Kindle Controversy: eBooks in Transition

Last week, in a New Yorker piece called "A New Page," print conservationist Nicholas Baker's objected strenuously and eloquently to the Kindle eReader. In the main, he doesn't disagree that the era of the eBook is coming, and even confesses to having read an eBook or two. He simply doesn't like Kindles. Since I'm not a shareholder, I don't find this especially offensive. Baker's objections can be accessed here.

For convenience' sake, they can be summed up in a few bullets:

• The Kindle is ugly; (Kindle 2 is better but still ugly; and Kindle DX is gross).
• It's cumbersome both in size and operation
• It's screen is not as good as an LCD
• There are other, better options especially the iPhone as a device and Stanza as an eReading application
• Much like a single, disposable paperback, Kindle eBook files cannot be shared. Book and device are welded together.

Nonetheless, Kindles are still selling like hotcakes. There's a good reason for this as British photographer Mark Power told Mr. Baker in a live chat on the website of the New Yorker magazine (which is archived here).

Mark Power: In general I agree with his [Baker's] observations about the Kindle, which I have owned for about a year. The one aspect I think Baker overlooks in his assessment was the pioneer spirit which keeps some Kindle owners like me going despite its obvious limitations. My grandfather once told me about the perils of owning an automobile in its earliest days. Unpaved roads were rife with potholes, cars required hand cranking to start, you could expect a flat every five miles or so, and the machines were quite dangerous as they could be coaxed into going over 30 miles an hour.

But, said Grandfather, we put up with it because we could see the car was the future. One day the roads would be smooth as silk and the manufacturers would gladly guarantee a car to be repair-free for 100,000 miles. He neglected to add that the car would also choke the life out of our cities, but even grandfathers can't be expected to know everything. So it's sense of the future that allows us to tolerate the Kindle's limitations. That same spirit kept early computer users going despite the tiny screen, green letters and MS-Dos -- we could sense Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were beavering away in some dark garage and things would soon be better.

Or perhaps much, much worse but as we found out with the car there's no turning back.

After this piece and its chat appeared on the New Yorker site, Mr. Baker and his opinions about the Kindle were featured on the Brian Lehrer show. You can find and listen to that interview and the phoned in comments (mainly by Kindle owners) here.

I'm putting all this stuff up, so that people can access it easily. I think this controversy about the most popular eReader will clarify the issues surrounding the digital transition that's happening to old print technology. According to the publishing industry, 50% of all books in the world will be sold in eFormat by 2013. This fall, 60% of all American freshman college texts are available in Kindle format. Many people want to know more about the changes that are taking place, but don't know where to begin.

Begin here.

Even though I don't agree with what he says, I enjoyed Mr. Baker's take on the new medium. I found Double Fold, his 2001 book about the need to preserve physical copies of old newspapers really provocative. Baker thinks and writes well, and it was an inspired choice by the New Yorker to ask Mr. Baker to write about Kindles.

It's an especially good idea to test the depth of the Kindle's popularity this week, following Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' apology for deleting George Orwell's books Animal Farm and 1984 from Kindles that had previously downloaded free, but pirated editions of these books from Amazon. The New Yorker seems to be asking if the high-handed arbitrariness of withdrawing these copies from circulation without notifying their owners impacted the popularity of Kindle sales?

Well, apparently not. Highly literate people still champion this reader even though they appear well aware of its limitations. There don't seem to be any dissenting voices except Mr. Bakers, and his brand of dissent is highly informative.

Personally, I wish the New Yorker had asked Baker to write about eBooks in general since it is a very large and complicated field about which (I'm sure) he has many interesting things to say...

I'm going to hope that that will be a later chapter in a future work.

Comments

[Richard Brooks]

At ebookwise.com, you can get an eBook reader for $135.95 plus shipping (less before Christmas). $15 will get you the eBook Librarian so you can convert other formats for use on the eBook reader.

[weatherwaxx]

I don't like or trust Amazon. After Amazonfail - its supposed "glitch" that censored books that were about alternative health, gay and lesbian fiction, and other subjects that, mysteriously, were all the sort of thing right-wing extremists would object to... and a half-baked apology but no explanation, and no promise not to do it again? No, thank you. They had been doing such censorship sporadically before that--search "amazonfail" if you want to find more on that subject.

Amazon is trying to get control of all e-publishing. They treat the Kindle as though it is the only device of its kind available, and their influence seems to push press coverage into doing the same. Personally, I would rather have a device that connects to the vendor when I choose, not when Amazon decides it wants to rifle through my library.

Amazon has already tried to force its small-press publishers to do their print-on-demand books through its subsidiary, Booksurge; less than a year ago, it threatened to stop selling any POD that was not their own make. Threats of a lawsuit made them back down. I don't want to do business with a company that behaves this way.

If I want to buy an e-book, especially small press, I buy online from the publisher.

[susie1776]

I LOVE my Kindle and you know what??? I've saved, several times over in shipping fees the cost of my book. I was recently in the hospital. I tooj two things with me. My Medicare card and my Kindle. At 3 am one morning, in pain and unable to sleep, I turned on my Kindle and shopped for a new book which kept me going through the night. How convenient was that! I don't really care what others have to say about the Kindle. It does everything I want it to........provides me with a wealth of reading opportunities.

[gilesslade]

Yes, I hear you.

In addition to the advantage of shopping for a book any place any time, there's the advantage of the electrophoretic screen.

Although, as Baker points out, it is not as satisfying yet as an LCD screen, it consumes much less power, so if you're stuck there with insomnia, you'll be able to read all night without recharging. Great for travelers or vacationers stuck in a car or on a beach. Great for invalids. Also, transparency kicks in after an hour or so of reading and you forget the screen and go with the device.

Finally, if you get tired and still can't sleep, it'll read itself to you like a podcast and you can just lie there in the dark waiting for dawn.

Hope your convalescence is going well! Giles

[TazoWolf]

I had 1984 on my Kindle... It was removed and replaced with an copyright notice. However, after seeing yet another article on it today, I was discussing it with a family member, and I opened the book to read the copyright disclaimer to her. N DISCLAIMER... THE BOOK WAS RESTORED!! My notes and marks in the book were restored as well!

[jcwtts1]

interesting. That would mean that Amazon was on you Kindle twice without your permission.

[BrennaLyons]

There are a ton of choices, and Kindle is hardly the end-all, I'd agree. A couple of things along the way...

Not all Kindle books sell for $9.95, just as not all B&N ones do. If you check the indies that sell in both, you're going to find books of varying lengths selling for anywhere from $2 to $7. In fact, I can state that the only one of mine that sells for more than $6 is roughly 130K in length, so it's still cheaper than you'd pay for a mass market of that length.

As far as "file sharing" being difficult, if it's an e-book you've purchased, I agree it would be nice to move it from one machine you personally own to another. I suggested to Amazon that they make a Kindle emulator for PC and MAC to facilitate this and to allow readers to purchase Kindle books without owning a Kindle. They might not do it, but it was worth a try. Since Amazon purchased Stanza, I eagerly await seeing what, if anything, they do to make books more accessible with it.

Sharing copies of e-books with other readers means making illegal by copyright (and by Millennium Act, if it's secured/DRMd) copies. You'll have to pardon anyone whose income depends on it being protective of those laws. For more information about piracy, try...
http://ebooks.epicauthors.com/?p=110
http://ebooks.epicauthors.com/?p=104
http://ebooks.epicauthors.com/?p=121

Brenna

[Richard Brooks]

Not all eBooks are copyrighted. I have over 1000 from the Gutenberg Project. Most are out of print and free for the downloading. And you can share some copyrighted books. Check out the Baen Free Library. These are books the authors have agreed to donate for free doiwnloads in the hopes that it will help sales of their other books.

I have 2 eBook readers from Ebookwise. Since I got them during Pre-Christmas sales, they cost me under $130. For $15, I got the eBook Librarian that allows me to convert text and .HTML files to the .IMP files my eBook reader uses. As well as the.RB files Baen Books provides.

The reader only holds about 100 eBooks. But as far as I'm concerned, it is much better than a Kindle.

[Brenna Lyons]

I don't believe I ever said that all e-books are copyright. I know about Baen and PG. In fact, Michael Hart's Friend of e-Publishing award from EPIC has text written by me personally on the face of the award. Grinning... I send teachers to PG every year, trying to get them to use e-book classics in their classrooms.

As with ANY book, print or e, there comes a time when it goes out of copyright. Creative Commons license and free reads offered BY authors would change the rules. But, if a book doesn't fall under one of these situations, assume you cannot reproduce it without breaking laws.

My kids own an eBookwise. I use my laptop and my Tungsten E. You're right. As I also said, Kindle is not the end all.

B

[Rowena Cherry]

Perhaps I misunderstood Mr Slade's bullet point, "Much like a single, disposable paperback, Kindle eBook files cannot be shared. Book and device are welded together."

How can the fact that a device apparently complies with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act be objectionable?

E-Books are not intended to be "shared". It is impossible to "share" an e-book without creating multiple copies, that is the difference between an e-book and a paperback. When you lend a favorite paperback to a friend, you physically hand it over and no longer have it in your possession.

[weatherwaxx]

You can't share files? Well, no, of course not. You can't legally make a photocopy of a book and sell it, either. Authors already lose thousands of dollars in sales from illegal downloads.

But I do think they should devise some way to let a person give away or sell an e-book if they don't like it. I can do that with print books... and if publishers are going to charge the same price for an electronic file as a hard copy, I'm less likely to spend money I can't recover if I happen not to like the book. A paperback isn't "disposable." I've bought hundreds at used bookstores, and traded them.

[gilesslade]

Happy to attempt to clarify:

These are not my bullets, they summarize Mr. Baker's main points.

Mr. Baker wants to share his book files with his friends, much as many people love to do with MP3 files. This makes Mr. Baker a bit of a combination of classic bibliophile and digital music downloader. His position is transitional, I think, between the old world which venerates physical copies of cultural productions and the new world that increasingly consumes and deletes digitized copies. Since he is a print conservationist, Mr. Baker has already made a considerable journey down the road into our hyper modern world of cyber-culture.

I won't surprise you when I say, the Digital Rights Millenium Copyright Act is not a universally popular piece of legislation There have already been several noteworthy court cases testing its assumptions and provisions. Your point, of course, is that Kindle must comply with the law.

My point was about wanting to share a book file on your Kindle, is that you also have to part with the reader itself for at least a temporarily loan -not likely- just as you would have to part with the physical copy of a paperback and the copyrighted information it contains. It might be smarter for publishers to allow readers to share the first 1/2 or 1/3 of a digitized copy with a limited number of friends. They might sell more books this way.

Nice hat. Have you been gardening?

[Rowena Cherry]

Thank you very much for the clarification, and also for the compliment on my hat. Romance writers of course do their gardening in garden party garb. Grin. The photo was taken at the Pebble Beach concours d'elegance.

[HarmonyAlexandria]

I get most of my books as e-books, PDFs and LITs, a kindle would be yet another device I have to lug around.

Print is dead, and it's very ecologically unfriendly. e-books= green books.

[ESerafina42]

Not only can they not be shared, but they can ONLY be read on Amazon's device, which they will sell you if you fork over $300 - therefore, the much-vaunted $9.95 price ISN'T that much of a deal. I have a lot of the same issues with e-books in general, but at least Barnes & Noble gives you their software for free and you can use it on any one of several different devices. I'm sticking with them for now.

[gilesslade]

You're in luck! Sony will release a new pocket e-Reader for $100 less than the new, low Kindle price before the end of August. Read about that here:

http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20090804/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_sony_new_e_book_readers

Now we can start to wonder if this is the beginning of a price war among competing eReader brands?

If the price for readers come down, will that increase buying readers as gifts for back-to-school and Christmas?

What seems like a reasonable price for a state of the art e-Reader to you?

I think if they were $199 they would make an irresistible Christmas, Channukah, Eid or Diwali gift...

My feeling is they will get cheaper before Christmas in this year of diminished consumer confidence.