directly onto the Kindle via USB, and never use the wireless connection to Amazon at all. As mentioned above, you can buy DRM-free e-books in Kindle-ready Mobipocket files from Fictionwise.

    It’s like the iPod: you may be stuck with a single vendor for DRM-encumbered content, but you can buy your DRM-free content from anywhere. Personally, I intend to buy as little DRM-crippled content as possible, and hope that Amazon gets the message.

  • The Kindle uses proprietary e-book format.

    As mentioned above, the Kindle’s native format is a trivial variation on Mobipocket format, which is HTML inside a Palm PDB database. The open-source mobiperl tools will pack and unpack .mobi and .azw files.

    As Mobipocket’s FAQ points out, the HTML extensions and metadata are based on an open industry standard.

    Also, there are free tools from Mobipocket for creating e-books. They’re Windows-only, however, and don’t seem to work under WINE.

  • You have to get all your content onto your Kindle by sending it to Amazon.

    Wrong. The Kindle mounts as a hard drive, using Storage Class USB. No drivers are required on Windows, Mac or Linux. Your library of books appears in a folder called “documents”. They’re just .azw and .mobi files. You can drag more books into the folder in Mobipocket or ISO-8859-1 text format, and the Kindle will display them.

    If you want to read PDFs, you have three options. One is to e-mail the PDF to your Amazon Kindle e-mail address; Amazon will convert it and it will appear wirelessly on your Kindle, at a cost of 10 cents. The second option is to e-mail the PDF to your free Kindle conversion e-mail address, and have Amazon e-mail it back in mobi/azw format for you to load onto your Kindle via USB. The third option is to use free tools to convert the PDF to mobi yourself, in which case Amazon need never see what’s in your PDF.

    From my own experiments, it appears that Amazon are using the open source pdf2edit on their back end as the conversion tool. Either that, or they’re using something which has exactly the same formatting conversion quirks.

Decision

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I will allow myself to buy an Amazon Kindle. But first, I must read all the books on my "books to read" shelf.

Except "Infinite Jest", the size of which makes it a prime candidate for e-book reading.

Kindle

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Dear Amazon,

You’re so almost there with your new Kindle e-book. There are just a few minor details you need to fix to get me on board.

First of all, you need Mac support, and preferably Linux support as well, both for content creation and for reading books. There’s really no excuse for not having reader support, as you have a working Mobipocket reader in Java that will run on Mac and Linux, you just haven’t taken the time to package it up properly. The creation tools ought to be a pretty simple task to port too; a command line version would be fine. I don’t even care if it can’t apply DRM; I just want a way to be able to package up free text.

Secondly, you need to either drop the DRM, or drop the price of the books. Let’s consider a real example here. I’m about to start reading Charlie Stross’s The Atrocity Archives.

Let’s get one thing straight here: because there’s DRM, I can’t sell the book when I’m done with it, which breaks the first sale doctrine. Therefore, you’re not actually selling e-books, you’re renting them to me for an indefinite period of time, a bit like Netflix does with DVDs. I’d respect you more if you admitted that.

Anyhow, If I go the Kindle route, it’s $9.99 for the book.

Suppose I go the paper route instead. I can pick up a new copy on amazon.com marketplace for $12 plus $4 shipping = $16. When I’m done reading it, I can sell it for $9 second hand. Total cost to me = $7.

So the Kindle is more expensive, and I can’t actually buy the books. That to me is a poor deal.

Oh, sure, Kindle prices include network bandwidth… but with paper books, I had to include the cost of physically shipping dead tree across the country, and I still came out ahead. If you can’t beat the paper book price-per-reading, you’re doing something seriously wrong.

We’ve all watched the music industry flail around overcharging for DRM-burdened files and get nowhere. Learn from their mistakes. Drop the DRM, or drop the book prices to $5 or so (comparable to a DVD or video game rental, plus some markup to cover network costs) and I’ll order my Kindle tomorrow.

Update: Of course, if you gave me the Kindle for free, I’d use it to buy books from you, and look on the extra cost as a convenience fee.