TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Hello, Jeff Bezos? Want to blog here, mix with LONG-TIME e-book owners and get feedback on DRM and other issues?

By David Rothman

The other day, Amazon’s billionaire CEO started working at a Kentucky warehouse that his conglomerate owned.

Jeff Bezos wanted to see his employees on the job and "hear their comments about their work," according to the Lexington Herald-Leader.

Bezo’s "restlessly inquisitive mind has been one of his most prominent and distinctive features," Saul Hansell of the New York Times reacted under the headline Curious at Amazon, but Not Idle.

But wait! How about people just as important to Jeff, if not more so, than his employees—his customers? Perhaps he needs to guest-blog openly for TeleRead to get some feedback from long-time e-book users. No need for a disguise. I doubt that members of the TeleRead community would hide their opinions from him. They might tell him about the havoc DRM wreaks on true ownership of books over the long term, since there’s no guarantee that even Amazon will be in business forever or reach every hardware platform. Many might also complain of Amazon’s unwillingness to embrace the ePub standard for the Kindle even though Sony Readers can read ePub.

Canaries in the e-book coal mine

Granted, Bezos is a busy man. But doesn’t he envision e-books replacing paper books in time? And if that happens, won’t most everyone eventually be a long-term owner of computer files rather than simply of paper and cardboard. Unfortunately, even the Oprah Winfrey’s crowd is starting to think uppity thoughts about the Kindle despite her endorsement of it as her favorite e-gizmo. "The chat show goddess hasn’t even put her own magazine O onto an e-ink screen," the Register has noted. So even if the Kindle II is hot at the moment, mightn’t it pay off in the long run for Bezos to grow closer to users? Hotness can be fleeting. I’m seeing original Kindles showing up on Craig’s list for as little as $150. I myself almost ended up with a supposedly unopened Kindle II for $230, before the owner changed his mind. With a focus on DRMed books, the machine is worth a lot less to me and many other TeleRead community members than the usual $360.

TeleRead’s community is a mix of veteran e-book loves and novices, but the former could remind Jeff Bezos of their disasters with Gemstar machines and others whose formats became as obsolete as the predictions that e-books would take over from p-books in just five or so years. Simply put, our sophisticated users are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. A Microsoft-hired designer dropped by TeleRead to pick up comments on hardware, and we’d love to see Bezos do the same about the Kindle and e-books in general. Co-Editor Paul Biba and I can’t guarantee that everyone would be respectful, but we would try our very best to keep things civil. How often could Bezos blog here? As frequently as he would like, though I don’t predict he’ll be a regular name here. I just want him to know that the door is open for special occasions if nothing else.

Positive feedback expected, too

Not all the early feedback, in response to his blogged views, would be negative. I suspect that many Kindle II owners would come forward to praise Bezos and friends for improving the ergonomics of the K machine and for popularizing e-books through interviews with Newsweek and the like. Such approval would be well-deserved. And of course, people might also thank Amazon for offering nonDRMed MP3s. Perhaps visits to TeleRead could remind Jeff of the need for some consistency in the right direction.

Likewise, in dropping by TeleRead, Jeff could hear from small publishers confused by Amazon’s software, as my own happens to be even though she is more adept technically than are most people in her place (see comments from the format-savvy Allan Wallcraft).

Come on, Jeff. Make this virtual visit; in fact, a whole series if you’d like. It would be good business in every sense, not just smart PR but as a way to hear out us canaries on DRM, e-book standards and other topics before it’s too late. Meanwhile I’ll attach some DRM-related questions (shared with National Public Radio and soon to be shared with the New York Times and Washington Post) to which I’d welcome answers. I’ll also include some Mobipocket questions from TeleRead’s Chris Meadows. Wouldn’t it be great to exercise your Times-recognized curiosity and see how users felt about your answers for Chris and me?

An aside: Yes, many of the questions I raise about Amazon would also apply to Sony and others. I love the Sony Reader’s ePub capabilities, and Sony’s commitment to a multi-store approach for its promised wireless network, and I now hope that Sony will offer ePub books in its own bookstore and experiment with social DRM.

Reminder: TeleRead of course runs Amazon advertising and in the future may carry Sony ads or otherwise engage in open and ethical business relationships.

Update, 11:57 a.m.: I’ve modified this post after receiving Pond’s helpful feedback.

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What I e-mailed on March 13 to a PR firm representing Amazon

Many thanks, Alexandra, for seeing what you can do with those DRM questions for your clients at Amazon

I’ll start with a TeleRead post for background, followed by the actual questions. Given all the uncertainties here, I know what I’d do in Amazon PR’s place. I would tactfully suggest that Jeff Bezos answer these questions personally. Kirk Biglione of Booksquare and Medialoper (cc’d here along with Sara Lloyd of Pan Macmillan and Chris Meadows of TeleRead) is under the impression that Jeff could be flexible on DRM. I would be grateful if Jeff personally clarified matters, thereby addressing any possible conflict between the him and the people responsible for DTP Terms and Conditions, which seemingly gives Amazon the right to impose DRM. These are rather timely questions with a Federal Trade Commission hearing coming up on DRM on March 25 in Seattle. Amazon’s willingness to let publishers choose whether they want text to speech from Kindle books makes this issue even timelier. And now the TeleRead post:

Kindle books without DRM?

By Joshua Tallent of eBookArchitects.com

Josh reproduced some dialog from The Daily Show between Jon Stewart and Jeff Bezos. Part of it:

JS: How do you keep people from pirating—from downloading books to other books and passing them around? Like, how do you protect the authors’ authorship?

JB: Well, publishers get to decide, do they want to put, uh, you know to encrypt the books and put DRM on or not—

My questions:

1. If Jeff Bezos didn’t intend for his "publishers decide" answer to include the Kindle (device and apps) and Mobipocket store, why didn’t he say so? Or did he intend his response to Jon Stewart to include them?

2. In the cases of the Kindle and the Mobipocket store, do publishers get to choose whether to use DRM?

3. If not, why not? Has there been some kind of misunderstanding of Jeff’s intent? Has he misunderstood Amazon Legal or vice versa?

4. If if there is choice, what is the mechanism through which publishers can exercise their preferences? Screenshots and/or URLs available?

5. If Jeff really wants e-book providers to have a choice and if one does not exist now, will he request changes in e-forms for publishers and writers to accommodate those who wish to avoid DRMing of their e-books? Just so he’ll know, Pan Macmillan prefers that authors not require DRM, and many small publishers, including my own, Twilight Times Books, would be of the same mind. The position of  Pan Macmillan’s Sara Lloyd, whom I didn’t consult before writing the present note, is this: "My personal view is that DRM stinks and that one day it will be a non-issue; it actively discourages honest consumers from downloading the e-book and has little or no impact on whether a book gets pirated or not."

6. If a choice is or will be available, will Amazon avoid in any way giving preferential treatment to publishers wanting DRM?

7. If Jeff does not intend to make DRM just an option, why can he deny publishers this choice while giving them a choice in the case of TTS?

8. What does Jeff think of the concept of social DRM–embedding names and/or other identifying information into books to discourage copying? Might this be a third option for the Kindle and Mobipocket Store books, besides DRM or no DRM [not DRM in the usual sense]? Social DRM would make a cross-platform approach much easier than going the DRM route. Even more importantly, it would make it possible for consumers to own industry standard ePub books for the long term. [Regular DRM in effect turns nonproprietary formats into proprietary ones.]

On a related issue for Jeff to address, I continue to root for Amazon to make the Kindle and the related iPhone app capable of natively rendering ePub files. Is there any possibility this could happen in the near future–at least in the case of nonDRMed books? Sony allows this, as you may know, with its PRS-505 and PRS-700 readers.

Many thanks,
David Rothman
(Speaking for himself and not necessarily for Kirk or Sara)

703-370-6540 | davidrothman@pobox.com | dr@teleread.org

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What Chris Meadows sent the same PR firm

Given that Amazon owns MobiPocket, I would like to know when Mobipocket will release a Mobipocket client for the iPhone, which will allow people who have bought DRM-locked books in Mobipocket format from non-Amazon vendors to read them on their iPhone (which the Kindle app will not allow). Mobipocket users who own iPhones have been clamoring for such an application since the App Store first came out, and they would like to know whether Amazon will allow its Mobipocket subsidiary to cater to their needs, or if Amazon is only interested in pushing its own incompatible Kindle version of the Mobipocket format.