[Web4lib] Kindle vs. Accessibility

[Tim Spalding]

> Once something is digitized and made available to the public, it is "in the wild." Control over distribution falls by the wayside, just as it has with music and movies.  SOMEONE will jailbreak the Kindle.  SOMEONE will find a way to strip the "no audio" flags out of the files.  SOMEONE will find a way to make the files readable on any device out there.  The files will be distributed on BitTorrent and its successors.  The masses of tech-capable folks out there will always be one step ahead of the publishers and other authorities, because they have numbers on their side. Publishers, authors, Amazon, etc. can recognize this and reformulate their business plans, or they can fight it and lose in the end, like the music and movie industries.

I think this is an essentially religious argument. Whether it's
Christ's return in 1979 or the end of the movie industry, reality
matters. In fact, movies have been hurt by digitization piracy much
less than music movies because movies are harder to "jailbreak."
Everyone's computer copies, decodes and rips CDs by default. Computers
don't do that with DVDs by default. You need to make a significant
effort. And the relative bandwidth difference makes movie copying a
more expensive, labor-filled thing. Yes, some movies are pirated, but
it's nowhere near the problem it is in music. I might also add that,
even if we accept that book copying will be rampant ten years from
now, publishers are *rational* to extract non-piracy rents now, when
it's still possible.

It's unclear where books will fall. Books are tiny files, so that
won't be a problem. But, so far, they aren't zipping around easily,
and you can expect publishers to try to hold onto that for a while. I
also think the demographic matters. Music piracy is driven by
teenagers. Adults are more likely to buy their music. The publishing
industry's center is the 40-year-old woman. I don't think that's the
BitTorrent demographic. We'll see if it becomes one. I suspect that if
the film industry exercises sues a teenager into the ground every few
years, soccer moms twenty years from now will still be wary of
stealing large numbers of Hollywood movies.

> The issue of author profits vs. publisher profits vs. Amazon profits is one that those parties will have to work out among themselves.  In the meantime, Amazon is alienating a portion of their potential user base, just as they have done be stripping sales ranks off "adult" materials.

It's tempting to believe things that fit out world view. You are quite
wrong on the Amazonfail thing. As Clay Shirky writes (see
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/04/the-failure-of-amazonfail/) it
was easy to believe Amazon did what it didn't do because it fit so
perfectly in with (some) peoples' view of the world. I think the same
underlying thing is to blame here—you're imagining the world is and
will be what you want it to be. That's not a good way to predict
things.

Tim