The Kindle as a pirate gizmo—plus Vanity Fair says, ‘Gadget makers want you to steal’
“Users may buy a book or two on Kindle, but many users will simply steal the content they want to read. Thanks to Amazon, that’s really easy to do on their slick new device.” So says TechCrunch. In Stealing books for the Kindle is trivially easy, Michael Arrington notes that users can use or convert books in popular formats available from pirate sites. How shocking!
Seriously, Michael, what’s the point of running both the item and the pirate graphic, which, in the interest of newsworthy press criticism, I’m, er, “pirating” under fair use? Are you saying that Amazon isn’t fanatical enough about piracy, that the Kindle should read nothing but DRMed files and stick entirely to its K-specific format? And that Amazon is more evil than Sony and Bookeen and iLex and other makers of e-book readers? Even though Amazon’s gadget has built-in Big Bro capabilities for the company to check up on users? Or are you just writing on the futility of DRM? I hope the latter is the case.
Rather mixed signals
Of course, as the DRMless experiences of Baen and countless small publishers prove, Amazon should go in the other direction and get rid of “protection”—which, by the way, doesn’t exactly enjoy the most promising of future on the music sides of Amazon and Wal-Mart, if you extrapolate from an Ars Technica report. More proof that DRM is more of a proprietary format-reinforcer than a sales-protector? That Amazon’s DRM is there to encourage use of the proprietary format? It’s as if Jeff B is schizo with one Bezos enlightened about music and the other happily injecting books with DRM toxins. Adding to the fun, Billboard reports that a Pepsi-Amazon deal is “forcing further consideration by Warner Music Group (WMG) and Sony BMG Music Entertainment to follow EMI and Universal Music Group’s lead in distributing music in the MP3 format” (thanks for the link, CarolA!).
Yes, there will be leakage, piracy, whatever, lots of it, without DRMing of books; but there’ll also be more revenue for Jeff if he ditches “protection” and lets customers own books for real. While I favor an archive-style approach to try to assure customers eternal access to “protected” books, the best solution remains either no DRM or social DRM.
The Vanity Fair take
Meanwhile, over at Vanity Fair, Michael Wolff has written a piece on somewhat the same topic as TechCrunch, except he might come across as a little more direct: “News flash: Gadget-makers want you to steal.” He suggests that the iPods and similar gadgets are primarily for ripping off content providers (as if ripping of already-owned CDs does not count). He also alludes to the Kindle and Sony Reader.
I’d advise you to read the whole Vanity Fair piece to get some context. But among other things, Wolff says: “There is, too, the Sony Reader—Amazon also has one—a gadget that is in essence designed to facilitate the iTunes download model, but for books. You buy books from an online store and download to your portable book facsimile. This is an entirely intuitive idea, whose time seems to have been on the verge of coming for 10 years now—but it never does. Possibly because these gadgets don’t help you steal the book (or possibly because it’s a book, so nobody wants to steal it).” What’s the deal here? That e-books aren’t books (Wolff’s of the- medium-is-the-message school)? Or that the Sony and Kindle, unlike lots of evil boxes, can’t be used for pirated content—in which case Wolff and the TechCrunch guy need to have a little chat to coordinate things?
“Any good gadget has to be sly about how it respects digital-rights management (D.R.M.—the thing that prevents you from copying stuff), trying to stay within the bounds of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which sends you to jail for cracking somebody’s D.R.M. lock,” Wolff goes on. “But everybody knows which end is up and what the point really is.”
The case for banning printing presses
I have an idea. Let’s ban the printing press, too, in every corner of the globe, considering the piracy potential; witness all the unauthorized best-sellers in India, China, and so on? If Vanity Fair goes out of business along the way, let’s weep not. We must, to the max, fight piracy. Oh, well. At least Wolff concludes his piece mentioning the ad potential of the new media.
Linked from the TechCrunch item: An Australian report saying that half of Japan’s 10 top bestsellers were written on cellphones (something different, presumably, from reading on them even though cellphone novels are the rage over there). A legitimate question comes up in the report. Will the short sentences of cellphone fiction dumb down literature? One positive of the Kindle is that Amazon designed it with a large enough screen to display traditional books fairly well, or at least those dependent on text rather than detailed illustrations.
And a juicy detail in Vanity Fair: Sony’s developing a WiFi-equipped gadget to receive newspapers and magazines. Will it work for books, too, and help fend off the Kindle, which has nonWiFi wireless? Also mentioned, as playing around with the same concept, are HP and Fujitsu, well known for its e-paper.
December 3rd, 2007 at 11:40 am
David Rothman questions the rationale for an article posted by the commentator Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, “Seriously, guys, what’s the point of running both the item and the pirate graphic”? To understand the radical attitude of the influential Arrington I suggest reading the article The Inevitable March of Recorded Music Towards Free that Arrington posted on his blog earlier. Below are some excerpts:
Although Arrington’s comments are about the music industry, I think that he would perform a similar analysis and make similar claims about the market for e-books.
December 3rd, 2007 at 12:17 pm
Helpful link, Garson, thanks. Glad to see confirmation that Arrington is pointing out the futility of DRM, as I hoped he was doing. Of course, as his commenters unwittingly show, he could have been clearer. David
December 3rd, 2007 at 3:10 pm
It’s certainly possible that a lot of good things will happen when the price of music (and books) falls to zero. There are also some bad things that will happen. For example, David, your ad-supported model depends on users not stripping out the ads and ‘pirating’ ad-stripped content. Of course, my already-underpaid authors (and underpaid editors and artists) won’t consider a zero price that much of a good thing.
I established my business on the theory that books should be sold at an affordable price and that eBook technology offers significant savings that can be passed to readers. But affordable shouldn’t have to mean completely free.
As you know, and as Apple is trying to show, lack of DRM doesn’t have to mean free content. DRM is designed as a mechanism to enforce, through technology, copyright law (at least that’s its ideal form). I’ve used the newspaper analogy before but I’ll trot it out again. In the old days, before technology, newspapers used to sell in open machines. You’d put in your dime and take a paper. Some were stolen but most people paid for what they took. I like to think we can move there with eBooks, too.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com
December 3rd, 2007 at 3:40 pm
Rob, thanks for your thoughts. Pirates are like cockroaches–they’ll steal from anything: printed books (via OCR), non-DRMed for sale books (obvious) and ad-supported books (as you’ve described). But without DRM, legal books are easier to use. The best DRM-proofing is low prices, and I really like your biz model. We need all kinds of models available, and advertising happens to be one. Really enjoyed the newspaper example, Rob; thanks! Just perfect. Happy holidays! - David
December 3rd, 2007 at 4:06 pm
I’ve added a few comments on Techcrunch…
One of the comment is actually quite interesting:
“What idiot thinks Kindle doesn’t support ebook standards?
Mobipocket and Kindle support OPS 1.0, the official ebook standard since 2000. It will also support OPS 2.0, the official ebook standard since 2007. OPS 1.0 is a standard for files to be converted into ebooks using Dublin Metacore data, an XML schema, and so forth.
It also supports conversion from Word, RTF, Simple HTML, and PDF (beta) but you’re saying Amazon should sell devices that it’s not easy to convert things into?
That worked so well for Sony…”
I answered to this person (it’s signed “Some guy”) that the Kindle cannot be considered like a device that support current e-book standards. But don’t you think that this comment sound like someone from Amazon (or Lab126) ?
December 3rd, 2007 at 7:56 pm
Lawrence Lessig has a good discussion of the different kinds of filesharing / filecopying in his book _Free Culture_. He talks about 4 kinds, Ive used his kinds but added my comments:
A - ’substitutes for purchasing’ - classic piracy; addressable through existing law (e.g. allofmp3) for commercial piracy, addressable though DMCA take downs for YouTube style collaborative sharing. These steps break fragment piracy and should greatly stunt it. This should leave something like the ‘lend the book you liked to your father’ sharing, technically here you are left with a copy and thus violate copyright law - but the economic effect is probably similar to lending it.
B - ’sample before buying’ - maybe this is even a benefit, from studies it seems the jury is still out here.
C - ‘hard to find / out of print’ - as paper is taken out of the equation this should naturally disappear, converting to A or B.
D - ‘free (libre) content’ - applying DRM to public domain works - is that a kind of piracy? locking people out of their own property?
We should in general be careful about letting computer code manage law - how often does tech go wrong? In the US Fair Use is some complex 3 (or 4) aspect ‘test’, there is no way code can do that so DRM says ‘no fair use’.
December 4th, 2007 at 12:28 pm
Wolff is a very strange guy to pontificate about ethics. You must read his book about how he sold the “Internet” and made his fortune, Burn Rate.
December 4th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
Yeah, god forbid a device let me take a public domain book like the Bible and read it on an ebook reader without giving some publisher somewhere a cut.
The thing about pirated ebook is they’re not as reliable as other forms of pirated media. Many are, in fact, simply OCRed scans that have varying degrees of accuracy (I’m just speaking hypothetically of course! I assume that this is the case.)
Books-for-a-buck is a great idea…hell, Baen’s pricing model is excellent. For everyone else, the cost of finding the book in an acceptable format and then paying for it is typically higher than just finding someone who is filesharing the book.
December 4th, 2007 at 4:20 pm
>>>Yeah, god forbid a device let me take a public domain book like the Bible and read it on an ebook reader without giving some publisher somewhere a cut.
That would be the royalty called a tithe. (Satan get behind me!)
December 4th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
I think the indie crowd, both in music (Jane Sibbery and her ‘pay what you think it is worth’ system, where less than 20% paid nothing and of the 80+% who paid, more than half chose to pay more than the suggested price) and books (Jim Munroe, Cory Doctorow et al) have proven that people WILL pay a reasonable price for content they appreciate. Where I think the ‘industry’ gets into trouble is this whole obsession they have with ‘monetizing’ every byte of data in the world, like that guy posted today who thought people would pay $10 to read his blog. That kind of attitude makes people resentful and does not encourage repeat buying. If I paid for it once, I should own it. I may pay extra for a print copy of an e-book I enjoyed, but I certainly will not pay a second time for a Kindle version if I already have a Rocketbook version or some nonsense like that. And if you tell me I have to? Yeah, I may look for techie ways around that
Bottom-line dollar is not the deal-breaker for most people. I think the issue is ‘how easy and pleasant are you making it for me to get what I want at a price that is reasonable to both of us?’ My Mac is the single most expensive item I own, but I would do it again in a minute even though there are cheaper options, because I liked the user experience. I also bought my Doctorow print books in part because I respected what the author was doing in the e-world and wanted to show my support. If the author in question was a total jerk who made me pay 5 cents every time I visited his website, I certainly wouldn’t be supporting such a business model. Better for the author to gain a fan base, even if that means judicious use of a freebie or two, and make people feel like part of a community they want to participate in.
December 4th, 2007 at 5:48 pm
Joanna wrote: “Where I think the ‘industry’ gets into trouble is this whole obsession they have with ‘monetizing’ every byte of data in the world, like that guy posted today who thought people would pay $10 to read his blog. That kind of attitude makes people resentful and does not encourage repeat buying”
Exactly.
You know an hidden assumption in the music/book/movie complaints about piracy is that they assume piracy is free. But finding, downloading, transferring, and then using pirated materials has very real actual and opportunity costs. The only reason large numbers of people pirate music and movies is that the costs imposed by the producers are often significantly higher than the opportunity and actual costs of downloading from a filesharing network.
For example, say I want album X in MP3 format. Finding album X in the format I want at the bit rate I want is nontrivial. Downloading it and organizing it (since so much music offered on filesharing networks has non-existent metadata) is an additional cost.
If I could download the album for $5, the costs of downloading would be significantly higher than going out and stealing it. But once the album costs me $20, the situation is reversed.
That’s the real secret behind Baen’s success IMO. The low cost plus lack of DRM means, frankly, it is cheaper for me to buy it from Baen than look for those books on some filesharing network. Moreover I have that positive experience I have with Baen makes me feel less like some point on a spreadsheet at some megacorp and more like buying a book at a traditional bookstore or con, which I almost never feel buying ebooks anywhere else.