I've got an upbeat post after the last few downers - Amazon has found a way to charge for free content in a manner I find acceptable.
Shocking!
As detailed here, Amazon is offering classic texts (IE texts that can be legally downloaded for free) with built in commentary and analysis. Personally, I hate built in commentary and analysis, but I also have a memory that lets me make associations from books years after I read them (It's not as cool as it sounds, you end up making strange references at parties and looking awkward.)
Now, MacBeth is free, it belongs to all of us now, but $2.39 for MacBeth and Commentary seems like a decent deal.
Certainly a better deal than this version for $0.99 - you ran the text through an auto-formatter, for that you think you deserve a dollar?
Or this version where for $1.75 you can get less than the entire play, which is free.
It seems that Amazon's Kindle store is still a goldrush for people who want to get paid for stealing from the public domain. At least Shmoop is giving you something in return.
For profiting by stealing from the public domain - kindle fail!
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
The ownership debacle
Amazon's Fahrenheit 451 debacle has really turned me off from posting.
Remember, I am generally supportive of Amazon and the Kindle, I'm just one of the self selected critics who has decided he has the chops to snipe from the margins.
Amazon's Fahrenheit 451 actions are a failure on a whole different level.
The skimmed down basics are:
*Someone who didn't own the copyright submitted a digital copy of the book to Amazon.
*The true copyright owners contacted Amazon and had the unauthorized version removed.
*Amazon deleted the unauthorized copies from all Kindles, and returned the customer's money.
Ironies about deleting Fahrenheit 451 aside this exposes just how different digital books are from real books. Namely: you can't own digital books. This has always been obvious to some extent since you can't resell your kindle books, but not being able to keep the books you've bought is something else entirely.
If this had played out with physical books Amazon would have stopped selling the unauthorized version and the copyright owners would have sued the unauthorized publisher. Any suggestion that Amazon would turn over its customer list so that the copyright holder could contact and confiscate the copies that were already sold would have been laughed at. If the publisher did try and go to this extreme step they would have had to take Amazon to court, followed by suing each and every customer to compel them to turn over their copies.
It would never happen.
But it can happen in digital land.
Do we get the same benefits in reverse? When a publisher issues corrections to a book, will Amazon correct the kindle versions? If a revised edition comes out, there's no reason we can't have the corrections.
Now that Amazon is setting itself up as the guardian of book correctness, I think we have the right to demand that they provide us with the positive as well as the negative.
Remember, I am generally supportive of Amazon and the Kindle, I'm just one of the self selected critics who has decided he has the chops to snipe from the margins.
Amazon's Fahrenheit 451 actions are a failure on a whole different level.
The skimmed down basics are:
*Someone who didn't own the copyright submitted a digital copy of the book to Amazon.
*The true copyright owners contacted Amazon and had the unauthorized version removed.
*Amazon deleted the unauthorized copies from all Kindles, and returned the customer's money.
Ironies about deleting Fahrenheit 451 aside this exposes just how different digital books are from real books. Namely: you can't own digital books. This has always been obvious to some extent since you can't resell your kindle books, but not being able to keep the books you've bought is something else entirely.
If this had played out with physical books Amazon would have stopped selling the unauthorized version and the copyright owners would have sued the unauthorized publisher. Any suggestion that Amazon would turn over its customer list so that the copyright holder could contact and confiscate the copies that were already sold would have been laughed at. If the publisher did try and go to this extreme step they would have had to take Amazon to court, followed by suing each and every customer to compel them to turn over their copies.
It would never happen.
But it can happen in digital land.
Do we get the same benefits in reverse? When a publisher issues corrections to a book, will Amazon correct the kindle versions? If a revised edition comes out, there's no reason we can't have the corrections.
Now that Amazon is setting itself up as the guardian of book correctness, I think we have the right to demand that they provide us with the positive as well as the negative.
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