Quote:
Originally Posted by toddos
The problem right now is that everybody has their own device and wants to lock in the customers. Amazon isn't going to be helpful this time around because they want closed, locked down formats to keep people buying Kindles, and they're expanding their market not by opening up their ebooks and letting anybody use them but instead by making Kindle apps available virtually everywhere (iOS, Android, and WP7 smartphones and tablets, PCs, Macs, etc). Ironically, Apple might be our best hope for ebooks because their iBooks store is not doing so well. If they realize they could sell iBooks to Nook users, Kobo users, Sony users, Aldiko/Stanza/FBReader/BlueFire/etc users as well as iBooks users, they might come around. They already have the open format (epub), they just need to kick the DRM. And preferably the agency pricing model, but Apple got us into that mess in the first place.
|
Well, a couple of things here:
1) While Amazon is obviously heavily invested in the Kindle, they're primarily a book vendor. The Kindle is an e-book kiosk, not the main event for Amazon. They care about lock-in because they would prefer you don't have the option to buy from other vendors from your Kindle, not because they don't want you buy any other device to read your Amazon e-books on. It would suit Amazon just fine if you bought your Kindle e-book and read it on a Sony Reader. What they don't want is for you to buy from the Sony Reader bookstore and read it on your Kindle.
2) Apple's not going to be the savior this time, any more than they were last time. Apple's support of e-books seems half-hearted, at best. The iBooks store, from what I understand, hasn't kept pace with the Kindle or Nook stores. And books don't seem to be a part of Apple's iPad strategy. Were there any improvements to the iPad 2 that made it better for e-books than the original iPad? The only possible difference I saw was that the iPad 2 is lighter. Apple just doesn't seem to be going after the e-book market very hard (which would make sense, given what Jobs had said about the Kindle initially).
Quote:
Originally Posted by toddos
DOC is certainly not an open format, and TXT has limited formatting capabilities. Epub is already a standardized, open format based on standardized, open technology that anyone can easily implement, so that's step one.
|
Doc isn't an open format, per se, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a flexible (in terms of text formatting options) format that more people could read. Do you think more people have DOC reading software on their devices, or ePub reading software, overall? Anyone who has the free version of Docs to Go on their mobile device can read DOC format, and I'd hazard a guess that virtually every laptop and desktop on the planet has the ability to read DOC format when it's shipped.
Quote:
Originally Posted by toddos
I'm not sure I'd worry too much about derivative works any more than I'd worry about people remixing or sampling mp3s. It happens (videos get pulled from youtube all the time for music-based copyright violation), but it's certainly not big business.
99.995% of the people just want to consume, not create. Those that do want to create generally want to create on their own, not steal. There will always be the odd bootleggers and counterfeiters (China is notorious for this), but dropping DRM from ebooks is not going to increase that type of theft, just as DRM doesn't diminish it today.
|
Most of the videos I've seen get pulled from YouTube for copyright violation have that fate befall them not because they changed the music or video, but because they used copyrighted music or video
without altering it (e.g., using copyrighted music as a soundtrack for unrelated (and sometimes, in its own right, copyrighted) video. The
Antoine Dobson-type stuff doesn't get taken down. I think your basic point is sound, but I think derivative works fare better on YouTube than you're imagining. And Mr. Dobson apparently seems to have profited from it (which is okay in my book, since he was the "star" of that particular show).