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Amazon to add "lending" feature to Kindle

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Re: Amazon to add "lending" feature to Kindle

#41

Post by potatolicious »

rwhitman wrote: post #33
sliverstorm wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One wonders then why you do not resent the iTunes store. After all, you can get vinyls and cassette tapes for next to nothing at thrift stores these days.

I do, kinda. Lets just say that I haven't paid for music in quite some time.. and when I did it was always CDs, I've bought maybe one album digitally. Its not the idea of paying that bothers me so much as the price point. I know damn well there's nowhere near the overhead costs to digital distribution that there are to printing, publishing and retail, why am I only getting a $5.00 discount? Popular digital books and…

> "I know damn well there's nowhere near the overhead costs to digital distribution that there are to printing, publishing and retail"

I dislike this argument - it assumes that products ought to be priced according to their cost of production, which is patently false in reality. The price of a product is whatever the market will bear.

Does this means MP3s aren't overpriced? Nope. The monopolistic cartel-like behavior of the labels does seem to prevent the market from reaching a natural equilibrium price for music; that being said, the notion that digital things should be almost-free because they're almost-free to produce IMHO is BS.

> "$9.00+ for digital DRMed media is a total ripoff."

None of the major digital music stores have been DRMed for a long time. Both iTunes and Amazon MP3 are DRM free, and in fact the only real place you'll find DRM on music these days is the Zune Store - but that's more because you're on a all-you-can-listen subscription plan, there's no confusion about whether or not you own your files.

Re: Amazon to add "lending" feature to Kindle

#42

Post by danudey »

michaelchisari wrote: post #27
sliverstorm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I write software and give it away for free, how about you? For a living, eh? So do we presume you feed yourself with soup kitchens, and live in a cardboard box on the street?

Open source economic models have been pretty well established, no? My income is through payment for services, not software. My software may be free, but my labor is not. The same is being applied to music, artists like Unwoman regularly write songs and albums on spec and through crowd-sourcing. A friend of mine is a huge fan, and donated money for her to write a song using a Voltairine DeClayre poem. http://www.unwom…

So what you do for a living is provide (consulting? programming?) services related to open-source software, not write free software.

Re: Amazon to add "lending" feature to Kindle

#44

Post by danudey »

sliverstorm wrote: post #25
dlsspy wrote: post #3

Why can't we model it like a real book? Even if they limit it to owner -> borrower -> owner, it'd be great to just not have time limits. A market will be created in any case.

It'd be a pain in the ass trying to get your book back?

They could fairly easily add a 'take back' feature for those cases where you've lent a book to a deadbeat who can't be bothered to dig it out of his digital bookshelf and explain why there are virtual coffee stains on the pages.

Re: Amazon to add "lending" feature to Kindle

#45

Post by jonhohle »

michaelchisari wrote: post #21
jules wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

F. Waaaaaaaaait a second. Why would the author write a book of which he can only sell 1 copy? There is no book.

Regardless of whether human creativity is intrinsically bound to economic reward (I would strongly argue that it isn't), the fact of the matter is that you can't make the case that what we're dealing with isn't a matter of artificial scarcity.

The true scarcity is the clever/creative author, which was previously monetized by selling less scarce physical artifacts of the author's work. This doesn't decrease the value of the author, however they are stuck finding another way to capitalize on their ability.

Software did it by putting software behind services, not allowing copies to be distributed to the end users. Perhaps authors can figure out something analogous.

Re: Amazon to add "lending" feature to Kindle

#46

Post by stevenbedrick »

seancron wrote: post #7

The main problem that I have with the Kindle is not the lack of lending. What I want more than anything for the Kindle is support for ePub books, including DRMed ePubs. The Kindle would be enormously useful to me if I could navigate to my library's website, check out an eBook, and read it right on my Kindle.

If your library is anything like mine, supporting it would mean that Amazon would have to add support for Adobe's "Digital Editions" DRM scheme- which strikes me as somewhat unlikely, unfortunately (and by "somewhat unlikely", I mean that I'll be able to write a Duke Nukem' Forever review using TextMate 2 long before the Kindle supports ADE).

This was actually a (small) part of my thinking when I was trying to decide whether and which eBook reader to get. I ended up going with one of the new Sony models, in part because I knew it would work with my library's eBook system.

For whatever it's worth, though, breaking Adobe's DRM is trivial, as is converting the resulting unencrypted ePub file to a MOBI file, which, if I'm not mistaken, can be read on a Kindle. Your personal legal or moral mileage may vary, but from a technical standpoint it's pretty easy.

Re: Amazon to add "lending" feature to Kindle

#47

Post by jonhendry »

rwhitman wrote: post #33
sliverstorm wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One wonders then why you do not resent the iTunes store. After all, you can get vinyls and cassette tapes for next to nothing at thrift stores these days.

I do, kinda. Lets just say that I haven't paid for music in quite some time.. and when I did it was always CDs, I've bought maybe one album digitally. Its not the idea of paying that bothers me so much as the price point. I know damn well there's nowhere near the overhead costs to digital distribution that there are to printing, publishing and retail, why am I only getting a $5.00 discount? Popular digital books and…

"Popular digital books and MP3 albums could cost $2 and still be profitable..."

Reproduction is a very small part of the cost of a book or album, as a share of the per-item price.

Re: Amazon to add "lending" feature to Kindle

#48

Post by danudey »

rwhitman wrote: post #33
sliverstorm wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One wonders then why you do not resent the iTunes store. After all, you can get vinyls and cassette tapes for next to nothing at thrift stores these days.

I do, kinda. Lets just say that I haven't paid for music in quite some time.. and when I did it was always CDs, I've bought maybe one album digitally. Its not the idea of paying that bothers me so much as the price point. I know damn well there's nowhere near the overhead costs to digital distribution that there are to printing, publishing and retail, why am I only getting a $5.00 discount? Popular digital books and…

> I know damn well there's nowhere near the overhead costs to digital distribution that there are to printing, publishing and retail, why am I only getting a $5.00 discount?

This isn't exactly true. Most of the 'overhead' of a CD isn't physical production, it's record labels. They give a band a lump of money to sign on, and then they bill the band at every opportunity. They charge you to use a recording studio, they charge you to hire a producer to make it sound the way they want, they charge you to hire an artist to do your covert art, they charge you to do the music video, etc. Once it's all done, they handle all the distribution as well, which has become relatively cheap thanks to economies of scale.

This is the same reason studios have always been against digital distribution. Once people realize how easy things can be, they'll realize that they, as an institution, are far less valuable. You don't need to get airplay on the radio if you can preview every song in an album, lend music to your friends wirelessly, etc.

The price of digital goods won't come down until we eliminate the actual overhead - the profiteering middlemen.

Re: Amazon to add "lending" feature to Kindle

#49

Post by ceejayoz »

htsh wrote: post #36
jules wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

F. Waaaaaaaaait a second. Why would the author write a book of which he can only sell 1 copy? There is no book.

1. Speaking tours make money. Conferences make money, etc. 2. Fame, recognition, i.e. non-monetary benefits to being a good writer. 3. At least some people write because they believe what they have to say is important and/or helpful. 4. People will always want to own physical books. This is different than music or a dvd as a book can be passed-on/gifted much easier than a DVD or a CD, which will be obsolete. I can se…

Speaking tours and the like make money if you're an established author, and it's about as likely as it is for your garage band to make millions on tour. Sure, it happens, but it's hardly a good career for the other 99.999% of folks who yearn to do that.
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