[jwvgoethe]

If google can offer for sale a significant fraction of the books they currently serve, I will be happy. However, The current state of the ebook market is unexciting. There are too many proprietary formats, often tied to some specific piece of software. Furthermore, ebooks often do not carry a significant enough discount over the print edition to make up for the restrictions in my opinion. I've come to this conclusion myself after I purchased an ebook, found a passage revelatory and wanted to show it to a friend, but realized that I did not have printing rights. So I was forced to go out and buy a hard copy.

I think ebooks will go the same way as digital music. Once the market becomes mature enough, consumers will demand the wares without draconion DRM restrictions which currently make the e reading experience unpleasant.

[jrockway]

There are too many proprietary formats, often tied to some specific piece of software.

Kindle books are just HTML with the extension changed and some trivial "encryption" on top. The encryption is there to give the publishers some illusion of security -- but if you want to read your books on a computer or other device, it's easy to remove the DRM. Once you do that, open your web browser on the resulting file, and enjoy. (All of your indexing tools that take HTML input files work quite nicely.)

DRM is "evil" and all that, but I don't worry about it since it's so trivial to remove, and always will be. If you can see it, you can copy it.

[zouhair]

Am I wrong or it's illegal to break DRM in the U.S.?

[ahoyhere]

It's also illegal to cross a totally empty street against the light, but that doesn't stop almost anyone.

[zouhair]

But you won't be facing criminal charges for doing so.

[throw_away]

you should visit seattle some time.

[pj]

Maybe it's the removing of the DRM that is evil? I mean, it is there to protect the producer and help the producer ensure a stream of revenue and an incentive to produce more content for you in the future.

Would you want a future without content worth buying? Why can't you just live with the DRM?

[jrockway]

I wrote a book. It was un-DRM'd and made available for download on various Bittorrent trackers. I still made plenty of money.

Next time, I refuse to inflict DRM on my users. It only hurts the people that actually pay. The people that pirate it aren't inconvenienced by DRM at all. That is pretty fucked up, IMHO.

[bjelkeman-again]

And how do you create a DRM that doesn't suck?

Dead tree books have DRM which works, albeit in a shape which isn't digital. It is a pain to copy a 300 page novel, but you can do it (there are of course copyright limitations). But all DRM systems implemented fail in comparison. Of course, comparing the two directly is hard as they are very different media.

Books work well because: - they don't stop working when the DRM vendor goes out of business (see all the music sites now gone) - you can give them and lend them without problems - they are compatible (i.e. you changing to a new computing platform doesn't mean that you can't now read your books)

When the convenience of electronic distribution with DRM overcomes the drawbacks then you are going to see some uptake, but the drawbacks seem too large at this point.

To have a future with content worth buying, then maybe the business model needs to change? However, book readings aren't quite as attractive as touring bands. So that is going to take some good thinking. :)

[pj]

How do you create an honest society? Which is easier, DRM that doesn't suck, or consumers who don't "share?" I don't know the answer.

I think we are entering an age of consciousness. The realization that we can lie is a natural stage of maturation, a later stage is the realization that lying has negative consequences. Maybe we as a digital society need to go through a similar stage of honest consumerism. Buying things, not because we are forced to, but because we want to give producers an incentive to produce.

We could all smash windows, steal cars, bump locks... security is an illusion. We can defeat it if we want to, but we don't have to. We can all win. Life is not a zero sum game.

A balance will be achieved. If it is not achieved, then the producers will simply stop producing and life will be worse for all of us or at least for the producers or perhaps the distributors.

I don't have the answers, but we are raised to know that stealing is wrong. Honesty is the best policy. Golden rule.

Sounds simplistic, perhaps naive, but maybe that's the answer. Personally, I stopped stealing music a long time ago. Now I listen to streaming radio online or I flip through Youtube videos from the distributors' channels or that kind of thing.

My point is, there are "honest" alternatives to stealing products, digital or otherwise.

I don't know why we create this sense of us versus them. We share this planet. If you make my life better, I want you to be around to continue making it better and I know you need to eat. I think that's the answer. Build a sense of community around the product, the producer, the consumer and the future where we all benefit from our shared existence.

[asciilifeform]

> How do you create an honest society?

How about wiping out all forms of artificial scarcity?

[stcredzero]

I think we are entering an age of consciousness.

In the same way, we are always in "Eternal September." Also, Gallium Arsenide: The Technology of the Future. Always Was. Always Will Be.

Maybe we'll hit a wall at the Singularity. I think it will be like hitting a too-low speedbump at highway speed: by then we'll be going too fast to notice it much.

[stcredzero]

I think that the analogies between books and digital music will go much further. Books have, until recently, stubbornly stayed in the dead tree format and out of the digital realm. But to see the same synergy with digital technology that music has experienced, they need to go digital as well.

A big part of the problem has been media. Backlit LCD screens are fine for the "workstation" and watching video. But form factors have rarely approached the utility of the sketchbook, (paper) notebook, or scratchpad. The Newton made some inroads here. The high-end Wacom LCD tablets have as well.

To match the utility of paper, the form factors need to be light and thin, approaching the size and weight of a thin standard magazine. They should be always instantaneously available, so should remain on basically all the time. (We can give them 8 hours of charging time back at the desk, but they should still be usable all the while.) The ergonomics of input have to be excellent. If there's a stylus, the feel has to be as refined as the feel of pencils and pens on paper. Interactivity is a must, so long refresh times like with e-ink are unacceptable.

I'm waiting for the day when we can browse and remix our personal libraries with the same facility with which we can browse and remix our music libraries.

[zouhair]

You never been at #bookz or the multitude of ebooks on torrent trackers (text and audiobooks). A lot of people I know read those ebooks on PDAs and listen to them on their mp3 players

[stcredzero]

So then it's still at the early adopter stage. (An analogous point to just before Napster 0.1) When eBook readers (or whatever grows out of their technology) become as mainstream as iPods, we will have reached the point I'm thinking about. Tablet computing will finally have arrived. (Alan Kay's "Dynabook.")

Technology seeps into the culture only after decades and lots of false starts. (Alan Kay's "The Computer Revolution hasn't happened yet.")

[sown]

So here's a question to consider: is the publishing industry reacting worse or better than the music industry?