Amazon Stymies Lendle E-book Lending Service 237
CheerfulMacFanboy writes "CNET quotes Lendle co-founder Jeff Croft: 'They [Amazon] shut the API access off, and without it, our site is mostly useless. So, we went ahead and pulled it down. Could we build a lending site without their API? Yes. But it wouldn't be the quality of product we expect from ourselves.' Croft also said 'at least two other Kindle lending services got the same message' yesterday.'"
Read... (Score:4, Insightful)
Without the functionality being sanctioned by Amazon's own API, we aren't sure if there is a legal sinkhole waiting to ruin us.
10$ says Amazon has their own 'lending' service come online involving modest per-loan fees within 6 months.
Re:Read... (Score:5, Interesting)
I know a perfect way to bypass Amazon's API to loan and borrow books.
Let's consider having a building where we can store them paid for by our taxes. Then we can go and get free memberships and atually have a real book.
Let's call it a "library".
Then we can borrow and lend and no one can stop us.
In all seriousness...this very thing (and similar cases of "big brother-ishness" from Amazon and others) is why I have been anti e-reader. You're granting power to a company to control what you read and how you read it...and you are paying them to do it to you.
Don't give up freedom for convenience. Amazon has gotten too large in this market and wields too much influence.
While I hate to see it happen, I foresee some sort of federal regulation of "e-reader's rights".
Just my $0.02.
-JJS
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But, libraries carry e-books. and you can borrow them to all you want. It's the one place where some DRM policy almost makes sense. (enforcing 'borrowing' over keeping). Almost. Of course, some people'd like to screw with that system, too:
http://www.examiner.com/libraries-in-albany/the-upper-hudson-library-system-boycotts-harpercollins-new-ebook-policy [examiner.com]
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Amazon is a bookstore. If you want a book not available at one bookstore you can just go to the next... or go to the library, which conveniently also has e-books you can borrow. Considering that about 1.5h of my day is spent reading during my workday commute, e-Reader convenience (purchasing, size, and weight) will most always beat out the freedom that several hundred sheets of paper gives me.
The caveat that you (currently) can't lend out e-books bought from Amazon is a small issue for me. I VERY rarely len
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Lucky you. You clearly live in a privileged part of the world (although, even your own libraries are struggling for funding). I've found every UK public library that I've visited to be worse than the one in Brakpan, South Africa and that wasn't exactly a big city or anything.
Libraries are disappearing and unless we get a new set of political overlords, we need to find alternatives.
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Lending service? Not likely. They probably feel "lending" eats into the sales profits.
That said, I think it was foolish to use Amazon's API for any length of time without a plan to build their own infrastructure and databases. To depend on a for-profit's web API was just asking for someone to pull the plug.
They still need to build their own service, but now they are out of action until they do. Sad for them, but that's the way it goes. Depending on a commercial entity to "not change" is just a bad idea
Re:Capitalism At Its Finest (Score:5, Interesting)
Nah. Somewhere in between is better.
We do need some system of rewarding people who work hard, or else, evidence shows, people will just slack, and you end up not with everyone equally rich, but instead with everyone equally poor, so to say.
On the flipside, we do also need mechanisms for ensuring that capitalism is a servant of the people - and not it's master.
I tend to think the scandinavian countries hit the balance close to optimal, but offcourse I'm biased, being Norwegian myself. Some people would say we're -too- socialist, while others would say we're not -enough- socialist, to a certain degree it's a matter of personal taste, I guess.
But I think it's fairly clear-cut that capitalism in the USA, needs *more* moderating influence, and that it has gone too far in the direction of giving power to the wealthy.
Re:Capitalism At Its Finest (Score:5, Interesting)
Being from another Scandinavian country myself, I have to disagree. The nanny state is huge, and people are no longer able to be responsible for themselves. Everyone thinks about their rights, not their obligations to society. Also, there's a great deal of Jantelov thinking, which is basically an institutional form of jealousy. The scandies need to consider that they're no longer in an isolated, homogeneous part of the world, where everyone agrees about what the public pot should be spent on.
But anyway, that's not the main point I wanted to make. It's not that giving power to the wealthy is the main problem. (Sure, it can be a problem, no doubt.) The problem is giving power to large institutions. Microsoft, AT&T, Shell, etc... government is yet another example. If you ever work with or for one of these behemoths, it's understandable why you're frustrated. Large organisations lack common sense in their decision making, and they lack common empathy in their dealings with ordinary individuals. Due to their size (and influence) they're also able to live beyond their useful age, holding up resources (people, mainly) from more productive uses. Unfortunately, the west has institutionalized a system where the big firms work with the big governments to make sure neither of them is ever renewed. If organisations were smaller, we'd have a much more healthy society, where useful firms live, and old, unproductive ones die.
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1) People are more apt to support their own than others. This extends to cultural and socio-economic groups. A homogeneous culture benefits from this aspect of basic human behavior. With the small size of the population of Norway, the community aspect becomes more pronounced.
2) A much smaller problem, but still a problem, comes from supporting people of many different ethnicities on a large scale. Medically(as Norway is used as a prime example for social medicine done right), the lack of d
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A huge problem in the US (which is getting worse) is the "culture islands" of people that have no interest in assimilating. During previous immigration waves the people that were coming to the US wanted to be "Americans" (whatever that means) but recently the trend has been "diversity" where they want to keep their culture, language and customs - just live in the US, make lots of money and send a good bit of it home to the family.
What this does is you get attitudes that are very, very counterproductive if
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You should play Go. You'll find that all crude, low-level games end vastly imbalanced-- B+30 points, W+178 points, an "even" handicap cannot be won and it's W+60 points, etc. Higher level games, however, tend to fall within 2-4 points; occasionally a mistake is made, and a large loss is sustained, B+186 after White plays the tiger's mouth instead of the solid connection and loses a vital point in his wall.
What is interesting about Go, however, is that the manner of play must be flexible. The openings ar
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Choice is available for the rich or the educated. I can easily crack the DRM on their books so their lockdown does not stop me and I am not rich (By USA standards, I'm filthy rich by world standards). Problem is the rich are scared that you can be poor and educated.
Because eventually the poor that get educated will learn they are getting the poop end of the stick.
This is barring systems set in place to distract the poor and make them complacent.
Television, the lottery and welfare are designed to protect
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This action has nothing to do with capitalism. This is just greed.
Capitalism is a method of allowing private or public investment in business, for the investor to gain returns if the company is successful.
An ethical business will create value and keep as a profit some portion of the value, with its customers acquiring the remaining value in the form of that product or service.
An unethical business with divert value instead of creating it, so they profit from something that harms everyone else.
Communism is
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Lenin was not poor. Everyone in the cabinet in the USSR were not poor.
In fact the poor to rich ratio in the Former U.S.S.R. was pretty darn close to what it is in the United States right now. From where I am standing, Both Communism and what we call Capitalism are 100% identical in screwing the public to favor the top elite.
In fact show me ONE form of government that is fair. Because I cant find one that exists ANYWHERE on this planet.
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In fact show me ONE form of government that is fair. Because I cant find one that exists ANYWHERE on this planet.
Bhutan? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhutan#Government_and_politics [wikipedia.org]
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Under communism, who would have invented and marketed the kindle (or iphone or other devices), and why?
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Under actual communism you would not have had a (pleasant) lifestyle provided for you - you would have been told "if you don't come to the government farm and work every day, you will starve to death. You will not be paid for work on the government farm, you greedy capitalist, but maybe you won't starve" while of course tens of millions would be starved to death by Stalin asserting his power.
Under fantasy communism, skittle-shitting unicorns flying overhead would provide for your every need through the rai
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Writing code on/for what? Where did the devices come from? Do you actually think the state would create consumer electronic devices? Or were these devices designed and manufactured by other people doing it 'for fun'? And where did all the raw materials and equipment used to make the devices come from? Miners mining for fun?
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I'm not talking about the individuals working on it. I'm talking about the $millions it takes to develop and market the product - the devices themselves plus the infrastructure around it. If nobody can get rich, who is going to invest that money? You may say "the state", but they will invest in 1 device at most, not a lot of competitors who will push the top devices to get even better.
I've worked in a few companies who create physical devices and it isn't cheap to develop them, much less market them. An
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forces me to buy Hospital insurance
So many stupid US people grumble about being forced to pay for other people's healthcare, blahblahblah.
They don't seem to realize that they're ALREADY paying when some uninsured person queues up at ER and either eventually gets treatment and/or dies there (that still costs money). Even just turning them away costs money and time (won't be surprised it lowers the effectiveness of the ER in treating actual emergencies).
Guess where the money comes from?
Guess how efficient the "long queues at ER" method is at p
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What you really mean is if you get really sick - and young people can and do get really sick - you'll be uninsured and expect me, through my taxes and my insurance contributions to pick up your tab? Or do you have a six figure sum tucked
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It's because people like you do not know how to count that insurence finally has to be mandatory...
Corporation do not magically have "money" to spend, ALL their money at the end comes from YOUR pocket, the only difference between :
Taxes, mandatory insurance where the money is collected by the state, mandatory insurance where the money is collected by recognized insurance, volontarely insurace is the billing system, and the potential spending oversight, not the "cost" in itself.
And not having an insurance wh
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I'd be OK with mandatory health insurance if it worked just like mandatory car insurance: get my employer and the government the fuck out of my individual insurance purchasing decision (unless I'm in the "must insure at a loss" pool, in which case beggars can't be choosers).
The mandatory insuance model for cars works fine (as government programs go) in many states, but somehow when people start talking about mandatory health insurance the conversation veers off to all the doctors working for the government.
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The idea that "all the doctors would be working for the government" is a red flag waved by people who like the system as it is : way overpriced...
France has had mandatory insurance for probably over 20 years, and generalized insurance since the end of ww2.
And most of the doctors are independent professionals, and although you are supposed to identify a "generalist" as your "family doctor" and use him or her as an "entry door" before visiting a specialist (expect special cases like eye doctors, gyncologist,
Re:Capitalism At Its Finest (Score:4, Interesting)
Cool story bro time...
I'm in my 20s and healthy. I would be like you (except with catastrophic coverage mentioned before) if my employer didn't provide insurance, but they do. Last year I was in an accident and broke my arm. The total costs (to my insurance company) for the ride to the ER, surgery to screw my bones back together, a couple days in the hospital, and some physical therapy afterwards was over $50k. A couple things to note here. That $50k would have bankrupted my family if we had to pay that out of pocket. More importantly though... while I was in the ER I got to hear the initial patient questions they asked everyone in the room... Name, what happened, do you have insurance, etc. I can tell you based on the responses to those questions that my $50k of health care probably only cost about half that, because several people didn't have any form of insurance... But the hospital had to pay for doctors, nurses, beds, food, etc. for every one of them. The hospital I went to is non-profit. And sure, the President makes a big paycheck as do the doctors, but there's not massive corporate profits going into the pockets of some benefactor. In fact, the big local for-profit hospital will just do enough to keep you alive and then offer you a free ride to the non-profit hospital I was at.
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FWIW it also helps pay for the uninsured queuing up at the ER.
Whereas in some other countries you have:
1) private hospitals which charge a lot.
2) government/state hospitals which are tax subsidized/funded, but often (not always!) have longer queues - so if your condition is not serious you have to wait longer than someone who needs the stuff "right now".
The latter is not always inferio
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High deductible (aka catastrophic coverage) insurance is a crock of shit. The savings in premiums may exist, but often its insubstantial -- possibly as little as 5 or 10% -- unless other provisions exist, such as low lifetime caps on treatment, which completely defeats the purpose of having insurance in the first place. Worse, the lack of any co-pay before meeting the deductible discourages people from seeking treatment *before* something minor turns into something big. That's the point when a true savin
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What makes me really laugh about the Americans whinging about people spending their taxes on healthcare, is that despite spending nearly twice as much per capita on healthcare than Canada, they still have a lower life expectancy for reference [wikipedia.org] and their infant mortality is significantly higher. And even funnier, their % of government revenue spent on health, is higher than Canada too.
Surely a solution to this is for the government to regulate the healthcare and medical insurance industries to ensure the cost
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You're just setting yourself up for higher premiums later in life. A system where people don't buy insurance until they need it can't work any other way.
Re:Capitalism At Its Finest (Score:5, Insightful)
You've previously stated [slashdot.org] that you make close to $150k, why not just say that instead of skirting around the question?
Oh, I know, it's because you know no one will take your claim of being "poor" seriously. Well, fortunately for us, this isn't 4chan and your posts never get erased.
Have a nice day. :)
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150,000 is pretty standard for the readers of Slashdot (programmers or engineers), and it's miniscule compared to the persons earning $5 million a year off Stock options and other shit. (i.e. the Ruling class of this country, like CEOs and congressmen)
But it certainly isn't anywhere near "working poor".
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Hay guyz (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's make a web site that completely and entirely depends on some interface provided by large perpetually hungry company!
And compete with that company!
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It's interesting that the "quality they expect from themselves" depends entirely on them not actually doing any work themselves. I know I could build a quality [insert product here] if I were given enough time to research and develop. The fact that they say it just wouldn't be good enough, rather than it would take too long, is kind of sad.
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I think they mean that without the API, the most important features are missing. Unless your research and development includes hacking Amazon, I don't see what you could accomplish.
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I think they'd have been better off just saying that it would be illegal to do it without the API, rather than saying "It's possible, but it would suck". I don't think they'd have to hack Amazon's servers directly, just break Kindle DRM, but that's still illegal.
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It would definitely be a breach of copyright though, as I can't see them being able to add/remove books from actual Amazon accounts at will. They'd only be able to change the contents of specific devices. In that case, it would be possible to re-download any currently "lended" book back onto your Kindle enabled devices without taking it back from the person you'd loaned it to, and so two people would be using the same "copy" of the book.
This is making me realise that people could just register a friend's Ki
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Interestingly, lots of companies have made their main communication line (E-mail) and quite a few documents run via Google. My own company will be doing this as well. This will not end well.
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Interestingly, lots of companies have made their main communication line (E-mail) and quite a few documents run via Google. My own company will be doing this as well. This will not end well.
There is a significant difference between a company using Google mail and Google docs versus one basing their service on Amazon's API. With Google, you give them a bale of money ($50/user/year) and they are contractually obligated to provide you with service. If service breaks, Google engineers fix it in accordance with the contractually specified Service Level Agreements. With Amazon's API, access to customer lending information is a feature Amazon provided for free, and were equally free to revoke at t
Re:Hay guyz (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would you buy a book that can:
a) be remotely disabled
b) be remotely altered
c) decide when/where/how you read it.
All under the control of Amazon... a profit driven company.
It's basically sleepwalking into 1984.
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Re:Hay guyz (Score:4, Interesting)
the reason 1984 was disabled remotely was because of copyright issues in that the person who posted it to the store did not have the rights to it and therefore, neither did Amazon.
And they should have eaten the liability for selling something they shouldn't have. They had no right to force their customers to share the burden of their error by screwing with something that was theirs, not even if they provided refunds.
Yes, it was a little hinky in that if it was a physical copy, they probably wouldn't have...
The analogy is inapplicable. The point is they weren't selling a physical copy, they were selling a digital copy, and they dishonestly reneged on the transaction.
Also, everything about getting your books electronically can also be applied to all content anywhere and especially over the internet, where every aspect of the interaction is driven by or on commercially motivated resources and systems.
False. If I pay to download an MP3 or PDF over FTP, that file is mine and the seller is never going to be able to delete it (at least not without engaging in some black-hat stuff). Paying for ephemeral permission to access something within a walled garden is totally different.
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Because I can strip the DRM convert it to epub and remove their ability to steal the book back from me.
Every ebook I purchase is cracked and striped of DRM to protect myself.
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I'm not sure what people are expecting, anyway. The eventual goal of every content producer (even those who create physical products like DVDs, CDs, books, etc) is to charge for every consumption of their product. That's why you have to register your videogames with EA to play them, now. It's not enough to spend $60 on a game or $20 on a book and then let someone else in the household enjoy it, lend it to a friend, or sell it to a used book store. You need to pay $60 for the game or $20 for the book and the
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Let's make a web site that completely and entirely depends on some interface provided by large perpetually hungry company!
And compete with that company!
That's a high risk, but not necessarily a stupid strategy. The key is your exit strategy. If your exit strategy is "I'll keep doing this forever, dogging Amazon's heels and making money off of *their* business," then the overall strategy is obviously stupid. That's why I'm supposing their exit strategy looks like this: grow fast enough and become popular enough with Amazon customers that Amazon would rather buy you and expand your service than pull the plug and piss people off.
In this case Amazon pulled t
eBook Fling not using API (Score:5, Informative)
I've used the eBook Fling [ebookfling.com] site, and they don't seem to use an API. Their site is built around their users following a number of steps to lend eBooks to each other, each step described in an iFrame below which the Amazon site is displayed.
They're probably still good to go, although the site has a number of deficiencies. For example, Amazon only allows US-based Kindle owners to lend books. They're not clear about this (you can't find it on the site) and eBook Fling doesn't tell you either. So I've wasted an hour or so finding out what was wrong with either eBook Fling or my Amazon account, until an Amazon rep finally figured out that I wasn't US-based.
No problem... (Score:4, Insightful)
Har, har, har
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Avast, you scurvy scallawag!
Trust (Score:4, Interesting)
I trust warez release groups more than Amazon. That's so wrong.
Dear Amazon (Score:5, Insightful)
While I understand that the Kindle is sold somewhat as a loss-leader and a mechanism to try to sell ebooks for absurd prices (it's bad enough that paperbacks are $9; to charge that same price that costs you NOTHING to duplicate, NOTHING to store, NOTHING to ship, NOTHING to advertise is...hard to swallow), at some point even your lawyer-swaddled management must recognize that if one too blatantly attacks all *reasonable* means of use of that hardware, the only things left are going to be people who are willing and able to use your hardware WITHOUT your consent/cooperation, ie pirates.
Cutting off Lendle (and with a classy c&d sent from a 'do not reply' email address and no recourse to appeal or discuss), secretly editing books, purging books that people have purchased - all of these things simply indicate that you as a vendor are untrustworthy. Therefore the trusting will go elsewhere, the unscrupulous will continue to use Kindles and here's the kick: you're not going to see a DIME of their activities.
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that costs you NOTHING to duplicate, NOTHING to store, NOTHING to ship, NOTHING to advertise is...
And quite a lot of time and effort to produce.
There is a difference in price between hardcopy and digital versions.
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"There is a difference in price between hardcopy and digital versions."
orly?
http://www.amazon.com/Absolution-Gap-ebook/dp/B001ODO61G/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&qid=1300800486&sr=8-1 [amazon.com]
Absolution Gap, by Alastair Reynolds 2008
Paperback: $8.99
Kindle Edition: $8.99
Those prices look pretty damn identical to me.
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There is a huge difference. Buy any book published pre-2005 and find they did a bad OCR job that they didn't even spell check. Then pay the same price as the well formatted and edited paperback.
I mean really a spell check and find-replace on the same errors made by the OCR job they did would lower the mistakes from 2 per paragraph to 1 a page.
I could cut the spine, scan/OCR these books and have a better quality ebook version myself in an afternoon. /endrage
I wish so many of my favorite books were not mangled junk at the same price.
I was talking about the time and effort in writing the book, not the conversion of existing ones to digital format.
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(it's bad enough that paperbacks are $9; to charge that same price that costs you NOTHING to duplicate, NOTHING to store, NOTHING to ship, NOTHING to advertise is...hard to swallow),
Advertisement is still a cost, and they have to make back their up-front costs such as advances, layout, editing, and proofreading. If that cost them $50,000 and they expect to sell 10,000 copies, then that sets the price at $5 minimum just to recoup their costs. I have no idea about costs or sales numbers but I expect a big selling author will sell a lot more than that, but again they have to offset that against authors that don't pan out.
I agree about your other points, though, Amazon have never behaved i
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I do know what the costs are and printing and logistics are 50% of the cost of the book.
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Advertisement is still a cost, and they have to make back their up-front costs such as advances, layout, editing, and proofreading. If that cost them $50,000 and they expect to sell 10,000 copies, then that sets the price at $5 minimum just to recoup their costs..
Um right, so grabbing a softcopy of a book from a publisher, converting it into a different format, and cleaning up the layout costs $50,000.
I would guess the real cost is under $100.
You don't really need proofreading for most ebooks, as the publishers give them the softcopies. The book publishers are working with Amazon.
For some older books you may have to scan them manually and then check to make sure the spelling all comes up OK, but there is no way it will cost $50,000.
I think the model is probably more
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OK I was thinking about the costs of e-publishing, rather than a digital version of an already-published book. But in any case it's unreasonable to place all of the cost-recovery on physical books and expect no cost-recovery from e-book sales, and $100 as the cost of releasing a digital version is... a little optimistic.
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Such as the Public Library...soon to be closed by budget-slashing consevatives to fund the Defense of the Wealthy Act of 2011.
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Two points:
1) Printing, binding and shipping are a relatively small part of the cost of producing a hard-copy book, at least when producing them in bulk
2) Publishers can and do specify minimum prices that Amazon cannot go below (in order to make a profit, even if there's nothing contractual in place)
On the prices at least, you are directing your ire at entirely the wrong target.
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Incorrect unless you are talking a 1,000,000 book printing order for a best seller. MOST books published are short runs that are only 10,000 -50,000 printed and can run up to 50% of the cost if there is ANY color pages inside. small cheap paperback with color cover are cheapest and if under 500 pages can be as cheap as 25% of the book cost in shorter runs. This is for crappy Perfectbound and in the typical paperback size called "royal".
I know because I have published 2 books. unless you are a NYT bes
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have you ever held a kindle? thought about the hw inside? it's not that expensive to produce..
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It doesn't cost nothing. It costs less, much less, but not nothing. Servers and bandwidth aren't free.
Advertising... from whose perspective? Amazon advertises the Kindle on TV, and that certainly isn't free. For individual books, having your book appear in a store alongside 600,000 other books isn't advertising. You need to do much more than that in order to promote your book.
Re:Dear Amazon (Score:5, Informative)
"to charge that same price that costs you NOTHING to duplicate, NOTHING to store, NOTHING to ship, NOTHING to advertise is...hard to swallow"
Especially if you don't grasp the concept that bandwidth, server storage space, and advertising (with the same requisite bandwidth and storage costs) AREN'T FREE EITHER. But hey, keep thinking that the latest churning of Harry Potter or the Twilight series are hosted off some 20gig harddrive hooked up to a old PII in some guy's basement.
Amazon gets their cut *after the publishers*, the same scrupulous people that were at the root of the 1984 / book deletion mess in the first place (but who am I to get in the way of some perfectly good nerd rage?).
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Wait, you go all pedantic over the cost of bandwidth and server storage space and claim my point is nerd rage? LOL. Really - what's the cost of storage and bandwidth for a 500k ebook? I bet it's a lot closer to nothing than $1.
Absolutes like "nothing" or "always" seem to trigger some latent nerd-Asperger's specificity gland, even when used rhetorically and as a generalization, not as some sort of scientific assertion. Does the fact that (calculating generously) bandwidth and storage cost perhaps $0.05 m
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It should be hard for you to swallow it because you are completely wrong. There is a cost associated with storing the data, there is a cost for backing up the data, there is a cost for customer service, there is a cost for transmitting the data, there is a cost for maintaining the infrastructure, there is a cost to upgrade the infrastructure, etc. etc etc. There are different costs associated with an e-book than there are with normal books that should be flat out obvious to anyone on Slashdot.
I re
So pick different authors, like C.J. Cherryh (Score:4, Interesting)
CJ Cherryh sells her books cheap and DRM free, see http://www.cherryh.com/, at least those for which she can wrest the rights back from publishers. Such direct book sales from authors, cuttong out publishers AND bookstores (brick like Borders or vaporous like Amazon) will get progressively easier. Just like the music industry will eventually learn, gouging your customers always loses in the long run.
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On the same level, actor/writer Wil Wheaton self-publishes via his own site http://www.wilwheatonbooks.com/ [wilwheatonbooks.com]. Short stories have a price which you can pick yourself, books are published via Lulu.
Pardon my ignorance (Score:4, Interesting)
Does this sort of thing happen often? If Oracle decides I have too many weeds in my yard, will my Java programs stop working?
Seriously, is the wave of the present/future APIs with all sorts of tests in them so they do different things for different users? Sounds both intriguing and insidious.
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no. it only happens when you build your service over an existing web/server service. if it was just sw running on their own servers, they couldn't be cut off.
it's like if you build a service called semirandomsearch, and the service was just fetching google searchs and then rearranging them in blocks of 10, so every page would have the same results as a regular google search but the results were in random order on that page. and then google would block you off from their "api"(doesn't matter if you use the g
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Thanks for the reply. I guess I was thinking of API at a lower level than is the general use - showing my age.
I understand and appreciate your answer, but the question still lingers - I'll use Java as an example - it is a bad one since the source is available, but assume for a moment it were not - what if swing (showing my age again) had tests throughout it saying that if the panel/frame/container/whatever was going to appear on wikileaks.org, then abort the program? I mean no one would ever do that, bu
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Dangers of platform exposed (Score:2)
This highlights the issue of building a business around open API's.
Techie's naively celebrate openness and API's and a lets "build together" attitude, but when a corporate entity ultimately controls the whole ecosystem, your neat business idea is vulnerable to failure as it's built on a stack of cards.
API's are techie solutions. The real world continues to use commercial contracts to enforce partners to behave. The Web 2.0 movement would be wise to address the thinking around this going forward.
So crack the DRM.... (Score:2)
Honestly, if Amazon wants to be hostile, out a link on the websites to point users how to crack the DRM and continue lending their books.
Screw amazon if they want to be jerks.
A spotify for books (Score:2)
THATS where it is going.
Not independent author websites (too many too cluttered), or even pirated content (still too much hassle) , or itunes (why pay for a track?)
Simple, uncluttered access to everything you (n)ever wanted.
It will take a few years, it took the music industry 10+ years, so expect this to happen around 2020 or something.
Funny thing, the Nook... (Score:2)
can still lend books and do it natively. Yes, I know, you cannot lend all the books you buy but at least you can lend some of them and the list is expanding. SOME is better than NONE, and here's to hoping Barnes & Noble can keep pushing for publishers to allow more books to be loaned out.
If the publishers are smart, they will realize that allowing eBooks to be loaned out greatly increases their chances for more sales. If not, I hope more authors will self-publish and creative groups will make apps to fa
eBooks are not books (Score:3, Insightful)
Calling these things eBooks ought to be considered deceptive labeling.
It's not a book if you can't lend it.
It's not a book if you can't resell it.
It's not a book if it won't last thirty years under ordinary casual home storage conditions.
It's not a book when a public library can't buy one copy and lend it out as often as they wish.
It's not about feel of the cloth covers or the smell of the dust or the silverfish living in real books, it's about replicating the functionality all books have had for five hundred years.
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Cloud computing at it's best... (Score:2)
Any corporation who would give it's customer list and profile to another company who own a significant part of the infrastructure you need to provide your service, and therefore would easely compete with you, would be deemed stupid.
Well no because it's "ta dam..." in the cloud "...."
Cloud computing has sense in two cases: you own your own cloud, or it's some amateur experiment, and you signed before a garanty (at least with yourself) that you would never ever want to make any money out of this, and would be
One more reason why... (Score:2)
... I don't like eBooks. There is no problem with APIs, DRM, ravenous megacorps, etc. when lending a paper book to someone. There is no lending fee and the loan event is not recorded.
As eBook development ascends the experience/technology curve (robustness, display quality, etc.), such devices could become a realistic alternative. But all this tethering and associated DRM kill the idea stone dead for me.
Let this be a lesson (Score:3)
Let Amazon's actions, and Twitter's, and others, be a lesson:
Never, ever make a competitor's (or potential competitor's) products and services a crucial part of your business unless you've got a written, signed contract with them that's got guarantees written in that they won't alter or discontinue those products and/or services and severe penalties if they fail to live up to those guarantees (scaled to the actual consequences to your business of the disruption, not to some arbitrary "fair" scale, and scaled to compensate you for those disruptions, not to be "fair"). Make sure your lawyers helped write the contract, don't touch a "take it or leave it" offer. Especially if their offer includes a clause that lets them change the terms at any time.
Doing otherwise is just becoming your competitor's unpaid R&D and market research department.
Who's mind is changing? (Score:2)
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When the barriers to entry lower enough that new players have a shot at getting in. I mean, you might as well ask why Uncle Curmudgeon wants you damn kids off his lawn: it doesn't matter, it's not like the whole neighborhood is composed of grumpy hermits.
The free market sees stuff like this as damage and routes around it. It just takes time for viable competitors to step up, especially when there are significant financial and legislative burdens to entry.
At the moment, you really can't have a successful e