Beats me but the last couple of days have been off-kilter. For one thing, my sleep habits are wacking out, not sure why but I’ve been up at 3 the last three or four days including a 3 hour session this morning that was actually quite productive. On top of that, I haven’t seen much to write about and yesterday was almost completely worthless at home.
That said, you may have heard in the enews lately about Amazon’s next big thing, Kindle. It’s a device for reading ebooks, one that sounds all snazzy and cool at first. They have apparently made it much easier on the eyes than previous tablets, more like a book they say. Of course, there’s one huge 800 lb gorilla hanging out over there in the corner. You see him? The one with the mad pointy eyes and the bunch of Chiqutas at his feet? Yeah, that’s the one.
See, the dealkiller problem here is that Amazon is treating these books as if they were CDs or DVDs, i.e. protected by DRM. Which is fundamentally idiotic. I’m sure that this came up in their roundtables, they are, after all, a bunch of smart people. But apparently it wasn’t important and they decided that after you buy one of their ebooks, you can’t sell it, give it, or loan it to anyone else, lest you be shot, dunked in hot oil and drawn and quartered.
Why in Dog’s name would I want a book that I couldn’t share? This is a fundamental disconnect. And it’s why ebooks, as long as they are implemented with DRM attached, will never succeed. Call me a codger but technology is about communication, not the restriction thereof.
For a far more entertaining and creative take on this entire mess, go read The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts).