[A2k] Re: [Aebc] Another 'misguided' author makes his 'ridiculous'opinionknown, re: Kindle TTS. Alert the Coalition!

[Claude Almansi]

Roos,

The way you put the price versus value of the product issue is much
more convincing than the "Don't buy Kindle books over $9.99" thread on
Amazon's own site (1): these people don't care whether they purchase a
license for a DRM'd product or buy a book (how many of them are aware
of the difference?), they only want to pay less than $10 per book.

I agree with you that for $10, people should be able to really buy a
non-DRM'd e-book and do whatever they want with it, within the terms
of copyright law. The problem is that the e-book industry and its
right holders are just starting to make all over again the mistakes of
the music industry and its right holders. How many years did it take
Apple to convince the right holders to de-DRM the mp3s offered through
iTunes?  The Authors' Guild and Amazon people don't seem particularly
prone to follow Thucydides' advice and learn from history (2),

And the problem is apparently going to be the same with the
exploitation of Google Books, according to  the limitations of what
users will be able to do described in the Settlement between Google
and the Authors Guild .

So for the time being, maybe the best course as customers would be to
support other existing offers that are being threatened by the
Authors' Guild's agreements with Amazon and with Google: authors
offering their books both in print through a traditional publisher
and in digital form under a Creative Commons license, like Cory
Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig, and Yochai Benkler. Publishers like
O'Reilly. Platforms like the Internet Archive or the Gutenberg project
and scientific open-access ones (3).

And if we are authors or right holders and disagree with the present
Authors Guild - Amazon - Google Books approach, we might try to
pre-emptively republish the works digitally under a CC license or an
other copyleft license (License Art Libre, Gnu Free Documentation
License - or our own). It's not going to be easy, because usually the
original publisher is co-right holder, but it might be worth a try.
And of course we should back and possibly join existing efforts to
prevent the Google Settlement from getting finally approved.

Maybe it'll help Amazon, Google Books and the Authors Guild learn from
the precedent of the music industry. Anyway, as William the Silent put
it: "One need not hope in order to undertake, nor succeed in order to
persevere".

Best

Claude


(1)  <http://www.amazon.com/tag/9%2099boycott/forum/ref=3Dcm_cd_ef_tft_tp?_=
encoding=3DUTF8&cdForum=3DFx1QQ0EHG6YPZUC&cdThread=3DTx3OW3F9IBBCP1Z&displa=
yType=3DtagsDetail>

(2) Maybe with music, the futility of DRM was more obvious: with a
perfectly legal and inexpensive software like Wiretap, even
tech-ignorant people like me could capture the sound of a DRM'd audio
file and produce an unprotected one with relatively little loss in
quality. The Kindle's protection prevents in theory transfer to a
computer. However, it might be possible, with a good digital camera,
to photograph the text shown on a Kindle and then run the pictures
through an Optical Character Recognition software to get a searchable,
copy-pastable, printable .txt version of the work - just as anyone can
scan and OCR the printed version for personal use.

(3) You may not get the last best-seller on all these platforms, but
they offer heaps of very interesting texts.

On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 5:33 AM, Ross Eadie <eeadie@mts.net> wrote:
>
> Claude,
>
> You bring up the all important reality of electronic versions of books
> moving from the purchase regime to the license regime. =C2=A0I think it i=
s time
> people who require electronic text to read books advocated for the purcha=
se
> of a kindle and its books as a purchase not license. =C2=A0The electronic=
 text
> often costs much less than the printed version. =C2=A0So what if I pay $1=
0.00 to
> put a book on Kindle for reading treat it as a purchase versus a license?
> The author still gets the royalty uh? =C2=A0The paper back only costs $18=
.00 for
> the $10.00 electronic text. =C2=A0The paper in the paper back might be wo=
rth a
> portion of the $8.00 difference with distribution being the rest. =C2=A0I=
 have to
> pay for the Kindle piece of equipment plus copies of the electronic books=
.
> So, can a challenge be made against the software treatment of electronic
> books?
>