KFX and Amazon's policies

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

Interesting you say that. When I designed and researched my own kitchen for remodel I came across a lot of fancy microwaves. Microwaves so expensive and silly that only those that hire a designer can actually afford them.

My microwave is just a counter top model. Not fancy in the least.

[Shad Plante]

I tried downloading a couple of Tor books using Kindle for PC to get KFX format files and there was DRM on them.

[Alohamora]

The world is moving on. (I think I read that somewhere).

Ownership is out. Renting, leasing, subscribing is in.

I'm slowly coming to terms with that. Netflix in, DVDs out. CDs out, Pandora in. Want to buy software? Can't do it, got to pay an annual subscription.

Ebooks will go the same way. My gripe with that is they still want us to pay ownership level prices for books we only get a license to read. Eh, more and more of my books are coming from the library.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by Alohamora

The world is moving on. (I think I read that somewhere).

Ownership is out. Renting, leasing, subscribing is in.

I'm slowly coming to terms with that. Netflix in, DVDs out. CDs out, Pandora in. Want to buy software? Can't do it, got to pay an annual subscription.

Ebooks will go the same way. My gripe with that is they still want us to pay ownership level prices for books we only get a license to read. Eh, more and more of my books are coming from the library.

There are alternatives to grinning, bearing, and accepting. Lately, in other arenas, they seem to be paying off.

[haertig]

Originally Posted by Alohamora

Ownership is out. Renting, leasing, subscribing is in.

This is of course what the vendors want. It becomes a continuing revenue stream for them.

But it also drives customer behavior. Example: How many here have any qualms about stripping DRM off of books they buy? I would put forth, "not very many". What the vendor wants is for you to "license" reading this content to only one device. But that concept drove customer behavior long ago. Behavior was driven to "Where to I find something to strip DRM off my books?" The idea of paying ownership level prices for something they tell you you don't own just doesn't pass the smell test for most people. And their behavior is driven as a result. I would venture to say that stripping DRM from your personally owned books is considered perfectly acceptable behavior to most everybody here. You have to take care posting about it, or you'll get slapped by the mods, who in all likelyhood are stripping the DRM off their own books too, just like everybody else. Kind of silly to have this rule when you think about the practicality of it, but it is to protect the forum from vendors and lawyers, so it is a necessary rule.

For the few that do have qualms about stripping DRM, what if in addition to (or as a replacement of) your purchase price, they soon decide that you need to pay a yearly maintenance or subscription fee? For a book that you read once, ten years ago, but hope to read again some time in the future? My guess is that there would be nobody left who would give a second thought to stripping the DRM that would enable this subscription model.

Behavior is driven. What is considered acceptable is driven by what you are told is not acceptable - taking into account how much you paid to "buy" whatever it is that they are trying to control. If traditionally you've been able to pay $X to own something, and now you're told that you still have to pay $X (or even more!) and NOT own it, well, as I said, the resulting behavior is driven.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by haertig

This is of course what the vendors want. It becomes a continuing revenue stream for them.

But it also drives customer behavior. Example: How many here have any qualms about stripping DRM off of books they buy? I would put forth, "not very many". What the vendor wants is for you to "license" reading this content to only one device. But that concept drove customer behavior long ago. Behavior was driven to "Where to I find something to strip DRM off my books?" The idea of paying ownership level prices for something they tell you you don't own just doesn't pass the smell test for most people. And their behavior is driven as a result. I would venture to say that stripping DRM from your personally owned books is considered perfectly acceptable behavior to most everybody here. You have to take care posting about it, or you'll get slapped by the mods, who in all likelyhood are stripping the DRM off their own books too, just like everybody else. Kind of silly to have this rule when you think about the practicality of it, but it is to protect the forum from vendors and lawyers, so it is a necessary rule.

For the few that do have qualms about stripping DRM, what if in addition to (or as a replacement of) your purchase price, they soon decide that you need to pay a yearly maintenance or subscription fee? For a book that you read once, ten years ago, but hope to read again some time in the future? My guess is that there would be nobody left who would give a second thought to stripping the DRM that would enable this subscription model.

Behavior is driven. What is considered acceptable is driven by what you are told is not acceptable - taking into account how much you paid to "buy" whatever it is that they are trying to control. If traditionally you've been able to pay $X to own something, and now you're told that you still have to pay $X (or even more!) and NOT own it, well, as I said, the resulting behavior is driven.

Good night will answer this post in the morning.

[darryl]

@notime. I won't say welcome back. I don't like your sometimes almost incomprehensible style of writing and arguing. I don't like your preaching or your habit in the last thread of ignoring comments raising flaws in your argument, going silent for weeks or months and then posting again without ever addressing the comments concerned. I don't like your anti-Amazon bias when all the major vendor's walled gardens suffer from similar potential problems. Hopefully you will do better this time. Because it is both worthwhile and timely to discuss KFX.

I have found that Mobileread is first and foremost a community of people who love to read. Not a community of either activists or idealists, though no doubt we have our share of both. I for one would much rather spend my time reading than battering my head against a brick wall. As one poster pointed out to me in another thread, the best thing about battering your head against a brick wall is that it feels so wonderful when you stop. That is true be that brick wall trying to convince Amazon to take a different approach than kfx or trying to get you to engage and argue logically instead of preach in that last thread.

KFX is a terrible format. It suffers from all of the defects claimed. It does apply DRM to ebooks which it purports to sell drm-free. Using one publicly available key does not change this. But Amazon is a corporation. It has a somewhat unique philosophy in its obsessive focus on customer satisfaction, which wins many friends. But it does this because Bezos believes it ultimately makes good business sense and over time improves the bottom line profit. Conveniently, THIS ARTICLE appeared today on Nate's blog. So how do we persuade Amazon to use a format we would prefer to kfx? Easy. Convince them that it is better for their customers and their bottom line. Easier said than done. Because kfx does not provide an inferior reading experience. It arguably provides a superior one. It's just that Amazon has chosen to provide enhanced typesetting through kfx rather than add it to kf8. I don't think there is any real mystery as to why Amazon chose to do it this way. I doubt the customer is getting any better reading experience in a kfx book over what could have been provided in a kf8 book. But nor are readers getting any worse experience. Amazon knows its customers. And it knows that the overwhelming majority of them just want a great reading experience on their Amazon hardware, and don't care at all about drm or lock-in or books becoming unavailable or price rises under a future monopoly or of the many future problems that may arise when stuck in a walled garden. Amazon knows it can't please everyone, and doesn't try. Mobileread has members who prefer much finer-grained control of their reading experience. Some people here edit their ebooks. Others want better font installation and control, screensavers, other applications etc. Many members here but by no means all, possibly not even most, care passionately about removing drm, myself included. I, like others, don't like being confined to a garden, not even one as pleasant and friendly as Amazon's. But we are not typical. What we need to show Amazon for it to care about our objections to kfx is that enough customers were dissatisfied, probably to the point of not buying from them. This is simply not true, and no amount of anti-kfx evangelism is going to change that. If Amazon does ever start offering only kfx then at least some here will stop buying from them, particularly if there is no de-drm solution available at that time. Personally if there is a solution available which gives reasonable results I would probably stay with Amazon. But, like Duckie, the first book I purchase from them where I can't remove DRM will be the last, at least until that changes. Unfortunately, it is doubtful that there will be enough like me for Amazon to even notice.

You seem to think that we on this forum are somehow remiss in not organising and implementing some sort of campaign against Amazon with absolutely zero prospect of success. You have no doubt heard the following old saying:

God give me strength to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Whether or not you believe in God or simply in common sense I think you badly need to find that wisdom on this point.

[JSWolf]

As I've been saying, KFX doesn't need to exist. And I've been also saying that darryl said that you do what KFX is doing with KF8. Amazon would just have to modify the renderer. Adobe did that with RMSDK (ADE) and ePub now can do hyphenation, ligatures, kerning, and variable spaces. This is all without the need for a new format.

A lot of us want our reading experience to be the way we like it. The problem is that we don't get this out of the box. So we resort to patching/jailbreaking our Readers and/or modifying the eBooks to deliver what is a good reading experience.

Amazon delivers a reading experience that most people don't mind. They download their eBooks and as long as they get that reading experience without any gotchas, they are happy with the status quo. They don't know the format of the eBooks they read. They don't know if there is DRM or not. They just want to read and as long as Amazon allows them to read the way they have been, they are happy. For these people, in most cases, Amazon has improved the reading experience with hyphenation, ligatures, and kerning. Now people can improve that even more with the ability to increase the weight of the default fonts and can set more font sizes. KFX, and the new font controls are only available on a PW2 or newer. This is where Kobo shines with their support for older devices with new or newish firmware. So from that perspective, you do get a better reading experience from Kobo on older devices then you do from older Kindles.

Amazon could go one step further to improve the reading experience by removing Mobipocket as a supported format. That way, those that make eBooks for use with Kindles could use more advanced features without having to deal with an obsolete format. Amazon could say that Mobi is going away and give people a year to save to buy a newer Kindle to replace the older one.

But overall, Amazon gives most customers what they want for a reading experience and until it's shown to Amazon that it's not working, Amazon won't change.

[darryl]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

But overall, Amazon gives most customers what they want for a reading experience and until it's shown to Amazon that it's not working, Amazon won't change.

Exactly right. The problem being, of course, that for the vast majority of readers it is working. Some of us on Mobileread can get quite passionate about things that matter to us, be it drm, fonts, ability to edit, open source or any one of many things. It can be hard for us to realise that we are a small minority and most readers simply do not care. And, of course, will not care until they are affected. For instanct, not many seem to care about drm, walled gardens and the like until they have lost access to their books.

[DiapDealer]

Well, not exactly right.

The "advantages" that KFX provides comes via pre-rendering stuff for the targeted device. The merits of such advantages can certainly be argued, but saying those same advantages could have been incorporated into KF8 without upsetting the apple cart isn't exactly true. Or it IS true, but it's a meaningless distinction. If KF8 were modified to include device-specific rendering, we'd be having the very same discussion about the evils of the "new KF8" format.

As far as the DRM thing goes. I tend to agree with many here: the "Unlimited (Amazon) Device" encryption practice on ALL KFX books is at odds with the intentions of those authors/publishers who have chosen to provide their content DRM-Free. Those who care deeply about this should let those authors/publishers know that their DRM-Free stance is being undermined by the Unlimited Amazon Device encryption on KFX.

But there's workarounds. And there always has been (except for brief periods of time). I'm not up in arms at all about it, nor will I ever likely care enough to take up "arms." I foresee no problem reading the books I want to read (the way I want to read them) until the day I die.

[JSWolf]

But, KF8 doesn't need to be device specific. It could all be done in the renderer. So for example, if an eBook have graphics, these graphics could be scaled to the screen size (if larger) by the renderer and then the code in the KF8 can deal with them as needed. What other device specific features would need to be in KF8 as opposed to the renderer?

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

But, KF8 doesn't need to be device specific. It could all be done in the renderer. So for example, if an eBook have graphics, these graphics could be scaled to the screen size (if larger) by the renderer and then the code in the KF8 can deal with them as needed. What other device specific features would need to be in KF8 as opposed to the renderer?

You're talking about two different things. I was only addressing your claim that the advantages of KFX could be done with KF8. The advantages of KFX are pre-rendered content that attempts to ensure optimal rendering on various supported devices. Device X gets file Y. Doing "the same thing" with KF8 would be pre-rendered device-specific content in KF8.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

You're talking about two different things. I was only addressing your claim that the advantages of KFX could be done with KF8. The advantages of KFX are pre-rendered content that attempts to ensure optimal rendering on various supported devices. Device X gets file Y. Doing "the same thing" with KF8 would be pre-rendered device-specific content in KF8.

KF8 doesn't need to be pre-rendered. The renderer just needs to handle all the new features.

[Pajamaman]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

@notimp, what you fail to understand is...

Oh the irony.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

KF8 doesn't need to be pre-rendered. The renderer just needs to handle all the new features.

The new features of KFX are provided via pre-rendering (and image optimization). So saying that KF8 renderer can simply "handle all the new features" doesn't make a lot of sense to me. If it were truly that simple to incorporate the enhanced typography features in such a way that all devices/apps (which supported enhanced typography) would display them similarly via KF8, it would have been done that way I believe.

What you're describing is handling it the same way as epub does. Meaning that the same file will render differently (from subtle to drastic) in every app and on every device.

I'm not arguing that either practice is inherently "better" than another. I'm just pointing out that there are actual merits to a system that provides book files that are tailored to each device/app that's rendering it in order to achieve a uniform typographic appearance across a variety of devices/apps. Tasking the renderer with achieving something similar may not be as feasible/efficient.