goblinbox

In which I’m torn between really liking a device that works well, and feeling like I should never use it again.

Last December, I bought myself an Amazon Kindle as a Christmas-slash-layoff present.

I bought it not because I didn’t already have a way to read ebooks (I have four separate ebook apps on my iPod Touch) but because I had device envy: the Kindle was a sleek little number with a 3G connection.

Plus, NLW said I’d like it, and she’s usually right.

The 3G connection was the kicker. I could buy books anywhere – in the car, at the store, in an airport! Imagine how great it would be to finish the second book in a trilogy and be able to download and begin reading the third book without even leaving your chair, man. That’s just plain hawt.

So now I have a Kindle, and it really is a slick little device. I carry it around with me more than I expected to. I currently have 77 items on it, from full-length books to short stories to today’s New York Times and this week’s Amritapuri news.

Since acquiring my Kindle, I’ve changed the Amazon bookmark in my browser to take me to the Kindle store instead of the main page. I have 31 items in my Kindle account, which means that Amazon got much more money out of me then they ever did when all of my ebook money went to Fictionwise and Baen and Mobipocket.

My Kindle works really well. It recently received an operating system update that made it even cooler than it already was. For the first time in all my years as an Amazon customer I started a second Wish List, so I could track the Kindle books and accessories I’m lusting over.

But then there’s Amazon’s party line:

Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate without notice from Amazon if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Software and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service or to Digital Content without notice to you and without refund of any fees.

- Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service

Which means, in a nutshell, that Amazon can brick your Kindle remotely whenever it likes. Which means you don’t own your ebooks, you’re just licensing them. (They’ve already mass-erased books from lots of devices.) If you decide to break the DRM and read a Kindle book on another device, you’re breaking the agreement and possibly even the law as well.

Cory Doctorow refuses to sell his works in Kindle format – you can get them for free from his website, but you can’t buy them from Amazon.com: he’s that against DRM and all it implies. He says that book ownership predates even the publishing industry itself, and he’s right. The ideas in a book might belong to the author, but the book itself belongs to its owner.

In the olden days, after you bought a book it was yours. You could read it, burn it, loan it, re-read it, let 11 family members read it, and then sell it: it was YOURS.

Now I’m giving money to a company who can brick my device if they merely think I’m acting funny. I have to back up all my Amazon ebook purchases and DRM-strip them just in case, or I risk the possibility of having rented rather than purchased the works in my account.

All of this pisses me off. I want to use my cool new technology, and they make it really easy for me to do so, but I don’t want Amazon thinking they’re getting away with this. They probably think the majority of their Kindle users are morons, and the more we use our Kindles and the more we accept their crappy licence agreements the more proof they have that we really are.

Yes, I still buy books from the other sites, but it’s just so much easier (and often cheaper, because Amazon sells the majority of their ebooks at a loss) to buy them directly from the Kindle itself.

Read The Future of Reading. It’s short and sweet and says most of what needs to be said.

I’m wondering if I shouldn’t abandon ebook reading on both the Kindle and the iPod Touch and find some other way of doing it. Isn’t it my duty to vote with my money?

In which publishers and sellers alike seem to be on the verge of losing their minds.

First off, let me just say that I’ve been reading ebooks since 1994. They’re not new. This whole ebook thing has been coming for a long, long time, and I can’t figure out why the big book publishers can’t figure out how to monetize ebooks without acting like morons.

Second off, I’ve been buying ebooks for a long time too, and I’ve read a lot of ebooks on a lot of platforms. Those are my creds as an ebook reader, so I kinda know what I’m talking about here, from a customer’s point of view. Seriously, I only know one person who has been reading ebooks as long as I have (this means you, NLW).

Third off, what the fuck is going on over at Amazon? They’ve pulled literally every Macmillan title due to some kind of “pricing dispute.” Apparently, Macmillan, after learning that the Apple ebook store will let them charge more than $9.99 per title, has decided that Amazon should do the same. Since Amazon sells virtually all of its ebooks at the $9.99 pricepoint, they pulled the Macmillan titles! (My beloved Tor is a Macmillan imprint, BTW.) It’s a freakin’ mess, and you know who’s getting hurt?

The authors. Because their BOOKS AREN’T SELLING.

A lot of treeware publishers are doing a terrible job embracing the ebook format. They’re running around carrying on about DRM and sounding like idiot RIAA executives from the 90′s. It’s a mess. They should all go read Eric Flint’s brilliant argument for loss leaders and against DRM, written a decade ago, posted at the Baen Free Library.

Here are some truths:

1. DRM DOES NOT PROTECT YOUR CONTENT! EVER!
2. PIRACY IS NOT THAT BIG OF A GODDAMNED PROBLEM!
3. THE BIGGEST PROBLEM FOR AUTHORS IS EXPOSURE!

1. I have never given anyone an ebook that I have purchased. NEVER. Not once. (Well, maybe once or twice, but if so I don’t remember it.) But if I wanted to give someone an ebook, the file format wouldn’t matter – any secure format can be broken. Back when the iTunes store was still selling music with DRM, all you had to do to break it was burn your songs to disc and then rip them back into your library! Duh! I have software on my computer right now that will break DRM on music, video, and certain ebook formats. Why? Because sometimes I want to use my content on hardware other than the hardware the seller wants me to use it on. Since I PAID FOR IT, I feel completely fine about breaking the DRM for my own ends, just as I feel fine tearing a blank page out of a treeware book to write a note on.

2. I’ve read absurd projections by some publishers; they claim they would lose a huge amount of money if they distributed new book releases in non-secure ebook format. WTF, over? They sound just like the record companies. I can’t believe these people didn’t pay attention to electronic formats in the music industry! Where the hell were they? Yes, some content gets pirated, but so what? It’s free advertisement! A truly heartening percentage of the ebook reading public is made up of moral people who will, if they can, pay for things they’ve enjoyed. Piracy does not “lose” you money. You can’t lose money you never had in the first place.

3. And, as they say so well over at Baen, loss leaders WORK. If you have a trilogy, give the first book away for free in ebook format. It’s cheap because all you have to do is format it once and host it; there are no manufacturing costs involved. You’ll find (if the book doesn’t suck) that the entire trilogy’s sales will increase: win/win for publisher and author.

Hey big publishers, the electronics are coming! You gotta get ready! It used to be a sub-market of weirdos like me with rare hardware, but now we’ve got the Kindle and the iPad and by the end of this decade the ebook format is going to be ubiquitous. You need to figure this out tout de suite. You are going to have to embrace the ebook format. You are going to have to take a smaller cut on electronic books, and you are going to have to change your product release cycle to quit holding ebook versions for ten months and then overcharging for them.

We, your audience, know perfectly well that the cost of producing a treeware book is SIGNIFICANTLY LARGER than the cost of releasing an ebook, and it pisses us off when you set ebook price points at hardcover levels. (I didn’t buy the a particular Guy Gavriel Kay book for over five years because it was nearly thirty bucks. THIRTY BUCKS FOR AN EBOOK? I waited until it came down to proper ebook range before I bought it.) It also pisses us off when we learn that between you and the ebook vendor, authors are making pennies off of ebooks – that’s why we buy them, when we can, directly from the author’s website, or from ebook sellers who are known to pay higher percentages.

With the paper, printing, and shipping out of the equation, all a publisher does is select, edit, and promote. That pretty much makes you an agent, which lowers your take pretty significantly. Which is okay, because the book market is huge. Readers tend to read a lot, and ebook readers will continue to make it easier and easier to read (and buy) a lot of content.

You have got to change.

Please, do it more gracefully than the music industry did, mmm’kay? You need to get ebooks to market alongside the treeware versions, and yes, you have to charge less for them. You have to select industry-standard formats; don’t bring yet another format to the table because there are already dozens. Forget about stupid DRM, too, because it DOESN’T DO ANYTHING BUT ANNOY EVERYONE. Design and implement appropriate sales tracking, so that you can see for yourself that ebooks can actually increase treeware sales. (Look at Cory Doctorow! He releases all his books in ebook format… for free! And he’s a success. Go figure!)

Believe me. This doesn’t have to be scary, and you don’t have to look stupid. Mellow out, there, big fellas. It’ll be okay.

In which I review the new device!

For Christmas, I bought myself a Kindle. (It probably wasn’t particularly clever to spend nearly three hundred bucks on an unnecessary electronic device the very week I got laid off, but whatever. This may be why I never had kids. Moving on!)

The form factor is nice. It’s light, thin, and sleek. It’s comfortable to hold. The screen is, surprisingly, quite easy to read, even in fairly low light situations – though I’ll still be buying a clip-on light since I happen to like to read in no-light situations. A lot. (Side effect of having read ebooks on backlit devices for the past twelve years is that I expect to be able to read in the dark: cars at night, unlit rooms, pubs, etc.)

I think the ‘NEXT PAGE’ buttons are placed too low. I have monstrously long thumbs and I’m pretty sure the button placement would be annoying to men or other persons with large hands. The 5-way mouse thingy could have been a little more elegantly designed, but for a second-generation device it’s fairly well thought out. It’s attractive-looking. (I never in a million years would have purchased the original Kindle. OMG that thing was hideously ugly.)

I don’t know why it’s white, except that maybe they were going for a clean, upwardly mobile Apple thing. I wish it came in grey or black, because I think the white case makes the screen look dingy.

The keyboard is almost entirely useless, but at least it’s there. The ‘experimental’ browser is the same because it can’t display a lot of common web content, not just because I have a slow Whispernet connection.

It’s really, really easy to browse Amazon.com and buy ebooks, though. Wow. They totally got that part right! Instant delivery! I can already imagine the joy of this feature when finishing book 2 of a trilogy and being able to get book 3 immediately no matter where I am.

The ‘HOME’ layout is stupid and needs to incorporate tags or genres or folders or something, to save one from having to page through 1,500 titles at a mere 10 titles per page. I’m still digging around in various Kindle superuser forums to see if there’s a hack for that.

The battery life is astonishingly good. I’ve seen some complaints in various forums that leaving the wireless on will drain the battery faster, but my device hasn’t been charged since the day I got it and has used only 25% of its charge. I’ve left wireless on the whole time.

Another wonderful feature is native PDF support. This is freakin’ awesome! I currently have my résumé and a sock pattern – both PDFs – on my Kindle just because I can.

Two of my favorite ebook stores, Fictionwise and Baen, support Kindle. All of my non-DRM Mobi format ebooks can be read on the device.

My particular Kindle is a K2i, which means “Kindle 2 International,” which means it’s an AT&T device (rather than a Sprint device like the U.S. version). I mention this because, well. Here’s a map of the AT&T coverage where I happen to live:

Dark purple is 3G, lavender is lower-speed EDGE, and the red box in the middle is Walla Walla. I only get one bar most of the time; two if I’m standing in the yard.

Still, although book downloads don’t take place “in under a minute” for me, I signed up for free 14-day free trials of The New York Times and Blog Kindle, and it’s pretty cool when they’re both there when I wake up in the morning. It would be an especially trick freature for those with long bus or train commutes, because they wouldn’t have to do anything like sync the device to get their news each day.

Each Kindle comes with its own @kindle.com email address, so you or designated others – maybe people at the office – can email ebooks to your device. Neat! (Oh, but Amazon charges you a dime or more every time you do so. Boo! Hiss!)

I discovered Calibre, an iTunes-like ebook application (it’ll even download cover art) that syncs with a variety of ebook readers including the Kindle. I told it where all my ebooks were, and it organized them like iTunes organizes music. It will even convert ebooks from one format to another so that they can be read on different device types. Best of all, it aggregates feeds and either syncs them to the Kindle over USB, or emails them at a particular time every day, neatly solving the $12 per month fee one has to pay Amazon for daily delivery of each blog or newspaper. (Calibre looks like this.)

Apparently, Mobipocket Reader software can also be used to manage one’s Kindle and news feeds.

I had to hack my Kindle, of course, to take custom wallpapers, because… well, I just had to. (Here are the wallpapers I made.)

I’m pretty happy with my Kindle. We’ll see if I’m still in love with it in six months. It’s not half as portable as the iPod Touch, on which I have three different ebook reading apps installed (including Amazon’s Kindle for iPhone, which syncs furthest-read with the Kindle so I can switch back and forth easily).

I suspect that my Kindle will live at home, and I’ll use it primarily for long novels and news while continuing to carry the iPod Touch literally everywhere with me and reading short stories on it.

Total: 4 out of 5 stars

The Kindle is everything Amazon says it is, I just don’t know if I’m the right user for this particular device. I’m so used to having my ebook reader be a single application on a device that does a variety of other things that a dedicated ebook device seems a little stunted. I think if I’d magically received a Kindle DX I might have thought, “Now here’s a proper dedicated ebook reader!” because honestly the screen real estate on this device doesn’t pack the punch I’d need to see. The Kindle is a joy to interact with, and while my functional needs might be otherwise, intellectually I like the simplicity of a dedicated device that does only one thing, and does it well.

In which I get a third package.

This morning I received my 2Gb RAM stick and used my trusty BMI pocket knife to install it into the Eee notebook.

Yay!

In which the notebook is here! The notebook is here!! OMFG the notebook is here!!!

UPS’s site said my Eee PC wouldn’t get here until Wednesday, but it was sitting on my desk when I got to work yesterday morning. Squee!

It’s tiny. It’s über-cute. It’s portable. It has killer battery life. It came with its own little slipcase and I can carry it around in my bag. It has a video port and can drive a huge monitor! It has three USB 2.0 ports and a micro SD card slot!

I installed Firefox (and WeatherFox and Foxmarks) and FileZilla and BOINC and SETI@home and VLC and iTunes. I put my favorite wallpaper on it. I scowled at the pre-installed Microsoft Works. (Microsoft WORKS?!) I touched it all over. I showed it to my co-workers.

And then I took it to the bar last night. In my bag! Tiniest little device ever!

Oh, and it picks up wireless from the foot of my bed, which is as far as you can get from the router and still be inside the house. Even the iPod doesn’t see the router from there!

Right now I’m copying my iTunes library onto it. (God, I love USB 2.0. I can move my entire library in about half an hour.) When I put the hard drive back into the old IBM Thinkpad A30, I’m going to give it to Left Coast Girlie for her birthday!

In other news, I read the two most recent inauguration speeches last night. In my opinion, Bush’s was stilted and entitled and Obama’s was moving and uplifting. Those who were disappointed by Obama’s speech should relax a little; half the nation wouldn’t recognize ‘a unifying theme’ if it poked them right in the eyeball.

In which my financial situation gives me The Dread whenever I think about it, which is not very often. Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.

Last night, my roommates went to see Clapton in Moline, IL so I had the whole blessed house to myself for the evening. I sat in front of the computer and dicked around with my PPC — the surgery appears to have worked! — and worked on this page, which I still haven’t been able to update without breaking. Grr.

Before I took my new-to-me PPC apart, it had WM2003SE on it. Taking it apart caused it to lose power, which caused it to reset itself to factory default… and now it has WM2003 on it. Which bugs me, because I want SE dammit! (The only difference between 2003 and 2003SE is landscape mode, which I don’t even use. It’s the principal of the thing.) Now, I just happen to have a 2003SE image and I found instructions (gawd I love the intarwebs) on how to to force-flash the ROM, though, so I might try to do a little illegal upgrade tonight. *evil genius laugh* I’ll need an assistant, though, because one needs to press and hold the “reset + press scroll in + contacts + power” buttons — all at the same time! — in order to force a ROM update.

Yes, I realize that none of you care about any of that. So I’ll move on and tell you that I bought new underwear at Walmart the other day! (I buy cheap-ass Walmart underwear because they’re cheap, they’re cotton, my dog will eventually eat them anyway, and because there’s nowhere else in town to buy undies that aren’t organic cotton and way out of my current budget.) New underwear = happiness. Read the rest of this entry »

In which that tiny little screwdriver comes in handy!

Once upon a time, I bought a little glasses repair kit. It came with a little magnifying glass, four tiny little extra screws, and this kick-ass little screwdriver all snug in a plastic case. I use it to tighten my glasses once in awhile, and I cleverly keep it someplace utterly random — my knitting bag! — where I can always find it.

I just used the kit’s little screwdriver to take the X5 apart. There it is, guts exposed! My new toy isn’t working properly at all; the screen either doesn’t respond or it responds incorrectly, and a touch screen device with a FUBAR touch screen is basically a paperweight.

I dug around here and found that the precise symptoms my X5 exhibits are common with older X5s, so I’m mid-fix as I type. Once I’m done with this post, I’m going to reassemble the thing (and then REINSTALL ALL THE CRAP I’D INSTALLED JUST A FEW DAYS AGO) and if it’s fixed, I’ll keep it. If it’s still a glitchy POS, I’ll send it back.

In other news, now that I live in town I have to register my dog [ordinance #1000 on the link] at City Hall. Which means I have to give her annual rabies shots, which pisses me off. I vaccinate my animal/s every three years because vaccines last for three years, they’re expensive, and over-vaccinating kills pets just like it does people.

Gah. I hate stupid regulations. I don’t mind paying $10 a year to license my dog, but there’s just no way I’m going to vaccinate my 10-year-old bitch for rabies each and every year, no way at all. I tell you what: there’d better be an elderly animal exemption, or my bitch ain’t gonna be legal.

In which this is all the news that’s fit to print, and it ain’t much.

We had friends over so I stayed up way too late last night, and now I’m sleepy. You’d think someone pushing 40 would have figured out how to go to bed on time, but no. I act like a little kid and stay up too late even though I know I’m gonna suffer.

Today I had a Subway sandwich for lunch because I’m not convinced that Mexican food alone provides enough dietary variation.

My new PPC arrived yesterday! It’s not refurbished, it’s used. Fairly heavily used. It’s a little glitchy — it doesn’t respond to the touchscreen properly while the sync cable is plugged into it — but I surfed around and found out that the glitch is something I can easily fix if I’m willing to take the unit apart, which I am.

The best news in the PPC so far world is that the latest version of Mobipocket Reader Desktop is fuckin’ hawt! It puts me in mind of iTunes, actually. One can finally organize books in useful ways, and it connects directly to ebook stores (my favorites Mobipocket and Fictionwise, as well as several others) so that purchasing, downloading, and syncing ebooks is effortless. Yay! And the Pocket PC version is also updated, and allows one to have more control over how the library is organized.

In other news… I feel this terrible, dark, foreboding depression this afternoon… it feels hormonal, like I’ve got PMS, but it’s not time for PMS. I sure hope an after-work nap takes care of it because I don’t particularly enjoy feeling as if my dog just died.

Update: A nap totally helped. Now… what to do this evening? Laundry? Dinner? Hmm.