Originally Posted by notimp
Anyone? You successfully defamed the intent, the person, the reasoning, you threw out the case by popular opinion. You did't even have the guts to censor it with commitment, you did it by badmouthing and social pressure.
Then you claimed it a successful attempt in that no one in here, in the former subforum, or any other subforum for that matter, will ever DARE to touch it, or anything surrounding the issue ever again.
Get it our of your sight. Your legacy. That you are so proudly representing.
I didn't loose my temper until the very end of it, not even once - but here I say it, It was a racket from the start - a fight mostly fought about reputation between egos in a place online, where moderators get paid in reputation by explaining new Amazon features in detail.
At least for a time, you had a voice that proclaimed that Amazon switching its distribution model to filling its customers Kindles with a fileformat no one but them is conceptually allowed to understand anymore, that gets its "better readability" from barring typesetting and grammar from works not created by the company - is fundamentally noteworthy - and a sea change in the proclamation of "what books are".
High ranking mods in this thread expressively yawned, when it was explained to them that this model means, that book production itself gets centralized, that authors and publishers lose the right to create the final work. That the main format for distribution on Kindles today is a format only Amazon has any stakes, rights or interest in - and that it came to this in a process that was not openly stated, reported on or made publicly known.
People laughed about the notion of "hacker ethics" that should drive them not only towards pimping their eReaders with screensavers, or giving device support on a level Amazon product support wasnt able to provide - but to keep all books on all readers at least as open, that people would be allowed to understand and reuse them - sometime down the line. The "right to tinker" for the Kindle crowd is reserved and restricted to "everything that DOESNT have to do with books or the parsers that are used to display them".
This was done under the guise of showing a "political conscience" as being something devs and likeminded tech enthusiasts dont do. Its the californian startup mentality finally separated completely from any of its countercultural roots. Its a developers mentality of using and maintaining the net as something he does, but has no idea why.
In the end - you got people that grew up with the internet arguing against decentralization of basic means of production for information based goods. Just so they would be able to maintain their initial point of not having done anything wrong.
Why shouldnt there be the premium book that only Amazon can produce or is allowed to understand (by decree)? Wasn't that just DRM, as always?
And why should there be any action - when people would still be allowed to knock on the booksellers door and ask for a version of what they just bought, without those fancy features - but a version that actually has any properties that qualify it as being fit for archival purposes? Or being able to edit it, or lend it - or to cite large parts of it. Or to view it on any device that isn't a purpose built reader, produced by the same company that sells you the account, the format, and the access all at once?
You know a book? Do you even know what that word means?
In the later years of Aaron Schwartz there was this notion, that the most grave offense that he has made was to suggest, that information should be at least somewhat free, because of a moral imperative. That whoever made the laws against it was wrong and the decision should be overturned. That the idea of the public domain is not, that you create it in the image of a national park that you put a high fence around, with guns facing outwards. In this forum, the highest offense was seen to criticize the company that just changed the basic principle of what people understood as books for centuries. Instead it was deemed appropriate to remain silent through out the whole process.
What a tremendous story. What a tremendous victory for your cause.
Written with my heart laid into it - from apparently the person that likes to see his threads being on top of a forum. Then lets see it one more time - and guess how I currently feel.
Oh and by the way - now that this is all ending - eff Amazon, wholeheartedly, for transforming the book into something (.kfx) that much more proprietary, that much more restricted, and that much more useless as it lays on a device thats still called reader and has become a authentication and tracking platform in order to even be allowed to look at a book you bought.
This is your future, not mine. And the people above are you guides through all of it.
Its like that old saying: The best gift you can give your unborn child is a Kindle lifetime membership, so he/she gets this little edge in having more fun reading books with exclusive Kindle formatting features.
,k
It took 30 pages and 444 posts, until the problem was successfully lobbied out of existence.
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