io9 
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San Francisco, 2:10 AM
Sat Dec 5
24 posts in the last 24 hours
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07/19/09
07/19/09
07/19/09
And so many of the "I prefer paper" comments aren't even about the merits of print books as a medium so much as plain old snobbery, like "Kindle? Sorry, I'll stick with real books." As if it's some kind of noble stance to take. We are on a science-fiction site, and we live in what is still largely a print-based culture. No one is denying the merits of the print book.
It's like if you own a Segway and discover you have problems riding it to work because there's a big hill or something. And you're trying to figure out what might be done, and someone says, "Well, that's why I just drive my car." Thanks, jackass -- I never thought of that.
(Please note that I'm not actually calling you a jackass.)
07/19/09
07/19/09
I mean, in the first place, like all right-thinking people I already *own* a paper copy of 1984.
In the second place, it's not like I didn't know that Amazon would be able to do that. Why would I leave anything serious on a device that's automatically attached to a company's private network?
07/19/09
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07/18/09
I *think* (hope for me, I'll find out Monday) that I might be getting a gift cert. for Barnes and Noble soon. And I will buy awesome real books with it.
(w00t! Hope I haven't jinxed it with this post!)
07/18/09
i love tech, but gotta keep some things analog, or we will end up like Claire, Whiskey
07/19/09
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07/18/09
1) The rights owners were legally in the right on this issue. They had every right to request Amazon stop the distribution of the books. I don't think anyone can argue that (legally) this is to be expected and would hold up in a court of law according to the laws as they now stand.
2) You can transfer files from the Kindle to a computer very, very easily via USB. It is actively supported by Amazon. You can even download your purchases to your machine from the Kindle management page on Amazon's site. You never have to use WhisperNet to get content onto your Kindle. If you are concerned about deletions, simply back up your books to your computer and connect to WhisperNet to get firmware updates... that's it.
3) Lastly, in my opinion, the main issue here is the deletion. I do believe Amazon should have a kill-switch on the Kindle - I bet there are exploits waiting to be found and a smart hacker could easily embed them into a file. Amazon should have the ability to kill such files. However, this wasn't such a case and did not justify what they did. Amazon should have handled this by contacting the purchasers and offering to replace "1984" with the authorized edition (for free or reduced rate) and offering to replace "Animal Farm" with an authorized edition (for free or a reduced rate) when one becomes available.
4) Amazon needs to approve the books that go up. Anyone can upload any document onto the service and it's easy to do. If Amazon actually has an approval process to determine if the work is in the public domain, or the work of the uploader, then this would be easily avoided.
5) Most importantly: Amazon has publicly apologized for the deletions, owned up to them, and has stated they will not do it again. The article on the apology is here (I can use the HTML for italics, but not for an href?):
http://tinyurl.com/kupmog
I find it amazing that everyone wants to cry about the deletions, but no one wants to pay attention to the apology. Everyone wants to cry "Big Brother," but no one wants to address the commercial realities of offering content in the e-book market.
No one is a fan of DRM but, like the iPod eight years ago, the Kindle is a device which is changing the marketplace and currently the content owners in that marketplace are going to demand DRM. Apple was eventually able to dump Fairplay and go to non-DRM files, the reality is that, as something like the Kindle grows, Amazon will be able to get to the point that the DRM can be removed from the Kindle, too.
It's a new venture that the old players don't get. I blame Amazon for the deletion, but I don't blame them for bowing to the publishers for the DRM and the ability to perform the deletion - that's simply the cost of being in business with such a product at this point.
I, for one, have made stupid decisions in reaction to requirements put on me by people I was working with. Again, Amazon is to blame for the deletions, but I find it utter hypocrisy that imperfect people who know very well they they, too, have made stupid decisions in their lives, are throwing stones at Amazon when: a) it was the first time, and; b) they have publicly stated they will not do it again. I'm willing to accept the apology at face value. If they do delete again, then that will be the point where an apology will not suffice to me.
Meanwhile, if you really want "1984" for cheap on your Kindle, download it from a country where it is in the public domain and use Stanza to save it as a Kindle-formatted book and copy it over to the Kindle via USB.
07/18/09
I personally think that's some major tinfoil-hat thinking to go to such extremes, but to each their own.
07/18/09
And never talk about anything online or over the phone or in writing.
07/18/09
I mean, it doesn't take a genius to figure out people will be pissed and feel violated if something they've purchased disappears, refund or no, and Amazon had more than one brain to consult here. And although, yes, this stuff is new and getting worked out on the fly, as it were, part of the reason that, say, iTunes got rid of DRM was people flipping out over it. When a person screws up, you can say to that person, "Hey, you fucked up, but it's cool; I understand" and there's a good chance they'll get the message. But with corporations, I'm not convinced -- especially, again, based on Amazon's poor PR record of late -- that they completely get what's OK and what's not and that sympathetic disappointment will get the message across. Whereas a deluge of "WTF? Did you know those assholes could do this?!" news stories, while seemingly disproportionate, will likely ensure that it doesn't happen again.
07/18/09
07/19/09
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07/18/09
They removed the e-copies cause they were being sold by someone who didnt have the legal right to.
They weren't removing copies cause they were afraid a book that everyone has already read in high school, readily available at any public or school library, and physically sits on the bookshelves of many homes as hard copies would start some sort of revolution.
Like Sperl said, it's ironic, not censorship which is a far more serious concept...
The only thing they did wrong was to do it with no prior notice to their customers.
Otherwise, unless Amazon starts banning the book outright from kindle and their mail-order websites, throwing around terms such as 'censorship' is over zealous.
07/18/09
It's great that Amazon apologized, but this is still worth knowing and thinking about. It's an observable indicator of one of those paradigm shifts people are always talking about. And dude, if you don't get worked up over paradigm shifts, I mean, I'm sorry, but you're not doing a very good job of being a curmudgeon.
07/18/09
One of the reasons people purchase Kindles (over other e-book readers) is because of the Whispernet features, which also gives them wireless 3G web access and the ability to (automatically) upload their highlights & notes to the Amazon site.
Yes, it's a bad PR move for Amazon to alter or delete content from user devices without prior warning and consent ... but anyone who previously thought this wasn't POSSIBLE was being naive.
07/18/09
It's never the incident. It's the cover-up and/or PR afterwards.
07/18/09
Little Brother can kill Big Brother.
07/18/09
07/18/09
you know amazon is gonna die.
07/19/09
07/18/09
07/18/09
It's lunacy for a business to do that, especially to early adopters.
07/18/09
07/18/09
Remotely deleting a book from a person's Kindle without their permission is not okay.
As has been stated elsewhere, this wouldn't happen with a physical book and is now a huge obstacle to convincing people that buying e-books is a good thing, including this early adopter.
07/18/09
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07/18/09
The story I wrote on 5.5 in. floppies? Unrecoverable without a ton of tedious effort and some expense. The hardcopy version of it on fanfold dot-matrix? Still visible.
We hear about what a hassle it is to work with the 40 year old Apollo tapes, yet my scrapbook from then is still mostly intact.
I have some books that were printed in the 19th century. Over there in Yurp they've got stuff from hundreds or thousands of years ago. Yet something I wrote five years ago on a 3.25" floppy is going to be annoying to recover. Nobody's going to be thrilled to inherit great-grandpa's Kindle, like I was to get a primer.
07/18/09
07/18/09
07/19/09
let's take another spin on that example. it's 300 years later, the 5.5 in floppies? still encoded with magnetic media. the hardcopy version of it on fanfold dot-matrix? long since decayed with age.
07/19/09
Scientific American had a great article on this, an expanded version of this can be found here: http://www.clir.org/pubs/archives/ensuring.pdf
It is possible to have so much information stored digitally, exabytes, that it is not possible to copy it all to a new medium before the old medium is no long readable. Such organizations have to have a strategy of continuous migration to new media. I once worked at such a place.
07/19/09
07/19/09
And the man-hours to transfer stuff is insane. Paper, it's there, no transfer needed.
07/19/09
I took the Edward Tufte seminar a few months ago. As part of the seminar he shows a first edition of a book by Galileo, published around 350 years ago. It was a remarkable thing to see, as his assistant carried it around the room while wearing white gloves.
I didn't pull the example of my master's thesis out of thin air: it had to be printed on high-cotton acid-free paper. The eight inch floppy disks that the digital copy is on are useless. But the paper copy of the thesis (which my advisor insisted contain all the source code) can be read (not that anyone would want to) long after I'm gone.
Go to any good museum and you'll see pottery fragments from ancient Greece, surviving thousands of years.
Digital media, by and large, is ephemeral. Future archeologists from Zeta Reticuli will curse us because they will find more written records from ancient Rome than they will from our Twenty-First Century. They will be quoting Petronius the Arbiter (if he really existed) and our culture will all be forgotten.
07/19/09
I also dimly recall discussing some of this in the entry on "Mass Storage" I wrote for THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF COMPUTER SCIENCE: http://www.amazon.com/Encyclopedia-Computer-Science-Anthony-Ralston/dp/0470864125/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1248052867&sr=1-1
07/20/09
still this conversation has been eye opening, some estimates of the shelf life an end user CD-R are as short as 2-5 years. i honestly didn't know CDs were that fragile.
07/20/09