Entelligence: Two strikes for Kindle is enough for me
By Michael Gartenberg 
posted July 23rd 2009 4:18PM
posted July 23rd 2009 4:18PM
Entelligence is a column by technology strategist and author Michael Gartenberg, a man whose desire for a delicious cup of coffee and a quality New York bagel is dwarfed only by his passion for tech. In these articles, he'll explore where our industry is and where it's going -- on both micro and macro levels -- with the unique wit and insight only he can provide.
I like books. No: I actually love books. In virtually every room in my home there are bookcases that are filled to overflowing. I like to purchase them, hold them as I read words written to inform, delight, and transport the reader into different times, new experiences, and enlighten them in ways they could not have imagined. Like the worst hot dog I've eaten and the worst beer I've drunk, the worst book I've read was wonderful... but books do have a downside. They're bulky to store, hard to travel with (paper is really, really heavy), and paperbacks in particular tend to not hold up well over time. So, in addition to books, I've been a fan of e-Books. My former venture capital firm did one of the first investments in Peanut Press (long sold and re-sold many times and now owned by Barnes and Noble) and more than a decade ago I struggled with reading fiction by Dan Brown on a Palm V device with low resolution and on backlight. It was a struggle -- but it was better than schlepping paper.
There have been a lot of e-book efforts over the last decade, but none of them have been successful. There have been dedicated readers such as the RocketBook and others. There were efforts from Microsoft to create an e-book market for their handheld devices and tablet PCs, and efforts from Adobe to publish books via the ubiquitous PDF format. None were successful -- until Amazon introduced the Kindle. While it was far from perfect, I felt that Amazon had done for the e-book reader what Apple had done for the PC. In the words of Alan Kay, the Macintosh was the first PC good enough to be criticized. I felt the same way about the Kindle. The Kindle had enough content to be interesting -- it focused on getting e-book prices lower (after all, what's the difference physically between an electronic version of a paperback and hardcover book?) and wisely bypassed the PC to load content. The Kindle 2, the Kindle DX, combined with Amazon's willingness to evolve the Kindle onto other platforms such as the iPhone seemed to make the Kindle appear to have the best chance of taking e-books to the mass market. But two events over the last few weeks have led me to put my Kindle back on the shelf and wonder again if the e-book market will ever take off.
Amazon states that "a copy of every book you purchased from the Kindle Store is backed up at Amazon.com in case you ever need to download it again. You can wirelessly re-download books for free any time. This allows you to make room for new titles on your Kindle, knowing that Amazon is storing your personal library of Kindle books. We even back up your last page read and annotations, so you'll never lose those, either. Think of it as a bookshelf in your attic--even though you don't see it, you know your books are there."
Sounds good. Not too different from eReader's policy where I can download books I bought more than decade ago to my iPhone, a device that didn't even exist when I bought them. My problems occurred after downloading my copy of Freakonomics to my Kindle 1, my iPhone and iPod touch. I discovered I couldn't download the book to my Kindle 2. I kept getting error after error that simply said this book can't be loaded on this device. A little time with Google revealed I was not alone. It seems there's a finite number of times each book can be downloaded, even if it's downloaded to the same device. This number is set by the publisher and varies from book to book, but Amazon never mentions this, and there's no indication of it anywhere during the purchase process. In short, it obviates the reason why one would buy an e-book in the first place. If I want to read Freakonomics at this point, I either have to find a device that I'm no longer using that has that content on it or buy a new copy. Sorry. That's just not acceptable and I've been debating what books I'd buy in the future. That was until last week.
More troubling for me was last week's news that customers who had purchased copies (note the irony) of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four discovered their copies had been deleted from their Kindles, and Amazon was issuing refunds. Now, these copies were unauthorized in the US, Amazon had no right to sell them, so I'm not surprised they were pulled from the store. But the idea of a company reaching on to my device and removing content I had put on there is beyond the pale UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. Imagine Apple deciding somehow that the music on your iPod wasn't there legitimately and deleting it for you? (In fact, Apple has removed content from their app store such as Tris, which violated license agreements, but users who had downloaded the app to their device could continue to use it). Yes, Amazon blundered. They have said to the New York Times that they won't do this again. There are a hundred different ways they could have handled this. At the end of the day, they chose not to and that's a hard thing for me to get over.
Books are precious. Important. The books that I purchase over the years -- from the literary treatises to the medieval Jewish commentaries, to techno thrillers and mysteries -- are far too valuable to me to take the chance on ever being locked out of the content that I own, or worse, having that content taken away from at the discretion of an employee at the bookstore where I purchased them. People have blamed this on DRM but it's not a DRM issue for me. I've bought protected content from Apple for years and have never had an issue of being locked out of it. Likewise from the folks at eReader and fictionwise. For now, I'm going back to paper, and when I do make e-book purchases, it will be through eReader (and now Barnes and Noble) where I have never lost access to content I own.
This is now two strikes for Amazon, and I'm not willing to wait for strike three before they're out. If the Kindle is going to really take on the mass market, Amazon needs to re-think how they're selling content and on what terms.
There have been a lot of e-book efforts over the last decade, but none of them have been successful. There have been dedicated readers such as the RocketBook and others. There were efforts from Microsoft to create an e-book market for their handheld devices and tablet PCs, and efforts from Adobe to publish books via the ubiquitous PDF format. None were successful -- until Amazon introduced the Kindle. While it was far from perfect, I felt that Amazon had done for the e-book reader what Apple had done for the PC. In the words of Alan Kay, the Macintosh was the first PC good enough to be criticized. I felt the same way about the Kindle. The Kindle had enough content to be interesting -- it focused on getting e-book prices lower (after all, what's the difference physically between an electronic version of a paperback and hardcover book?) and wisely bypassed the PC to load content. The Kindle 2, the Kindle DX, combined with Amazon's willingness to evolve the Kindle onto other platforms such as the iPhone seemed to make the Kindle appear to have the best chance of taking e-books to the mass market. But two events over the last few weeks have led me to put my Kindle back on the shelf and wonder again if the e-book market will ever take off.
Amazon states that "a copy of every book you purchased from the Kindle Store is backed up at Amazon.com in case you ever need to download it again. You can wirelessly re-download books for free any time. This allows you to make room for new titles on your Kindle, knowing that Amazon is storing your personal library of Kindle books. We even back up your last page read and annotations, so you'll never lose those, either. Think of it as a bookshelf in your attic--even though you don't see it, you know your books are there."
"The idea of a company reaching on to my device and removing content I had put on there is beyond the pale under any circumstances." |
Sounds good. Not too different from eReader's policy where I can download books I bought more than decade ago to my iPhone, a device that didn't even exist when I bought them. My problems occurred after downloading my copy of Freakonomics to my Kindle 1, my iPhone and iPod touch. I discovered I couldn't download the book to my Kindle 2. I kept getting error after error that simply said this book can't be loaded on this device. A little time with Google revealed I was not alone. It seems there's a finite number of times each book can be downloaded, even if it's downloaded to the same device. This number is set by the publisher and varies from book to book, but Amazon never mentions this, and there's no indication of it anywhere during the purchase process. In short, it obviates the reason why one would buy an e-book in the first place. If I want to read Freakonomics at this point, I either have to find a device that I'm no longer using that has that content on it or buy a new copy. Sorry. That's just not acceptable and I've been debating what books I'd buy in the future. That was until last week.
More troubling for me was last week's news that customers who had purchased copies (note the irony) of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four discovered their copies had been deleted from their Kindles, and Amazon was issuing refunds. Now, these copies were unauthorized in the US, Amazon had no right to sell them, so I'm not surprised they were pulled from the store. But the idea of a company reaching on to my device and removing content I had put on there is beyond the pale UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. Imagine Apple deciding somehow that the music on your iPod wasn't there legitimately and deleting it for you? (In fact, Apple has removed content from their app store such as Tris, which violated license agreements, but users who had downloaded the app to their device could continue to use it). Yes, Amazon blundered. They have said to the New York Times that they won't do this again. There are a hundred different ways they could have handled this. At the end of the day, they chose not to and that's a hard thing for me to get over.
Books are precious. Important. The books that I purchase over the years -- from the literary treatises to the medieval Jewish commentaries, to techno thrillers and mysteries -- are far too valuable to me to take the chance on ever being locked out of the content that I own, or worse, having that content taken away from at the discretion of an employee at the bookstore where I purchased them. People have blamed this on DRM but it's not a DRM issue for me. I've bought protected content from Apple for years and have never had an issue of being locked out of it. Likewise from the folks at eReader and fictionwise. For now, I'm going back to paper, and when I do make e-book purchases, it will be through eReader (and now Barnes and Noble) where I have never lost access to content I own.
This is now two strikes for Amazon, and I'm not willing to wait for strike three before they're out. If the Kindle is going to really take on the mass market, Amazon needs to re-think how they're selling content and on what terms.
If you are that paranoid about Amazon, then turn of the bloody radio, download your content to your computer and then copy it to the device. Kindle 1 owners can also use the SD cards to manage content. This whole thing has been blown way out of proportion now.
I couldn't agree more.
Thank you for putting it so eloquently....We really need these kinds of opinions for amazon to reflect on.
for $62 dollars, you can buy a gameboy advance sp and an sd card reader, and then torrent entire libraries of books for free. It's backlit, the screen is a fine size, and you can effect the font size to your liking. I have been reading books on it for 3 years, and i'm only taking up about 20mb of the 1gb sd card. also, amber lit converter (also free) will convert stray .lit files and the proprietary sony format in less than 3 seconds on the slowest computer you can find.
Couldn't agree more.
PlasticLogic and a bunch of other companies are working on their own eReaders.
PlasticLogic is even going to be putting in on the shelves in almost every Barnes and Nobel and B&N is going to be launching their collection of eBooks at the same time.
Potentially another option.
Now imagine that your copies of Animal Farm and 1984 are gone, BUT YOU AREN'T GETTING ANY REFUND.
This is EXACTLY what is happening to Zune Marketplace users every day. Not Zune Pass users, mind you, but people who purchase music from the Marketplace will find that if the music publisher decides to remove the album, *or simply rename it on the marketplace*, your music is gone, you don't get a refund, and you're plainly SOL.
At least the Amazon people got their money back. Us Zune suckers are just sunk. I'm out over $100 of purchased music and definitely no longer using the "service".
There are a lot of people here that have the issue of not being able to sell the item on if you don't want it any more. Please realize this opens up a whole new can of worms!!! The way it is if they open that door you will start to have resellers all over the place and the actual people who wrote the book will start getting nothing from the resale. Look at the games market with people like Eb and such buying a game from the publisher for $60 selling for $100. Then they re buy it of the customer again and resell it for $90 pre owned. This means that publisher gets $60 and Store gets $70!!! This is making it very hard on game publishers with many going out of business...
Now I know that a lot of people buy second hand books but the market is nowhere near as large because lots of people want the book in an excellent condition and not second hand. The difference here with digital media is it is always in perfect condition so people buy second hand much more freely.
I personally think that resale ability for digital media is killing the gaming industry and if it leaked into ebooks it may cause irreversible damage to both the ebook and normal book market!!!
No one has to be reliant on the publishers for electronic versions of these books. If more people were doing things like this: http://www.teleread.org/2009/07/22/convert-your-own-books-a-new-resource/#more-25677 then our books wouldn't be trapped in systems with DRM, remote-kill switches, and un-fixable typos.
I could not have said it better myself.
Actually, Apple HAS reached in and deleted DRM-protected content from the Apple TV. There was a "feature" (or bug) for most of this past year where all of a user's DRMed content would get deleted from the Apple TV if the iTunes application couldn't "phone home" to the iTunes Store. Thus, if your internet connection dropped and you launched iTunes then "poof" all of the sudden your Apple TV had no more purchased (DRM-protected) content. The saving grace (so to speak) was that you probably still had all of your content backed up on your PC/Mac so it could be synced back to said Apple TV. Fortunately, it looks like this problem was fixed just within the last few weeks (with an iTunes/Apple TV update).
Thank you for a well written article. I have been a very happy Kindle owner since the DX came out, and I tell everyone my experience has been 100% positive in all respects from day one. I knew most of the DRM concerns before I bought the Kindle and I felt the benefits outweighed the drawbacks. I have been right so far.
I am interested in a clarification brought up from the comments: do publishers restrict the number of TIMES a DRM'd book can be downloaded? Or the number of DEVICES it can be placed on? If I buy my book for my DX and redownload it a dozen times, will Amazon put a halt to it, or just if I put it on multiple registered devices? If it is a device restriction, then I'm not too concerned. We've all lived with device restrictions on our iPods and other DRM'd music since Fairplay. However, if it is a download restriction, that's a different story. Even though I make a local backup of the files onto my computer, the ability to redownload on the fly is one of several hundred reasons why I love my Kindle.
The one and only strike for me was the guy who lost access to his own Kindle because Amazon suspended his account for making two many returns of products he had mailed to him.
i am not surprised that an american company want to delete "animal farm" and "1984" without asking permission lol!
That's right man. The kindle is a fantasy that everyone wants to be real. Its not ready for primetime. Its not the persons job to go figuring out if what he bought is legal because the person selling it should know that first. Its a domino effect sorta thing I think. I'm glad this happened so people wake up and realize that these licenses and agreements are messed up and there has to be more voice about it. These companies are getting away with way to much and no one is doing anything about it.
ICFleming mentioned that the limits are on the number of devices that a book can be downloaded to at once, but how do they know how many devices it exists on at the same time? If the device is a Kindle then it is in constant contact and they can update the existence of the books, but do the Kindle reader apps on the iPhone and the iPod touch update as well? I don't know the answer to that, but the worse case scenario is that they do not. That means that Amazon can only count the device at download time. So once you download the device count is permenently incremented by 1.
Another issue arises if the iPhone and iPod touch do update. If they have the book and then go inactive, maybe the AT&T account goes away, then they can't update if you delete the book effectively incrementing the device count by 1 permenently again.
I for one kind of like the idea of an always connected device like the Kindle. The things that puts me off at this point are: Whispernet is Sprint, if they tank what happens? My books are backed up at Amazon, what happens if they tank? The Kindle is expensive. The Kindle books are proprietary format so the side services that could arise become more difficult to start (think on-demand book printing). Lastly, but not leastly, Amazon seems to have not given a great deal of thought to the rights of the book owner.
I'm a Kindle owner.
It was a mistake, guys. And this is just much ado over nothing. If they had taken the book back and not refunded money, THAT would be a problem. Everyone makes mistakes. I make them daily! Will it happen again? Probably. And Amazon will likely handle it correctly again when it does: admit, correct, compensate.
I got a stack of hardbacks by my bed that I have not read, cause people still keep giving me books...
This is the primary reason I skipped on the kindle. It is designed in such a way as they (Amazon) could alter, add and delete anything and at any time. WITHOUT YOUR CONSENT! This is inexcusable. If I purchase something, I want to be able to play with it on MY terms. If I want to get books that aren't on Amazon's overpriced booklist, I should be able to seek out other venues!
My solution was to get a Pocket PC. I can get ANY book available for the kindle, most at a more reasonable price than that which Amazon offers. I can find a huge number of books out at the Gutenberg project. I can even use MS Word to convert documents into ebooks. Sure I don't get a big screen, but I also have the option of shopping at any location I can receive a cellular signal at. Even without the ability to use the cellular functions, I have access to all the PPC functions of the unit. Hopefully the people thinking of getting a kindle realize the problems with it and spend their money more wisely, getting something that cost about the same and does SO MUCH MORE than that POS status symbol.
1. I'd call a pocket PC a POS status symbol, myself.
2. I'm an optician. I endorse you ruining your eyes on that backlit screen. Go for it; My industry needs the money.
3. The wireless on the Kindle is free, anywhere a cell phone signal is available. How much do you pay per month for your data plan?
4. You can turn off the Kindle wireless at will. No issue. No altering or deleting.
5. Even if they do delete or alter, you have your original on your PC, right? EVERY KINDLE BOOK YOU BUY FROM AMAZON CAN BE DOWNLOADED DIRECT TO YOUR PC, WHERE AMAZON CAN'T TOUCH IT!
Complain about it all you want, but as you don't seem to even understand the thing you're criticizing, you might want to refrain from assigning qualities to it that aren't true.
Six months ago bloggers (notably Stephanie at UrbZen) warned about this kind of thing.
See:
http://notionscapital.wordpress.com/2009/07/25/kindle-see-we-told-you-so/
What nobody is saying is that any book you buy from Amazon in Kindle format can be downloaded from Amazon to your PC, directly, where it will live on your hard drive as long as you want. Amazon can't take it back, or delete it, or touch it.
So it's no big deal. If they take 1984 off your Kindle, then you turn off wireless, resync via USB, and read it. You've lost nothing, and actually, you got a refund for it on top of everything.
I'm a happy Kindle 2 owner. I'm also a former bookseller, and I know that recalls of books happen. No problem. While this does skip the step of asking for the consumer to return the item for a refund, it's not an attack on anyone's rights. They get their money back, and they can use that money to immediately buy a legitimate version of the book. No harm. No loss. No censorship.
And if you're still paranoid about it, you can always turn off wireless.
You'd look like less of a hypocrite if you didn't enthusiastically use the iPhone, Mr Gartenburg.
Here is an available link that will display most Kindle books that are legal to download. http://kindle-reader-store.reader-kindle.com