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By David Rothman

kindlepirate “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.

 
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