Every now and then, these news items cross your path that simply don’t need any words or imagery in order to make an impact. This is definitely one of those. You all know Amazon’s Kindle, right? It’s Amazon’s successful e-book reader which allows you to buy a subset of Amazon’s book catalogue in electronic form. Well, the term “buy” doesn’t really apply here. Update: In a rare case of company mea culpa, Amazon has explained that deleting the books was a bad idea, and they assured us it won’t happen again. The issue here was that the publisher behind the two Orwell books in the Kindle Store did not have the rights to sell these books, and after Amazon was informed by the rightsholder, they removed the books. Still, according to the NYT, more books were deleted from Kindles, even though Amazon doesn’t have the right to do so according to its own TOS.
So, you’re happy with your Kindle. It’s an interesting device, and I must admit that I’m personally waiting for its European launch. You can buy books and newspaper subscriptions straight from your Kindle, making it the one tool for book lovers to carry around.
The problem is that if you have the rights to sell a certain dead tree book in your store, it doesn’t automatically mean you’re allowed to sell the ones-and-zeros version of said book as well. Amazon needs the permission from publishers to actually do so. As it turns out, that permission can be withdrawn at any time as well.
Several Kindle owners were reporting that books by a certain author mysteriously disappeared from their Kindle devices, with the money being refunded to their accounts. Amazon explained that this happened because the publisher of said books decided to withdraw these books from the Kindle Store – consequently, Amazon deleted them from all Kindle owners who had “bought” these books.
This means that all the reassuring talks by Amazon that e-books are just like books, but better is a load of absolute nonsense. You’re not allowed to resell them, you’re not allowed to give them away, and apparently, you don’t even own them, as Amazon can delete them from your Kindle at any given moment.
We’re living in a very crazy world. You buy a phone, but you’re not allowed to install whatever application you want on it. You buy an operating system, but you’re not allowed to install it on computers without a certain fruity label. You buy an e-book, but you actually don’t really buy them. You loan them.
The author in question? George Orwell. “1984” and “Animal Farm” were deleted from Kindles. I think the world just ran out of its entire supply of irony.
Perhaps you’ve not been educated. Amazon just freed us from these copies. I’m glad, becuase it would have been hard to do it myself. We need a friend like Amazon to help with these mundane tasks. Actually, electronic books are equal to hard copies of books. It’s just that some copies are more equal than others.
Well played, sir.
There are stories that Amazon limits how often you can download books as well. For a single kindle that never changes, not such a big deal. But if you trade up your old kindle for a new one, and then get a DX, or use the iPhone kindle application, you can pretty soon have several copies.
Add to that on the iPhone you get the latest OS from Apple which wipes your phone, and you have a chance of not being able to redownload a book you once had.
Plus, there seems to be no notification of how many times you can download a book, etc.
This idea sours the entire process for me.
I limit my ebooks to stuff I can download and burn to a CD and load at my leisure on my iPod.
>There are stories that Amazon limits how often you can download books as well.
Not true. The publisher puts limits on the number of devices you can have a book on at one time, not Amazon. That limit is normally 5 or 6, and if you need to free up a license because you got a new device, a call to customer service will do that.
I know it’s not the point, and the fact that something you’ve bought can be just taken away is reprehensible at best, but did anyone notice the part that said Kindle owners are refunded? Personally, I’d prefer what’s bought to stay bought, but I have a feeling we couldn’t expect the same treatment from, say Apple, if a record label pulled out of the iTunes store.
It was definitely good of Amazon to refund users for the books, but it’s still reprehensible for them to have taken them in the first place. It’s just further proof of how purchased digital content is inferior to physical media because of the stupid, paranoid things that content owners do.
As was mentioned in the article:
Given that Amazon gave in, they did a good job, but what the publisher did is still a royal screw-up. There shouldn’t have been any way for Amazon to legally recall the books in the first place.
A refund is great, but if you’re really “buying” the book, then this is theft with a refund. If you’re not actually buying the book, then they need to say so and stop acting like e-books are equivalent to physical ones.
…is that the printed and digital versions are different products and in many cases have completely different distribution licenses that restrict where and in some cases to whom they can be sold.
As an example an aggregator like lodingo.com is only allowed to sell the digital download version of the product – not the printed version nor even the CD version, and some of the products they are only allowed to sell in certain parts of the world. These things would all be outlined in their distribution license agreement.
Now I know that Thom hates licenses – as per his reference to the fruity label – but the reality, whether Thom likes it or not, is that they exist, and what they contain is really at the discretion of the owner of the material being licensed – whether that be a printed book, an audio product, an eBook or even an operating system.
In all likelihood Amazon hadn’t obtained the appropriate permission to distribute the eBook versions of these titles, or the permission was incorrectly granted when another sole distribution agreement existed – thus creating a legal problem – so Amazon likely had to do something to correct the situation. This is the more logical conclusion.
But then again logical conclusions don’t make for sensationalism do they Thom…
Hmm, I bet you wouldn’t be this blase about DRM and the like if you were hit by it. Do you support this kind of action, seriously? Do you think it’s ok for a company to take away your ability to view what you’ve purchased at any time of their choosing, refund or not? Understa,d the consumer doesn’t know or care about Amazon’s licenses. What they know is they bought it, now they don’t have it, because Amazon can manipulate your kindle with your files at any time. Do you fail to realize what this represents, or do you simply fail to see past the immediate situation?
and what exactly makes the agreements some publishers have, more valid than the agreements some consumers have?
The point that is missed is the grandmotherly kindness of some “bad apple” tipping this giants hand.
>and what exactly makes the agreements some publishers have, more valid than the agreements some consumers have?
The book were pirated copies. The seller had no right to upload them. When the legitimate publisher complained Amazon deleted the books from their store and devices. It’s exactly what I would expect if I were the author of books that had been pirated.
Buying stolen property, even intellectual property, doesn’t mean you get to keep it.
So if someone steal, say, your DVD Player and I buy it in good faith it is then perfectly OK for you to steal it back from me?
Last time I studied law that as not the case and this is exactly why we have legal proceedings and due process.
If course, we all know that digital media is “different” (as in special ed. different, no doubt) from other meda and it is exempt from all previous legalities (unless they happen to be in the favor of the owner) and can do whatever the hell it wants.
Edited 2009-07-20 15:50 UTC
I don’t think Thom is being sensationalist. If anything he is merely paraphrasing the original article, keeping its theme and scope but putting it into his own words. And I feel pretty much the same as him and Mr. Pogue; it’s a damn shame that you can’t even buy a freaking book without it being subject to remote deletion or otherwise rendered useless when there’s a screw up in the supply chain.
Just imagine if Disney had decided to send operatives to track down and steal back each and every copy of “Song of the South” and leave a $20 bill on the table. There would not be a Disney anymore; that is theft with compensation, which is still theft and the people wouldn’t stand for it. It is knowingly and willfully depriving another of a product or service that has been legally bought and paid for, without the purchaser’s consent. That is illegal in every single state in the United States, usually referred to as “Theft of Services” or “Theft by Conversion”.
You speak of license agreements, and yes, every Kindle user digitally signs an agreement when purchasing the device that they may be subject to the thefts. However, here in the US an otherwise legally binding agreement or contract that forces the signer to accept criminal acts done to them is invalid and unenforceable. I’d love to see a class-action lawsuit from the affected Kindle owners to put that law to the test. I think the outcome would be a major blow to the entire concept of DRM, as well as EULAs and SLAs.
But would happen if amazone sold hard copies that they did not have the licence to sell. Would they be able to force all customers to return it, no.
Then they would probably have to pay some fine or make up in court for the error that they did. It really should be the same thing with this.
The customer did nothing wrong so they should not need to suffer for amazons mistake, however amazone should be paying for the copies that they sold without permison to the cpirigth holders.
Umm … there is NO way for amazon to legally recall the books. What they did was broke the law, it’s theft, plain and simple.
What amazon is legally required to do is notify the police (law enforcement), and then the police is to come on by (after investigation) and confiscate the books.
Summary: Amazon broke the law by stealing books, and there are several lawsuits brewing.
I don’t see how they could have been refunded. If someone steals something from you, then pays you what they think it is worth, is that a refund?
no apples treatment is much better, when you have purchased something it stays on your computer. I have brought some things from iTunes, such as music, Music Videos and apps for my iphone, when these have been removed they are still on my computer, still playable, still watchable.
I think what amazon has done is out of order, you purchase something you expect it to stay around, for such a fledging market this is going to dent it.
I think a great deal of people who read this are gonna stick to the tried and tested formula of books. They are cheap and when you’ve finished with them you can give them to your local library.
We live in a world where the only lobby is that of the copyright holders. Not the authors/artists nor the users.
Only shit will come from this inbalance.
Unwashed RMS is pretty much spot on:
(video)
http://www.linux-magazin.de/NEWS/Video-Stallman-ueber-DRM-Patente-u…
This is why the various Pirate Parties have been created around the world. Addressing the imbalance in current Copyright laws are one of their key goals.
The authors are the copyright holders.
Yeah, then they sell it to various industries. I still think that is stupid, but that is the way it works at the moment.
I think “rights holders” would be a better term for what we’re talking about. Most major authors sign most of their rights away to the publisher. They have copyright, but not much else, and its the rights holders who hold the power now, not the copyright holders. If an author were to object, a publisher could simply wave the fine print in front of a judge and the author would get laughed out of the court room at least here in the US. Maybe other countries are more sane, I don’t know.
Oh please. No more RMS propaganda in here, please.
Go launch another Bad Vista campaign or something.
http://www.defectivebydesign.org/ is the campaign you are looking for. And RMS might be crazy, but he is 100% right about DRM.
Oh, the same campaign that rallied people to disturb Apple’s legitimate business?
No thank you.
Well, Apple sells _a_lot_ of DRM crap/invested hardware. So no wonder there.
I don’t know about the law where you live, but where I live, the authors and artists are the copyright holders…
/s/copyright holders/rights holder
“amazon.com doubleplusungood refs unbooks & unpersons. Speedwise unsupply amzn, undo teleread copies.”
upsub
It would be more ironic if the book was Fahrenheit 451.
Shhh. Don’t give them any ideas.
The more European title would be “Celsius 232.8” for Thom’s case! (slight rounding up: it may be closer to 232.7 in practice)
Actually, neither would be irony–it’s coincidence that the book Amazon deleted happened to be 1984; if it were a manual on how to prevent corporations from intruding into your life…THAT would be irony
If only this stuff just happened in our gadget world… But look at what Monsanto and others are doing with crops…
I almost got the Kindle II when it came out with it’s tts features. But first the Author’s Guild bullshit, and now this on top of it? To hell with it, the only Ebooks I’ll ever buy will be unprotected. Seriously, this will make piracy of Ebooks skyrocket… I have to wonder, do these publishers genuinely not get it or is this all some kind of amusing game to them?
Generally-speaking, content owners are interested in protected their content, and the fact that there’s so much piracy going on gives them that much more incentive to be paranoid about it. When they use DRM and such, all they’re thinking about is how to protect their content so that only those people who pay for it can use it, making it so that anyone who wants it must pay for it instead of stealing it. They may try to minimize how this negatively impacts paying customers, but that’s not their main concern when they first turn to using DRM on digital content.
If what these companies do impacts paying customers enough that they stop buying the product, then that may get the companies to change their tune. But when they do these sorts of things it’s all in the name of protecting their content from thieves. They’re generally paranoid about it, and no good solution to the problem has been found, so the result is generally negative.
Really, the only way for companies to avoid all these problems at this point is to sell DRM-free content, but then it can be freely pirated. There really isn’t a good solution for them at this point. They’re stuck between a rock and a hard place and are highly paranoid about the whole thing, so legitimate consumers end up losing out.
So, I’m not sure that it’s really an issue of whether companies really “get it” (though I’m sure that there are plenty who aren’t all that well informed about technology, how DRM affects customers, etc.), but rather that companies have yet to find a way to distribute their content digitally without either shafting customers or themselves.
This world is really becoming insane. But the real problem is the lack of education of the normal consumer. Most people I talk to assume that not being able to install any app on an iPhone is a completely normal thing. Or that buying a computer without Windows doesn’t even make sense.
Believe me, 100 years from here our time will be called the dark age of technology.
Mate, it is the same thing with poliitics; most people can’t work around this idea of what life was like before the age of big government. The left wing retell history as if there were people dying in the streets, poor people were whipped through the street’s like slaves and rich men sitting around twirling their moustache dreaming up of new ways of exploiting the proletariat, making females second class citizens and making children work in coal mines.
People are conditioned for a given result and it takes a generation for it to take hold to eventually wipe out what little knowledge they have of life before the change. We only need to look at people here who think that Microsoft/Bill Gates created the ‘PC Revolution’ and without them it would never have happened; most of them never having used anything beyond Windows, most of them condition from birth having only ever been exposed to one platform, one way of doing things, one company who to them has made possible everything they see – ignoring the fact that on the shoulders of giants these people climb.
Edit: Under 10 minutes and some coward takes off a point – typical; you can’t honestly expect me to believe that there aren’t people with sock puppets who set up fake email addresses, sock puppet accounts solely so they can moderate people don on threads they have already posted to. If you’ve got a problem with what I say, post a reply and point out where I got it wrong instead of being pathetic.
Edited 2009-07-18 02:25 UTC
Couldn’t agree more. The other day I downloaded an insurance quote at work (school) and there was supposed to be a copy of MS Office on my personal PC . . . but when I tried to open the file, turns out there was a key for it on the menu, but no actual program – the machine actually asked me for the install disk!!!
Thank goodness for having an alternative in the form of OOo installed . . . but I normally use this in any case, who needs MS Office?
People here in Korea cannot understand why anyone would want to use anything on a PC that wasn’t Windows. It’s all that you ever see sold here, even though (a) there is a large and conspicuous Apple e-store based in Seoul, and (b) versions of Linux (but not unfortunately Mandriva – have to go to Japanese servers for that!!!) are freely available on public servers. Couple this with (apparently) no understanding about Internet security, and wallop! – customer goes crying to an “engineer” to solve their “infection”. And even something as expensive as a PC is somehow considered “disposable”.
There are other answers, but nobody is looking. The kids are obsessed with games, or think that Windows-based chat programs and the like are all that there is. It’s only when you take an alternative route to find a solution to your problems that you realise how pernicious (and sterile) the whole situation is. It is highly illustrative that whenever you see a computer-related advert out here, the OS is never mentioned – they are all assumed to be the same. As long as it has a pretty, fast, animated and advert-friendly GUI, that’s it.
It would be nice to say that there are exceptions, but that’s difficult. For example, a company called Hansoft produces its own (hideously expensive) office suite called Hangul Word Processor, but you can only use it under . . . Windows. Other OSes are not even visible on the horizon.
If this isn’t all the result of deep conditioning, I don’t know what it is.
Ahh, well, tell me Oh enlightened one, how *you* then managed to escape this deep conditioning? What are your mental secrets to success? Did you in Korea go up to the mountain, finding your way down again through the Gateless Gate?
Perhaps a more pertinent reason for the behaviour and predilections you apparently discern is that Korean people generally just want to “get things done…and quickly”, added to which there is a massively superior service culture which can get you help quickly, efficiently, and knowledgeably for little relative cost to sort any problems out.
But just to buck the trend before you create an even greater impression that Koreans are somehow mass, unthinking and uncritical drones, enslaved to Mr Bill Gates:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/17/linux.korea
You know how much the unification of the peninsula means to Korean people, right?
In other words, play out your paranoid fantasies about IT technology without besmirching an entire nation, especially one whose IT literacy strips just about anyone else’s on the planet.
I can answer how I avoided it; when I went to school from the ages of 5 through till 13 I was never exposed to Windows/DOS based PC’s. The first computer I saw was at primary school which was an Apple Mac (can’t remember the model or anything), when I went to Australia my parents bought an Amiga 500, then I came back to New Zealand where I continued to use my Amiga, I obtained a BBC Micro and fiddled around with it, my parents then decided to upgrade to a PC, P75 with Windows 95 but I never really liked it all that much so I stuck with my Amiga.
The story goes on until bought an Apple; long story short, my first exposure by virtue of what I used full time was not a PC but an Amiga; I never had the attachment to Microsoft that some people here seem to have; I saw them as just another software company and thus I don’t have the adoration that some people here have.
kaiwai,
My bad – this wasn’t directed at you, but at fukudasan, whose profile states he’s been in Korea for the past 5 years…
Apologies – I know your credentials are good 🙂
The answer is very simple.
He has been there and he is right.
From your answer it is very clear you have not been there. Basically to anyone who has been there, and has experience in how things actually work in Korea, you look like an ignorant idiot with your reply. You come off as a know-it-all who knows absolutely nothing. Maybe toning it down in the future could be recommended instead of using your ass to talk down on people who actually know what they are talking about.
Try to sign up for some activity, check a homepage for some bus schedule, or just buy something online in Korea while not using MS Windows? too bad.
Scratch that, try to buy something in Korea using ANYTHING but Korean MS Windows – and you are likely to meet mr. “too bad” (English included).
I love it there, things just work, IF, you keep within the ‘walls’. Step out of the zone and you are on your own and you will face hell. This is regarding most stuff there, culture, technology and just generally everything. Culture is very Borg like and they are very good at it.
This is just fact of life in Korea and I can accept it and it’s my favourite place in the world.
Wow, something touched a nerve – enough for you to come out of lurk mode, or perhaps you are just in masquerade mode? Who knows,indeed.
Did you click through and read the link?
Well, I have been going to Korea since the late 1990s; half my family is Korean – other Koreans seem to recognise my estimation of Korean culture:
http://www.osnews.com/thread?372471
Note that the difference – lack of knowledge about alternatives, even where this might be stated, is not felt to be some cultural trait, and that is my point of reference for responding to fukudasan;
Kids may use Windows for games, and yes, South Korea has a massive appreciation of gaming, but how on earth do you suppose that all those government and civic authorities who have moved over to open source solutions get anything done if what you assert bears any relation to the truth?
Go look here:
http://www.ipa.go.jp/software/open/forum/north_asia/download/7thNEA…
or here:
http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSTRE51F2FS20090216
My point is that there are plenty of signs that Linux is being adopted and that exposure is there. And none of this has to do with the intrinsic culture of the Korean people – to suggest that it is, to me is tantamount to some quasi-racist view.
But then again, anyone who has lived in Korea for 5 years but who yet adopts a Japanese nickname, and boasts about using Mandriva downloaded from Japanese servers has to me some life issues that touch on the relationship they have with their adoptive country. I note Fukudasan remains silent on all this but lets call him out.
You don’t understand left wing.
I do understand the left wing – I used to be one but then I had a road to Damascus moment when I realised that reality doesn’t fit with the left wing’s view of the world, especially this addictive nature of ‘government is the only way of achieving an objective’ and how economically their ideas are impractical because it divorces how wealth creation occurs and who actually funds these grand projects.
You can have wide eyed optimism and noble goals but if you have an addiction to a particular method of getting there, if your ideology, be it left wing or right wing, blinds you to the fact that there isn’t ‘one size fits all’ solution, you’re going to end up either bankrupting the country or delivering something that is half-assed, half-baked and useless to the country’s citizens.
Edited 2009-07-18 23:26 UTC
Well, no, you don’t.
Your better off not refering to left/right wing as if they are a single thing.
What consitutes left and right is dependant on the country you are in
Tories in the uk are centre-right. If they were a US party they would be centre-left
Also take into account the liberal and authoritarian approches.
A political spectrum map may help clarify what leaders fall where accoring to the 4 point philosophy
http://bp1.blogger.com/_4_8fPeNDaDM/R6MnJmdaPLI/AAAAAAAACRE/II945Sj…
Well done. In one reply you were able to bring politics into the table, combine politically biased view of left-wring history, personal computers and human suffering.
Sometimes I think that people have no idea about the last one. You know, like those people so eager to yell “freedom, freedom” in the internet, from their cozy sofa, using their latest and greatest personal computer with a high-speed broadband internet connection, somehow being able to associate themselves to a forefront of some great battle — without having a clue that there are much more terrible things happening in the world than software and DRM.
Where did I do a comparison between all those? where did I compare computers to the suffering of people? all I did was demonstrate that how history can be retold and re-enforced over generations resulting in the present generation knowing nothing of what the world was like before.
And you do realise that many of these who scream “Freedom, Freedom, Freedom” are also active in many other things relating to individual rights but of course it is a lot easier for you to paint them all as fringe nuts than accurately portraying what they stand for.
But here’s another irony …
People will insist that when you buy digital content, it should be the same as physical content, in that you should have the ability to do whatever you want with it.
On the other hand, when digital content (like music) is pirated, these same people will insist the digital and physical media are not the same, thus pirating an album is not the same as stealing a physical CD.
As the old saying goes, you can’t have your cake and eat it too.
I think you have it the other way around. I’m not a lawyer but this is how I see it:
Capitalism has huge troubles with goods that aren’t scarce. Since the cost to reproduce digital content is basically zero, the whole supply and demand system is disrupted. The fix was to add copyrights to treat one copy of digital content as one physical object and hence create an artificial scarcity. This way they could apply the same rules as they do on physical content and make a profit despite the huge initial production cost.
So basically the content industry want all the advantages of physical content: a limited supply and 1 good = 1 sale, which is exactly what copyright does. However, in that same spirit, copyright law also says that you can sell a copyrighted work on the condition that you dispose your copy, just like you can sell a hammer you have bought.
In other words they lost ownership over that particular copy, which they do not like too much. Therefore the content industry created a workaround through EULA’s (contract law) and DRM mechanisms (backed by the DMCA) to prevent you from getting control, even though you might perfectly comply with copyright law and its fair use clauses.
In short: they are screwing everyone over by ignoring the intend of copyright law and by combining several other laws (which they lobbied for) to stay in control.
Talking about having your cake…
Very well-put and insightful.
However, I would add that, with EULA contracts, many provisions/terms have been invalidated by the courts.
Kids, take it easy. The role of the mediator in future is going to be severely limited. What Radiohead did with In Rainbows will be replicated more and more:
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1666973,00.html
Money will no longer be a means of exchange; this will be replaced by bandwidth, or slots on the computational grid.
The publisher, journalist, the PR people, the agent…they will go the way of the dodo, and this process will be accelerated by such examples as this by Amazon of an essential hypocrisy: “we will make you respect some aspects of the 19th C transactional model, but where this does not fit our 21st C strategy or needs, we will do what we like.”
Sorry Amazon, you can get as Web 2.0 on our collective ass as you like but we will, literally and metaphorically, no longer buy it.
Am I the only one who likes quality journalism? Novels written by real authors? The arts?
Like those things would just magically appear to the internet.
Someone wrote that this is the dark age of technology. But he got it wrong. To put it rhetorically: it is the true dark age when things like Slashdot have replaced quality journalism.
Nevertheless, this Amazon thing is one reason why I still prefer printed books. The other one is the more important: until I can write to a e-book with a pencil, scrunch and shred an e-book, and take it to a toilet with me when taking a shit, these things will never succeed
.
Edited 2009-07-18 18:46 UTC
Erm, like Radiohead isn’t a quality band?
It just requires for anything else to become great art or recognized as great artistry that we are all better educated in developing taste, and that means learning to discriminate for ourselves, which in turn relies on our own exposure to new things, and our own critical and aesthetic faculties being exercised as a result.
Journalists already rely on ordinary but alternative sources to write “their” quality prose but mostly what you see regarding objections to the ‘blogosphere’ replacing traditional news production is based on the fear of an industry that is seeing its business model collapse rather than anything else.
I stand by my original statement – the means of information amd media production will devolve more and more to individuals, away from corporations, and the consumption of media and information will be performed by individuals with greater and greater autonomy. The Internet will allow this to happen. China for example knows this, so does Iran. But you cannot firewall the human spirit.
I see your point, but still maintain my position. To clarify: I am against oppression of any kind and favor the “freedom of the press” [sic], but I remain highly skeptical about the utopia you painted. (Like I do with all utopias.)
Until I see “the mob” replacing, say… The Economist, Don DeLillo or Reuters, I remain skeptical.
Is there a difference between the writings of a random person in the Internet and a professional writer?
Who will bring us, say, quality news from boring things like daily politics? Facebook? Who will pay for reporters in Afghanistan?
What about the socio-economic background of those who have access to the internet to begin with? No more news from certain parts of Africa?
How about the so-called fourth estate? Who will bring us the next Watergate? Please do not tell me it will be Wikileaks (or even worse, Cryptome) because that surely sounds scary.
Can anyone submit news like in Slashsdot? Rate them too? Will the new brace world of media be as objective as Slashdot?
All in all, always remember that there is more to this than popular culture, Britney Spears, World of Warcraft and Linux. (Pun intended.)
Edited 2009-07-19 14:17 UTC
The person you’re replying to didn’t present a utopia, they presented a modern fact: Autocratic regimes can’t thrive in an environment where they don’t control the flow of information.
Do you know where the folks from the AP, Reuters, BBC, and CNN all were during the protests in Iran? They were holed up in their hotel rooms, quivering in fear because they were told exactly what would happen if they tried to do their jobs. If you read a single article about the Iran protests by any of those fine, quality news gathering organizations, you’ll have noticed that their primary references were Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and the blogosphere.
There’s plenty of quality news out there on the internet, and crowdsourcing is a brilliant way to democratize the flow of information, so please save us the arrogance pumped out by such condescending rags as The Economist. Like the other poster said, paper companies are whining because their outmoded business model can’t beat back the digital future.
If not for social media, all we Americans would have heard about the Iran protests would have been what the Iran government wanted us to hear. No head counts, no body counts, and no concessions and public admission of failure from the Iranian government. Sure, we might have gotten a few photos here and there from some ballsy journalists who value their integrity over their skins, but just like Tiananmen Square, we’d have been left without a good idea of the scope and scale of the event.
Your problem is that you’re assuming all internet-based news is as bad as the worst you’ve seen. That’s like me judging all print media from the crap I see at the checkout stand at my local supermarket. There’s a lot of Britney and Days of Our Lives there, too.
You just need to get yourself a better filter.
P.S. There are no more Watergates in print media. Haven’t been for a few decades now. And there never will be again. The major media outlets all got bought by (or advertise for) the same corporations who run our industries and own our politicians, so why in the hell would they pay reporters to shine a light on their own dirty laundry?
Out of curiosity, care to point out few that are not in any way related to established, pre-internet based, media? Note that the medium is not important to me; I am more against the idea that “once it is in the internet, it is free by definition” (thus the DRM-discussion).
And well, where I live in, sure, there are still Watergates. Your American press may be as twisted and sold-out as your country
.
Edited 2009-07-20 07:20 UTC
Huh.
It looks like Amazon finally found something for a $500 Kindle to do that a $200 laptop can’t.
Edited 2009-07-18 21:06 UTC
Edit: deleted
Edited 2009-07-19 15:43 UTC
The Kindle, and others like it, is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. Why would I pay $200+ for a device then pay more money for each book? Buy the (real) book instead.
“Oh, but you can take all your books with you.” they say.
Just how many books to you plan on reading on your trip?
I have to stare at this monitor long enough during the work day. Last thing I need is more screen time.
Long live the paper book. Completely compatible with all working eyes*.
*Some third party optical correction devices maybe required for viewing.
“Oh, but you can take all your books with you.” they say.
Just how many books to you plan on reading on your trip?
If the trip is a long one then it’s very much possible to go through several books. Atleast I can read a book a day, and if the trip does take longer than that then I’d already be needing something else to read. Also, carrying a single Kindle or similar does usually take less bag space than a single book, not to mention several books.
While you don’t like such devices you shouldn’t be so ignorant and arrogant and admit that those are a boon for many other people.
>Just how many books to you plan on reading on your trip?
I recently read 4 books during my trip. About 1.5 kilogram in ‘real paper’ form.
>Last thing I need is more screen time.
Just try it. E-Ink screen is nothing like LCD/OLED. I bought L-Book reader about 6 month ago and now it is one of my most-used gadgets
I even starts to read sci-fi again 
Try going on holiday in the UK. With our weather there is plenty of reading time :-p