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‘The Kindle is NOT a closed system,’ says ‘Evil Genius’ Dave Slusher
October 19, 2009 | 9:57 am
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By Paul Biba
The quoted words are from the Evil Genius Chronicles, by Dave Slusher. He is 100% correct. I’ve posted before about how the wonderful wireless capability of the Kindle is great for downloading books from Manybooks, FeedBooks, Gutenberg, MobileRead and others.
Here is a part of what Dave says:
I’ve paid Amazon around $60 (not all of these were the $9.99 price). However, I have hundreds of books on my Kindle. How did I get them? The first day after I bought it, I downloaded my entire library from Fictionwise and transferred it to the device. Because with Fictionwise you can choose a preferred format of books, I changed mine to MOBI and in 5 minutes had every book, short story and magazine that I had ever purchased with Fictionwise on my Kindle, in native format at that. Very sweet and easy.
It doesn’t stop there. I did an experiment where I took the first page of my recommendation list from the newly revived AlexLit site (I’ve had an account on there for 12 years!) and for every book that is in the public domain, I went and downloaded it from Project Gutenberg. That put another few dozen books on there, all for no cost and without any intervention from Amazon. I put them on via USB so I’m not paying the $0.10 per document to have them transferred. Even if I had transferred them at a dime apiece, that would have been $2.50 or so.
Anyone who tells you the Kindle is closed is simply wrong and is either ignorant or trying to promote their own agenda by spreading falsehoods. Read the rest of Dave’s article.
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Comments:
“Closed” has a lot of meanings. Certainly, one can put MOBI and PDF formatted books on a Kindle, but the Kindle OS and the Kindle file format are not an “open” system for development. For instance, you could not add new features to a Kindle formatted book, nor build a secure MOBI or ePub file reader application for the Kindle.
Since it is an e-reader, that should be the criteria for judging it’s being open or closed. The fact that you can create applications for the Kindle, though not for reading, means it is not an open e-reader development platform, yet.
I for one would tell you that the Kindle is closed and I like to think that I am not ignorant and don’t have an agenda to promote other than that as I a consumer I’d like to have more choices in the future and a vibrant marketplace.
How do you define a closed system or a closed reader? It seems to me that your definition is that a reader is closed only if you cannot read a single word on it without that word coming in a file you download from the reader provider. If that is your definition of closed, then, yes the Kindle is not closed. But that is not what most people, including me, mean when they say the Kindle is closed.
There are different degrees in which a product like the Kindle can be closed or open. And the Kindle is very much on the side of being closed, although it could have been even more closed. The best way of illustrating this is to think: what would Amazon have done if they want it to be less closed or more open? The kind of things that are not that difficult to develop and are not going to affect the pricing of the end product that much, but they have intentionally decided not to do to make the Kindle the way it is.
The list is long: allowing the Kindle to support more file formats (ePUB is the prime example here of course), publishing the specs of their Topaz file format so content producers can produce files in that format if they choose to do so, build wifi connectivity so you don’t have to pay Amazon to use their WhisperNet and consequently allow other publisher and ebook distributors to bring the same convenience for their customers that Amazon now keep for themselves, support other DRM systems (ADEPT) so I can own a Kindle and other readers (such as Sony) and buy books and enjoy them on both devices.
And if you define the Kindle not as the reader, but as the whole system (reader, DRM, and bookstore), I can add to the above licensing their DRM system to other ebook distributors so they can distribute ebooks using Amazon DRM, allow other business models within their bookstore or allow other bookstores to provide them in a seamless way (library purchases for example the way OverDrive make them, or ebook rentals, etc.).
The list can go on and one. Amazon has created a walled garden for the Kindle. They control the hardware, the DRM, and the bookstore. And it makes sense for them to do so, because having control like this, completely controlling the default channel to the Kindle both on the publisher side (who insist on DRM) and on the user side (who want the convenience) makes their default channel the only practical channel that will used with the Kindle. In order for a user to buy a non-Amazon book and read it on the Kindle, the publisher of that book must be willing to sell the book without DRM and the user must be willing to forgo the convenience of the WhisperNet. Both are not likely to be done in large scale for the foreseeable future.
I own a Kindle DX and I love the experience of reading on it. I prefer to read on it than reading a paper book. Given the choice, I always buy the Kindle edition of the book. I know I am going to loose access to these books when I change devices in the future (I can deDRM the mobi files but not the Topaz files, but I am also not sure that my future reader will support mobi anyway). But I personally don’t care that much. I like exchanging money for convenience and if the $10 or $20 is the price for the convenience of buying a book I want today and read in on a good screen even if I will not be able to read it a year from now, I am fine with that. Life is too short to worry too much. But I fully realize what I am doing here: using and supporting an awfully closed system to drive short term personal gains of convenience, pleasure, and education.
I also have an iPhone, another awfully closed system. But this is a story for another day.
The Kindle is only closed because publishers restrict most ebooks with DRM. Dave Slusher is pointing out that any DRM-free ebook can also run on the Kindle, and most are already available in the MOBI format that works on the Kindle.
With the Kindle, a DRMed ebook I buy can only run on the Kindle or an iDevice. If I buy a DRMed ePub ebook it can’t run on most smartphones or PDAs, but it can run on devices from multiple companies. If I buy a DRMed eReader ebook, it can run on a wide range of devices (perhaps the most devices of any format in the US, we may find out tomorrow). All of these approaches are closed by DRM. I can’t buy a DRMed ebook and read it on any device I choose.
The other way that the Kindle is closed is that Amazon only sells to the owners of the devices it supports. Some other DRM schemes can be interpreted this way too (MS LIT, Sony and Adobe), but they support desktop systems and so include many people in their reach. Unlike these others, Amazon is trying to create a closed ecosystem with Kindle owners automatically buying from Amazon. Note that this closed ecosystem does not particularly require DRM, it just requires excellent support for the ecosystem. B&N is trying a similar approach, but with multiple device vendors. It may end up being more dependent on DRM than Amazon.
I mostly argue that the Kindle is closed because it won’t work with library e-books and Overdrive. It seems purposeful and I’ve talked to some who have said the same.
My understanding is that on the Kindle you actually *can’t* run DRM-protected files purchased from anywhere other than Amazon — .MOBI format or not. When I first set up my fictionwise account, there was a pretty clear warning about that. If I am mistaken about this, I would be pleased to be set straight.
Oddly, owners of Sony Reader, iRex, or other e-ink devices can’t buy books from Amazon. So for the time being it works both ways. Given the extent of Amazon’s list, and how reasonable their prices are, if I had a Sony Reader instead of a Kindle, I’d be annoyed about this.
Many books can be “Kindle-ized” by sending them to Amazon’s free conversion service, downloading these through your computer and then manually putting them on the Kindle via USB. It’s not as big a pain as it sounds – I have hundreds of books, nearly all of them gotten for free – and in that sense the Kindle is open.
However, where the Amazon is decidedly not open is in the books you actually purchase from Amazon (a tiny minority on my Kindle). These cannot be read on any device other than a Kindle. Amazon does not retain proprietary rights over any paper books it sells. Why should it in effect retain these rights for Kindlebooks?
On the whole, though, I’d say the Amazon is more open than closed. With so many free books out there, it only very rarely happens that I actually purchase something anyhow …
I am in Court’s court. One of the first things I did was get the feedbooks catalog on my Kindle so I could get books via the whispernet that were free and ones I wanted. Amazon had not yet published the public domain books, so by the time they had, I had read about 50 books on my Kindle obtained elsewhere. Baen is a good place for PRC books without DRM and SteveJordanBooks is another although he has written less than 20. I have over 1400 books in my Calibre database. I can send any of them to my Kindle no matter what the format so far. It handles a very large list. I am not concerned with books that have DRM. If those publishers don’t want my business then that is their business. There are more books out there than I can possibly read in the 26 years or so that I expect to live.
Paul,
Hats off to you for posting this. Could be filed under “fair and balanced reporting”
Bottom line: the Kindle HARDWARE is anything but closed. I currently have 133 books on mine (my backlog)…probably less than HALF of them purchases from Amazon.
I get so SICK of hearing “ePub = Open” when we all know that, in the end, “ePub = AdobeDRM = more-of-the-same-crap”. And if the ePub ISN’T drm’ed, it takes all of 30 seconds to convert it to mobi and be reading it on Kindle!
cheers,
John
It sounds a bit strange to be talking about degrees of openness. It takes the meaning out of that word int the computer/internet context. To me, an ereader system which sells you tightly closed books through its main retailing mechanism is definitely not “open” in any meaningful sense. Is Microsoft software “open” because it allows you sometimes to upload open software onto it.
Similar argument one used ot hear about the iPod. It’s a closed system they used to yell, however noone was ever required to buy from iTunes. MP3 files always worked out of the box.
A system is only closed when there is no way into it other than through the official channels. I don’t have a Kindle, don’t want them, they look ugly and 80′s but as far as I know you’re not bound to ordering only through Amazon. You can load the reader up with content sourced from anywhere. That doesn’t sound very closed, any more than my iPod ever was.
You have to be clear: the Kindle DEVICE is open for arbitrary non-DRM’d files in supported formats. The Kindle STORE from Amazon is a closed ecosystem. You can try to cloud the issue but these are both facts.
My post has a narrow purpose to debunk a common misconception – that one is reaquired to purchase all content from Amazon to get it on the Kindle, which we all know is not true. All the rest is fun to argue about but outside the scope of my post.