Amazon's vertical integration/monopoly

[elborak]

Originally Posted by shalym

I just don't understand how ANY of this is inhibiting people from writing/publishing books in any way, shape, or form.

It isn't. But if we choose to ignore notimp's straw man, there's really nothing to talk about on this thread.

[notimp]

It is. Significantly.

And please don't ignore it - try to understand the problem from the perspective that in a few months the majority of Kindle users will have their devices filled with files in a format (not a DRM layer, a format) that no one is allowed to understand anymore - aside from Amazon itself.

That this was a structural decision on behalf of Amazon, and not "just a technical one". (Sure, json was so attractive to them, they practically had to remodel their entire intake infrastructure... - which by the way, you might recognize as one of the more recent arguments brought forward in the kfx thread.

I hope I dont catch any of the devs in here, any time soon, arguing, that Tim Berners Lee would have designed the web in json if he could have, because it saves 20ms rendering on every pageload - eff the peasants, or open standards, or society and its perspectives... 20ms faster load times (Amazon doesnt update eReader CPUs anymore, so I dont neglect, that there is a need...). #winning)

But back to the question at hand - "how ANY of this is inhibiting people from writing/publishing books in any way, shape, or form."

It takes away control of the "final master" from the public realm. This includes authors, publishers and the public at large.

No one but Amazon (the frigging distributer - think "Walmart") is allowed to officially produce the format, to sell it, to create in it (no specifications or tools were released), the publishing workflow was changed to adopt this new process, Amazon has never asked its customers if they want those new file properties and Amazon has not educated or even informed the public about its specifics (taking away certain rights), or even their intent to change the entire infrastructure. In fact they have buried the lead in press releases touting new features over properties fallen by the wayside.

Authors and publishers are forced to hand over the final part of what constituted "creating a book" to one company - they loose final control over typesetting, image conversion - and even "featureset" (no serifs, no hyphenations without "destroying" text integrity (soft hyphens are a workaround at best - from an archiving standpoint they can even become a problem. )).

While the public looses its ability to modify them or archive them in a format that still might be accessible a few years from now. Or to view them with anything that isnt a Amazon Kindle above a certain firmware - or to buy them in a store that isnt Amazon, or...

As you might have noticed after the Oasis release, Amazon has now also successfully linked "feature development" to their closed down file formats - while the release of the new eReader is seen as a generational turnover where no development takes place anymore.

(Devs in here probably cheered... #winning )

Also - elborak, you might not want to agree with me, but to tell off other users - advising them not to look at the issue, to ignore it - to even call it non existent is harsh and entirely unfair. Even shortsighted.

Again - I attribute this to a very large chip on the shoulder of members of this community and the ebook blogger scene at large - for being called out for having ignored Amazons ecosystem change with the rollout of kfx. Almost entirely.

Most of them have even championed it - regardless of the cultural properties they traded away for a "new more booky font".

This is the question at hand:

Should the public be able to produce and understand, to convert and edit the dominant eBook format on the market - that's before we talk about the necessity of DRM. Should authors and readers only be allowed access to certain layouts that increase readability - if they hand over the final production of books to one company - worldwide.

The old guard within this forum for some reason is convinced, that it was necessary for Amazon to take those freedoms away - and that we should not talk about it at all ("so thats a straw man argument, ey?").

And I am sorry - but you have to be willing to look at details to form an understanding about what's happening here.

What this development is ushering in - is the notion of books as "content" under unified ownership - while the rest of society is just starting to realize how this turned out in other sectors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZcygXXwM3M

If you want a more potent punchline - Amazon is currently stealing societies books ("integrating them into a closed ecosystem they control"), and some people within this community are cheering them on. In every aspect, they did it more secretively and with more malicious intent than I would have imagined any entity in this field being capable of.

From a short term profit motive it might seem in the interest of authors or publishers - but thats only if you can see yourself buying books following the "coke model", where one entity holds the "secret recipe" and you are more than happy to buy a branded product - because it comes with "exclusive features" (i.e. better readability).

I don't think people in here are too simpleminded to get this entire concept - I really dont. But for some reason a certain group in here mostly is unwilling to discuss it or even argue against it. They want to give it the "silent treatment" - while all of this is a currently ongoing process -

and the only way to argue "out of it" ("this not being a problem") is through a gateway (website login, usb transfer, a PC and significant effort - makes you able to opt into getting an older Amazon file format), entirely controlled by Amazon itself - which for a reason entirely baffling to me is accepted as a reasonable alternative and promoted in here if you'd care to ask for it.

Most people dont - so there goes the future of the ebook for at least half of its ecosystem. And don't tell me in a few years how sorry you are - tell the people in here not willing to acknowledge that - "something important changed".

Currently people within this forum try very hard to be "indifferent" and thats about it. Its a moment of hybris before you see structures collapsing... The issue doesn't go away, it just gets worse over time, as more and more people are affected.

Oh - and btw. Amazon has yet to comment on why they designed kfx this way. Blogs din't care to ask them what it was or meant in the first place (it would be interesting how they rationalized it from an organisational perspecitve).


edit: When google decided to scan the worlds books, and got sued over it, it actually produced something of value that wasnt there before. And they did provide those files in file formats that are open and every one of us can make sense of. Amazon on the other hand actually took value away and closed down an entire ecosystem. (What most people in here fail to recognize - for good (just looking at processes (who controls them) and numbers (how long until saturation)).)

Googles apks (Android App Format) can be freely created or modified by anyone who wants to, and they can even be sold on third party stores - such as, wait for it, Amazon --

yet google gets sued over infringing public interest, and Amazon gets a "high five" by every brand loyal Kindle enthusiast and his brother dev in here, while the issue is played down - don't worry - it's just the future of books.

[notimp]

Because I sense the progression swiftly going back to the usual small personal attack, pretend you chose to ignore "unimportant" facts, then don't do anything about it cycle - here are a few suggestions what we could talk about in here instead..

- The actual issue.
- The longevity of the proposed "workaround".
- The motivations behind the push for this walled garden.
- The missing reaction from the blogosphere.
- The missing statement from Amazon.
- The press release that went out instead (More booky with Bookerly!).
- The first reaction within this community ("What a fun challenge!").
- The self image of developers that help you to hack your way to a better screensaver but dont care about closed ebook formats.
- The missing reaction form authors and major publishing houses.
- Why Amazon hasn't been sued for contract infringement over the rollout.
- What we got in exchange for giving away the publics right to produce books.
- Why Amazon isnt letting you know anymore which ebook format you buy.
- Why Amazon, who some of you though was in the eReader business, has just decoupled eBook features from eReader product cycles - and coupled them with format releases instead.
- What it means, that Amazon now has an exclusive as far as selling the most current eBook format on Kindles goes.
- What it means that nothing in the new format is an open standard, much less html based.
- What it means that authors cant define paragraph spacing, image transparency, text alignment, ...
... or even when and where their final product is produced. Or when it becomes available.
- What that means for publishing as a whole (having agency, being topical, being nimble, being independent, ..)
- What that means for quality control.
- What this means for archival purposes.
- What it means from the perspective of a user that doesnt know file formats.
- What it means for the distribution and usage of calibre.
- What it means for society and pockets of culture.
- What it means from a free speech point of view (centralisation, loosing the right to final edit, not knowing when the release will hit...)
- What it means for third party stores that arent allowed to sell the current and best eBook format for Kindles
- What it means for us if we loose control over almost every cultural aspect a paper book still had
- What it means if this transition went through without any mainstream media recognition.
- If buying "premium" eBooks (better readability) is something we want.
- If Amazons layout prerequisites for their store are sufficient to take away our ability to edit an eBook after we have bought it
- What it means, that Amazon encapsulates public domain books as kfx files also.
- What it means, when Amazon chooses to neglect to educate users on the production workflow (not "better tools", but "no tools whatsoever")...
... or product features (/properties).
- What it means that they don't want to have people on their self publishing forums talking about the file format (at all)
- What this means for culture development as a whole (culture comes from societies interaction with art - over time)
- What this means from an anti competitive perspective
- What this means for eBook format development (as a whole)
- What this means for the institutional bodies that created the open standards we still depend on
- What Amazon will do with azw3 in the future..
- What...

And many, many related issues that are probably just as pressing and just as interesting to debate.

Take your pick - or just do as you did on every argument I have made in here before - and try to tell the rest of this community that none of it matters - because, you still can get a book formatted in a legacy format - if you put in the effort. And Amazon doesnt change its mind, policy and never stops supporting it.

Actually its the "there is nothing to talk about" mindset thats most disturbing. You had all this time to think about the kfx issue and its implications - and ended up at "there is nothing to talk about"...

[knc1]

None of which is a topic for a technical, development forum.
You are posting these topics that concern you in the wrong forum.

[notimp]

Not even the technical aspects of probably a good third of the "aspects" listed above (- that you need to understand to have an informed discussion about those concepts)?

The one and only prerequisite for this discussion to take place was that it had to be somewhere where you could reach the "technical minded" folks.

That this discussion could take place in here was sanctioned by other people, the thread was created by someone else, I was reluctant to become the main voice to push the issue, so on - and so forth... (but I was confident in my ability to argue for it.)

If after 26 pages you suddenly come to the realization that "having an ethical responsibility" as someone who understands the technicalities, as a developer no less, is "off topic" on grounds of it not being "technical enough" - I dont know...

I give up?

But not if I don't have to. I'll post once in here every few months, give context and opinion about recent developments as I see them unfold... I'll play my part - just to have the possibility of seeing a collective conscience developing around the issue.

[shalym]

Originally Posted by notimp

<snip>
That this discussion could take place in here was sanctioned by other people, the thread was created by someone else, I was reluctant to become the main voice to push the issue, so on - and so forth... (but I was confident in my ability to argue for it.)
</snip>.

I don't understand this...who do you think started this thread? Is there another poster with the same name as you?

Shari

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by shalym

I don't understand this...who do you think started this thread? Is there another poster with the same name as you?

Shari

This thread started as an off-topic discussion in another thread and was later split out. See the first line of the first post.

[notimp]

Mark Surman (Mozilla Foundation) on vertically integrated monopolies, digital empires and communication in the digital age.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmWRifoFmDQ

The talk was held four days ago. Just to emphasize that this is a current issue in different fields of the "content" sphere and that you need people with technical backgrounds looking at social implications as well.

@jhowell: Thank you. _headnod_

[Cinisajoy]

Will type an answer later. Bit busy this week.

[geekmaster]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

Will type an answer later. Bit busy this week.

Stay tuned for the next exciting episode of the Kindle Developer and Political Pundits Corner, all new episode coming to you next week, same time, same channel, brought to you by our sponsers, amazon.com and mobileread.com. Coming up next: "More of the same!" Relax and enjoy the show!

[knc1]

Most of America has to travel to rual country side to find a fire and brimstone preacher.

We are lucky, we have our own right here to type up the sermons for us.

[geekmaster]

Originally Posted by knc1

Most of America has to travel to rual country side to find a fire and brimstone preacher.

We are lucky, we have our own right here to type up the sermons for us.

Tent Revival, Kindle Edition



Opinion of villains that spout random philosophy?

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by geekmaster

Stay tuned for the next exciting episode of the Kindle Developer and Political Pundits Corner, all new episode coming to you next week, same time, same channel, brought to you by our sponsers, amazon.com and mobileread.com. Coming up next: "More of the same!" Relax and enjoy the show!

Now that I am caught up, I should have just answered read any of my previous posts in this thread.

[notimp]

The difference between my position and yours is fundamental.

I use "yours" because at this point it is obvious that I am faced with general opposition in here - and even If I try to get the conversation to the level of a debate - you guys wont bite, at this point, you want to heckle instead.

You are past the point where you attack personality, you now find "community" in disregarding an opinion that for me seems so blatantly obvious and rational to hold, somehow no one really tried to argue against it.

I criticized you guys for letting things slip on your guard and your immediate reaction was to discredit my voice. You even found an element of fun in not caring about social implications - entirely baffling to me, but hey - its your part of the community, right?

I am sorry, but I usually don't bow to displays of power when I see the people within those structures making mistakes. Which makes me a terrible preacher by the way, because religion is all about preserving structure.

But you din't exactly paint me as a that - you chose to classify me as an outcast, as someone that doesnt believe in your "technopositivist" notion, if certain ramifications aren't met. Some of them touch on the societal, on what are necessary properties of books, and on the notion that "tinkering" isn't worth much, when your output in the end mostly concerns giving better screensavers (cat pictures mostly) to people - on a device whose core functions you arent allowed to understand anymore.

Sure, you have filesystem access and can run minesweeper from a command line for whatever that's worth - but you arent allowed to look into anything that has to do with how the Kindle displays books. You can provide alternative reader programs, but the point of contention is, that people usually wont use it - as long as Amazon still allows other formats - even if some of them we don't understand anymore.

In your reality this isn't important. Here - use .kfx for all we care, someone hacked a way to let it be generated by a Amazon previewer software that also is a black box to us.
In my reality it is.

To be fair - you also provide a fallback - except that those three dozen people that are willing to switch to an alternative reader software don't show up in the broader picture at all.

I might sound like a broken record at this point, but I am still stuck at that moment in time when .kfx was released, eReading blogs celebrated it for finally becoming "more bookerly" - what ever that meant, and the general notion in here was that it was great, because you had something new to tinker with - except that you didn't --

- and when you found out, that reversing it wasn't possible at this stage (because Amazon, for the first time ever hadn't released a creation tool) you instantly went to ignoring the format mostly - because you had others that worked.

When you buy a book on Amazon you pull the hooks and leavers necessary to get an old file format - because thats just what we do. As people that still want the Calibre ecosystem to work.

It's not what the majority of people outside this bubble are doing. There is a new default, there is a new file format being autodelivered all over the world - and you chose to ignore it. Not comment on it, not to take a public stance against it.

The only thing remotely "rebellious" that came out of this community was when Calibre made a statement in not supporting .kfx, but only listing it - so you could find, see and delete it. Those are the only options any software that isn't closed down, Amazon created and in practically all cases part of their hardware (Kindle), can do with it.

And to tell you an open secret, that was about the only thing Calibre can provide until this day - but again you mostly didn't care.

My only interpretation of how a future in this ecosystem might look like was, that in 6-18 months most files, on the Readers (Kindles) of most people, will effectively be junk, as far as this community is concerned with - and that this would have "social implications", because we are still talking about books. Electronic books, but books non the less.

Thats the entire "fire and brimstone" part of my speech. It always was.

The notion I couldn't bare is, that Amazon was able to transition you into this without you forming a public opionion about it. Without telling your peers what it meant. Without bloggers taking a stand and publishing one "wait a minute..." article about it.

That strenghtened my believe, that things you see as something you cant fix, you'd rather not touch at all, than to acknowledge how little you can do about it - because while you are A class coders, you have no idea about fostering or maintaining a social opposition to the concept of the "book as a brandable item" (no, no - its an Amazon book, you know - the new format, with all those features...) nor did you want to learn how to do it.

Thats whats called an ivory tower, because while in your world - everything is fine, in mine we are just a few months away from .kfx becoming the defacto Kindle standard, while you still haven't made up your mind how to confront this.

At this point I guess we part ways.

Please try to remind me as a free thinker, and not so much as a preacher. Going back through all those pages, reading both positions - you owe me that much... Also I couldn't stand the label..

(edit: As a reaction to the Noah Feldman presentation - first *who's still watching TED..* (I don't like the format ), second - he's not wrong, you could conceptualize it that way, but it is also necessary to have a notion as to "why" they are deployed (so to speak).

If you are just concerned with there being a "working path" you loose all perspective as to if it is usable, or used at all. So I guess it depends on your understanding of what "technology" is. (From my POV: Its just a means to an end, as well - more often than not.. ("There's an App for that.") )

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by notimp

[...]in your world - everything is fine, in mine we are just a fem months away from .kfx becoming the defacto standard[...]

Your whole post seems to boil down this this.

You seem to be castigating everyone for not doing anything about KFX. What do you think people could do? Please try to reply in three paragraphs or less.