Technologizer

Back in July, Amazon.com endured a bout of bad publicity and inspired debate about the ethics of copy protection when it remotely deleted copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from customer’s Kindle e-readers after discovering they were pirated. CEO Jeff Bezos eventually apologized and called the action stupid. Now the Wall Street Journal’s Digits blog is reporting that Amazon has e-mailed the Kindle owners whose books it erased and offered to restore the tomes (along with any notes taken) or issue a $30 gift certificate or check.

It’s not entirely clear why Amazon is making the restitution six weeks after the dust-up, but Digits notes that a class-action lawsuit was filed over the incident.

Maybe I’m just being a Pollyanna–hey, was she an Orwell character?–but I tend to think that Amazon’s decisions and consequent humiliation served the greater good. Or at least I’d hope that other companies with the technical power to delete content from customers’ devices will remember the Amazon case and decide the bad publicity just wouldn’t be worth it.

Novelist Nicholson Baker is an unapologetic friend of paper–and his book Double Fold* is an important expose of the mass dumping of bound newspaper volumes by libraries in favor of vastly inferior microform copies. So you gotta think that when The New York arranged for him to write about Amazon.com’s Kindle, it knew that it wasn’t going to get a love letter. It didn’t—but “A New Page” is as eloquent a bad review of the Kindle as you’re going to find. Even if you find much more value in the Kindle than Baker does, as I do, you may find yourself nodding as he makes the case for print and ticks off all of the Kindle’s downsides.

Other than…well, me, Baker is one of the few Kindle judges I’ve seen who doesn’t buy Amazon’s “reads like real paper” claims for the device’s E Ink screen:

The problem was not that the screen was in black-and-white; if it had really been black-and-white, that would have been fine. The problem was that the screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray. The resizable typeface, Monotype Caecilia, appeared as a darker gray. Dark gray on paler greenish gray was the palette of the Amazon Kindle.

Baker also points out rightly that the presentation of newspapers–at least all the ones I’ve seen–on the Kindle is pretty pathetic. It’s not just that they aren’t well done; they’re nowhere near as well done as they could be even considering the Kindle’s limitations.

Like me, Baker isn’t so sure that the conventional wisdom that an LCD screen such as that on the iPhone is harder on the eyeballs than E Ink is true. Actually, he’s pleased with the iPod/iPhone Touch version of Kindle as a way to quickly dip into a snippet of a book.

So am I–enough so that I’m flirting with the idea of selling my Kindle 2, since I do most of my Kindle reading on the go on my iPhone these days. I’ll let you know if end up parting with it.

*footnote: Baker’s takedown of the Kindle is available on the Kindle, which lets you subscribe to The New Yorker. And Double Fold (subtitle: “Libraries and the Assault on Paper”) is available as a Kindle book, too. In fact, Amazon seems to really want you to buy it in that form:

Amazon’s decision to remotely delete pirated copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from customers’ Kindle e-readers and refund their money was stupid, thoughtless, and self-inflicted. That’s not an irate blogger talking–it’s Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, who indulged in some serious self-flagellation at the company’s forums, as reported by TechCrunch’s MG Siegler.

Bezos’s mea culpa is one of the most refreshingly humble statements I’ve ever seen from a tech company CEO. But it’s pretty much standard that examples of major tech companies making boneheaded DRM-related decisions are followed up by backpedaling and apologies. If other companies remembered that, they’d make fewer boneheaded decisions in the first place and spend less time apologizing. Sounds like a win for everybody involved.

Here’s Bezos’s post in its entirety:

This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

As far as I know, Amazon hasn’t said what it intends to do in future instances of publishers selling pirated books through Kindle–a situation that’ll surely happen again, and one which copyright holders have a right to be upset about. But maybe part of the solution lies in figuring out better measures to prevent the stolen goods from getting into Amazon’s virtual bookstore in the first place.

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At the moment, “e-book” and “Kindle” are darn near synonymous. Barnes & Noble aims to change that with multiple announcements it made today. It’s releasing free e-reader applications for Windows, Mac OS X, iPhone, and BlackBerry; it’s opened an e-bookstore with 700,000 titles, including bestsellers for $9.99 apiece; and it’s announced a deal that will make it the exclusive e-bookstore for Plastic Logic’s e-reader, due in 2010.

B&N is saying that its e-bookstore’s 700,000 digital books makes it the largest electronic bookstore (Amazon’s Kindle store has 300,000 books). But it’s also touting more than half a million free public-domain works provided by Google Books. That seems to leave it with fewer examples of recent, copyrighted stuff than Amazon: When I checked the New York Times’ top five bestsellers in hardcover fiction, hardcover nonfiction, paperback trade fiction, and hardcover advice, Amazon had all but one in Kindle format, and B&N had only half. But B&N is superambitious: “The company expects that its selection will increase to well over one million titles within the next year, inclusive of every available eBook from every book publisher and every available eBook original, which is a fast growing marketplace.”

I tried the iPhone and OS X editions of the e-reader software (which are based on the existing apps from B&N subsidiary Fictionwise), and found them to be a mixed bag. On the plus side, the iPhone version has some features that Amazon’s Kindle for iPhone doesn’t, including the ability to choose fonts and opt for justified or unjustified text. But there’s nothing like Amazon’s Whispersync, which keeps track of your place in a book as you move between devices. And B&N’s iPhone-friendly site for finding and buying e-books isn’t as good as Amazon’s: If you know what you’re looking for you can search for it, but you can’t even pull up a list of bestsellers to browse through.

And when I wanted to download one of the free Google Books tomes, I was flummoxed by the process: The B&N site couldn’t decide whether the book was free or cost a penny, and demanded my credit-card information even though the total price was $0.00.

Both B&N and Amazon make you use the iPhone’s Safari if you want to buy books on your phone; I’d much rather they let you do so from within the apps themselves. iPhone OS 3.0’s in-app commerce would let them do that, but they’d have to give Apple a cut of proceeds, so I’m not holding my breath.

All in all, Barnes & Noble’s e-book initiative seems rougher around the edge’s than Amazon’s–which isn’t surprising given that the latter has almost a two-year head start. B&N won’t truly compete head-to-head with the Kindle until the Plastic Logic reader is finally on sale next year, so it’s got some time to refine this first rough draft. I’d love to see Amazon get some serious competition, and long-term, B&N seems to be in as good a position as anyone to provide it.

[IMPORTANT UPDATE: The Web is rife with examples of people assuming something unlikely-sounding is true because they read it somewhere. I usually go to pains to avoid doing so--which is why my posts tend to be rife with words like "reportedly" and "allegedly"-- but in this post I screwed up. As BetaNews reports--rightly taking me to task--everyone who ranted about this was missing one important detail: The Orwell books that Amazon yanked back were unauthorized copies of copyrighted works. You can argue whether it's OK to delete even pirated copies--Amazon appears to have done a poor job of communicating what it was doing, and now says it won't repeat its actions. But this wasn't about whims; it was about Amazon unwittingly serving as a channel for stolen goods. I now return you to my original post.]

This is hysterical and depressing, all at the same time: Everybody who’d bought George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm for their Amazon Kindle e-book readers have had their copies yanked back by Amazon and received a refund. The books’ publisher decided that it wasn’t so hot on the idea of electronic rights after all. Did you know that Amazon reserved the right to take back books after you’d paid for them? Me neither.

Judging from the chatter in Amazon’s Kindle forum, it didn’t even explain what it was doing: It simply removed books and returned money.

Amazon’s site is full of references to the notion of Kindle owners “buying” books, and if there’s any mention of the purchase actually involving a revokable license, it’s in very fine print indeed.

All this is just the latest proof that when copy protection is involved, there’s no such think as actually buying anything–what you’re really doing is renting for a fix fee. Most other examples of this fact have involved companies giving up on services and shutting down DRM servers. This is the first one I know of that appears to be based on whim rather than economic factors.

Amazon may be a middleman here rather than the capricious copyright owner, but it could be a force for good if it simply required publishers who sell books to Kindle owners to sell them, period. Absent that, how about allowing Kindle owners to return e-books or the e-reader itself for a full refund at any time–no excuse required?

I don’t have 1984 or Animal Farm on my Kindles–but I do own them in good old-fashioned paper form. And nobody short of Big Brother himself can barge into my library and take ‘em away…

Engadget has noticed that Amazon’s Kindle 2 is now a better buy: The company has shaved $60 off the price of it’s e-reader, which is now $299:

The first Kindle shipped in November of 2007 and cost $400; Amazon has been bringing the price down, but only gradually. (It’s the e-books you download from Amazon–many of which are $10 or less–that feel like a bargain.)

I’m not sure if there’s such a thing as a magic price point that makes the Kindle an iPod-like breakout hit, but if there is, $299 probably still isn’t it. But a $199 Kindle might appeal to a much broader audience.

Amazon’s newest Kindle–the jumbo-sized Kindle DX with a 9.7″ screen–is still $489, and is out of stock for the next three to five weeks. The 6″ Kindle 2 is the better buy, I’d say–and, for now, the only Kindle you can actually get.

Kindle DX is sold out.

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Reasonable people can disagree about just what Michael Jackson’s legacy is, and whether or not he was the biggest pop star of all time. But this much seems pretty much undeniable: He’s the biggest pop star to have died in the Web age. And so the Web is reflecting things about the reaction to his passing that give us more knowledge than we had when Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Elvis Presley, and John Lennon left us.

Amazon.com and Apple’s iTunes Store, for instance, both tell us their top sellers on a continuous basis, and as I write this, both are awash in Michael Jackson and Jackson Five items. More details after the jump.

Continue reading this story…

Gear Diary has an illuminating, alarming post about the DRM for Amazon’s Kindle e-books:

“How do I find out how many times I can download any given book?” I asked. He replied, “I don’t think you can. That’s entirely up to the publisher and I don’t think we always know.”

I pressed — “You mean when you go to buy the book it doesn’t say ‘this book can be downloaded this number of times’ even though that limitation is there?” To which he replied, “No, I’m very sorry it doesn’t.”

For what it’s worth, I’ve read Kindle books on three Kindles and two iPhones to date, and have never run into any DRM snafus.

For decades, books have come in two major variants: Big, expensive hardcovers and smaller, cheaper paperbacks. Now Amazon.com’s Kindle e-book line has splintered in a similar fashion: The company has started shipping its $489  Kindle DX, which feels like it’s playing weighty hardcover to the more  portable, paperback-like $359 Kindle 2. Like its little brother, the DX is brilliantly cool in some respects and surprisingly clunky in others. Overall, it’s good enough to tempt serious book junkies right now, but also whets the appetite for more advanced book-reading gizmos to come.

The big Kindle has access to the same impressive collection of 285,000 books (many for under ten bucks) as the small one; it also offers the same catalog of thousands of blogs (including Technologizer), magazines, and newspapers. Its 3.3GB of available memory holds up to 3500 books and other reading materials, which arrive in seconds via the wonderfully seamless built-in EVDO connection, which carries no service charge. The display technology remains the monochromatic E-Ink, which looks good in bright light and somewhat murky otherwise, and which sips power so sparingly that it can run for two weeks on a charge if you shut the EVDO connection off. Like the Kindle 2, the DX has a rudimentary Web browser and MP3 player, plus the ability to play audiobooks.

Continue reading this story…

Amazon has announced that it’ll start shiping its jumbo-sized e-reader, the Kindle DX, on June 10th, a week from this Wednesday. On paper (ahem!), it’s not a breakthrough device–it’s pretty much the current Kindle 2, only more of it, with the capability to display PDFs. But the larger screen’s ability to display more words with less reformatting could make for a meainingfully more pleasing reading experience. Look for a review on Technologizer as soon as we can swing it…

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos says that a Kindle e-reader with a color screen won’t show up any time soon:

The Amazon CEO also said a color version of the Kindle was not imminent.

“I know it’s multiple years. I don’t know how many years but it’s years,” he said.

“I’ve seen the color displays in the laboratory and I can assure you they’re not ready for prime time,” Bezos said.

Bezos’s stance sounds like it’s based on the assumption that the Kindle will continue to use a power-miserly E-Ink screen, or at least that Amazon is unwilling to consider the possibility of an LCD Kindle with a battery life measured in hours, not days. I persist in the stubborn notion that we live in a color world, and that the Kindle might have trouble competing with a cool, multipurpose tablet device in a similar form factor from, oh, say, Apple–even if the tablet had a traditional LCD display with traditional uninspiring battery life. I’m also intrigued by alternative display technologies such as that offered by Pixel Qi, which may bridge the gap between the benefits of E-Ink and LCD.

Maybe Bezos is being less than entirely forthcoming–hey, if Amazon is working on color right now, it’s not going to tell us–but if I were him, I’d be formulating plans to have some sort of color Kindle out in months, not years…

Amazon.com, whose first pass at putting Kindle e-books on the iPhone was simultaneously amazing and disappointing, has released a new version of its iPhone app.  It’s still not the ultimate iPhone e-reader, but it sh0ws welcome influence from the excellent Stanza (recently bought by Amazon).

Four new features make it worth checking out, and one of them is important enough to turn iPhone Kindle from an app I almost never user to one I’ll use frequently when I have time to kill.

Continue reading this story…

Amazon has unveiled its new, larger Kindle, and it’s pretty much what you’d guess it would be–a device that looks a lot like today’s Kindle 2, with more screen real estate. The Kindle DX has a 9.7-inch screen (that’s twice the space of the 2’s 6 inches), costs $489, and is shipping some time this summer. It’s got the built-in capability to read PDF files, and the larger, 1280-by-824 display means it can show magazine pages without reformatting.

Like an iPhone, the Kindle auto-rotates the display when you flip the device into landscape orientation. And it’s got 3.3GB of available memory, good for storing up to to 3,500 books (the Kindle 2 stores 1,500).

The screen uses the same E-Ink technology as the Kindle 2; Jeff Bezos’s letter repeats Amazon’s mantra that it “looks and reads like real paper,” and says that text and images are “amazingly sharp.” But even though the DX will be able to show photos and other art at a comfortable large size, E-Ink’s sixteen shades of gray will have trouble making anything that was originally in color look “amazing.”

Besides the newspapers and magazines that are already available in Kindle format, a bunch of textbook publishers have signed on to produce tomes for the new Kindle, and several colleges say they’ll distribute Amazon’s new gadget to students. Sounds good to me: I still wince when I remember lugging my backpack full of books, and wince even more when I recall how absurdly expensive many textbooks were.

And here’s something a little weird: If you sign up for a long-term subscription to the New York Times, the Boston Globe, or the Washington Post, you can get a discount off the DX’s somewhat intimidating pricetag–but only people who live in areas where they can’t get home delivery of the dead-tree versions of the papers qualify. Sorry, tech-savvy locals!

The Kindle DX would seem to be a great big Amazonian shot across the bow of Plastic Logic’s similar reader. Plastic Logic announced its device last September, but doesn’t plan to ship it until early 2010, which gave Amazon plenty of time to steal some of its thunder. It too has a big E-Ink screen and PDF capability (as well as support for Microsoft Office and other formats); it uses a touchscreen instead of buttons and a keyboard, and has Wi-Fi instead of the Kindle’s EVDO. It’s still an intriguing device, and I don’t think it’s aiming at precisely the same audience as the Kindle DX–Plastic Logic envisions businesspeople loading up their reader with Word documents and PowerPoints. But it’ll be the second one in its category when it shows up, not the first. I wonder if Amazon would have come up with the DX if it didn’t know that the Plastic Logic device was in the works?

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