Readers Against DRM

I’ve really been enjoying my Kindle. I’ve even bought some e-books from Amazon instead of only reading books I could find DRM-free copies of. The little, niggling reminder in the back of my mind that the device and the e-books I was supporting were more restricted than the paper books I could buy on the shelf never went away, but I was able to justify my ignoring it with the pros of the device and formats themselves.

Then a friend of mine wrote a piece titled “Almost, Amazon” about why he couldn’t bring himself to buy a Kindle despite all the enjoyment he’d get out of it, and it made me feel guilty. We show businesses what we want by how we spend our dollars, and here I was part of the problem.

My wife, on the other hand, doesn’t see much of a problem. Sure, she’d prefer that digital books and e-book readers not have anything to do with DRM, but the DRM model is one that doesn’t negatively impact her. So she can’t donate a finished book to the library or sell it to the used book store for a couple dollars; she’s still saving money up front and getting all the e-book benefits that paper books don’t have. The pros vastly outweigh the cons. Also, she reminds me, as e-book sales increase, publishers should be able to stop worrying about digital books (legitimate and pirated) eating away at their traditional sales, and instead take such confidence in their future involving digital books that they needn’t cling to DRM. I understand that DRM is helping give publishers the confidence they need in digital publishing’s infancy, but once it’s learned to walk they should be able to stop holding its hand and let it run. I can still remember the frustrating days when it looked like there was no hope for the music industry, and now DRM’d music is a thing of the past.

But I worry about what could happen if e-books never escape from DRM the way digital music did. DRM for ebooks isn’t terribly restrictive in its current state, but the ability is there for publishers to start getting crazy without a moment’s notice. Just weeks ago Harper Collins declared their intent to start using DRM not just to prevent piracy, but to increase revenue from libraries (and one can infer they hope to make libraries less able to be useful as well). In addition to writing “Almost, Amazon”, my friend also shared a link with me that paints an even grimmer possible future; one not nearly as far-fetched as you may think.

However, I shared this and other “worse case scenarios” with my wife, and again she’s not too concerned. Even if every person in a family needed their own Kindle and their own copy of an e-book in order to read it (as opposed to sharing one copy within the family across multiple Kindles as we currently do) she says the pros of e-book outweigh such cons (her enthusiasm for e-books is impressive).

I understand my wife’s perspective, and I certainly agree with her on the benefits of e-books in general. But I’d really like to help increase the chances that once the dust has settled in this messy birth of e-books we’ll see them left with the same easy-to-share/sell/give/use abilities that paper books have. So I need to write letters to publishers, authors, and e-book DRM providers like Amazon and Adobe. I need to educate my e-book loving acquaintances on how much better it could be without DRM, and how much worse it could be if we never get rid of it, in hopes that they’ll too work to encourage publishers and sellers to end DRM. The Readers’ Bill of Rights for Digital Books sums our demands up nicely, and the website and community its creators have developed around it is bound to be a valuable tool in the fight against e-book DRM.

I have to hope that some day a big player like Amazon will convince publishers to give up DRM and convert all existing and new e-books to open, DRM-free copies, liberating those of us who spent our money on the shackled content of today and giving everyone else sound, reliable, open access to one of the greatest technological advances of our time. If not, I hope we’ll still have paper books around in case publishers decide to use DRM to turn e-books against us.

Some Thoughts on the 3rd Gen Kindle

Now that Amazon’s released its first new generation of Kindle devices since the iPad, a lot of people are criticizing the device for its lack of color and touch screen.  I too was a little underwhelmed, until I learned a little more about the improvements (or refinements) Amazon’s made:

• smaller size body but same size screen with higher contrast
• a Wi-Fi version that’s $50 cheaper than the 3G version
• a new open source browser based on WebKit (just like Chrome, iPad, etc), which includes a button to remove content surrounding articles (like the Readability bookmarklet)  (I have a cell phone for browsing the web on the go. The web browser on my ebook reader should be for locating sites that I can then strip down to just the content and enjoy.)

When I showed the knew Kindle to a co-worker, he dismissed it as soon as he learned it didn’t have a touch screen.  I explained how a touch screen decreases the visibility of non-backlit screens, but he then just added the complaint that it’s not backlit. I showed him this quote from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, but he wasn’t as impressed as I was:

“There will never be a Kindle with a touch screen that inhibits reading. It has to be done in a different way. It can’t be a me-too touch screen.” [emphasis mine]

I was also happy to see I’m not alone in appreciating Amazon’s commitment to a simple, quiet, e-reading device.  A commenter on a BoingBoing article on the new device said:

I’m glad to see that Amazon’s not trying to bloat the device with silly features like touch screen and color in a misguided attempt to compete with the iPad–instead, they’re improving its base functions, and lowering the price. They know their product and their market.

The Kindle is a specialized device for comfortably reading [digital] books without eyestrain brought on by backlighting and glare. In that limited scope, it excels, and far surpasses the iPad and other devices that use non-eInk screens.

The biggest (dare I say, only) problem I have with the new Kindle is that is still only accepts Amazon’s DRM. Adding the ability to buy from other e-book sellers (which would simply mean accepting the e-Pub standard) would be a huge step towards eliminating DRM altogether. Amazon has fallen far from the days when we applauded them for championing the DRM free music transition. I still hope they’ll be the ones to bring us DRM-free e-books, but this proprietary “nobody else plays on our device” garbage isn’t any less repulsive then when Apple does it.

So yeah, e-books are still heading somewhere and the value of e-ink hasn’t been swallowed up by flashy LCD tablets like the iPad and Archos. Hooray! But DRM (and even limited e-book availability from some backwards publishers and authors) is still forcing me to stick with buying and borrowing paper books for now.

Make Your Own $300 High-Speed Book Scanner

The second biggest reason I haven’t bought an Amazon Kindle yet is that I don’t like paying for books (the first being that it’s an expensive gadget).  I don’t like paying for anything really, but books are something that’s particularly easy to get for free thanks to your local library.  That doesn’t mean libraries don’t hurt authors any more or less than pirating music reportedly hurts artists, but libraries are currently 100% legal (more, earlier thoughts on this here).  There are thriving e-book piracy communities on-line. One needs only to remove the DRM of a commercially purcahsed e-book (easier for some formats than others) or digitally scan the book manually and spend hours pouring through the OCR output for typos.  Then people like me can easily reap the rewards of their efforts.

So the third biggest reason I haven’t bought a Kindle yet is that whether you pay for e-books or pirate them for free, many titles simply aren’t available anywhere in electronic form. It would be incredibly frustrating to have just spent over $300 on a device to read books on only to have to obtain a physical copy of a book that isn’t availible electronically.

And that’s where Daniel Reetz’s $300 high-speed book scanner is a great step in the right direction.  Sure, at $300 you’d need to have a lot of non-electronic books you really wanted to read on your e-book device(s) or have a desire to serve the greater e-book community with your efforts. And you can’t just queue up a book and walk away; you have to turn the page after each 2-page snapshot it takes. But even then you’ll only be standing there a good 20 minutes for a normal length book.

I could really see myself taking the time and money required to build this if it meant I’d be releasing books from the shackles of the physical world and letting them loose in electronic form to the world. But sharing copyrighted materials like that is considered illegal.  Building this machine solely for personal use seems like too much work for too little reward.  It’s tempting to join the e-book piracy movement and become a major “content provider”, but I’m just not sure that that’s the best way to deal with publishers (and libraries) dragging their feet as demand for e-books grows.

Anyway, my hat goes off to Daniel Reetz and others like him who are making it an especially exciting time to be a bibliophile.