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.'"
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.
Trust (Score:4, Interesting)
I trust warez release groups more than Amazon. That's so wrong.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.