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Amazon to add "lending" feature to Kindle

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Re: Amazon to add "lending" feature to Kindle

#71

Post by GHFigs »

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…

My software may be free, but my labor is not.

In other words, your previous answer was a cutesy lie. You do not, in fact, earn a living giving away software. You earn a living getting people to pay you to to write software.

That you don't sell the software is irrelevant: you're still creating the software because there is money in doing so. What would the effect be on your creative output if nobody would pay you for it? How much software would you be writing if you had to crank widgets for a living instead? More? Less?

Re: Amazon to add "lending" feature to Kindle

#72

Post by Aevin1387 »

rwhitman wrote: post #55
potatolicious wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

With the price fixing the only competition in town is priced at free. Therefore the market should bear somewhere between $10 and free. But not $10. Its still a ripoff no matter what way you shake it. Competitively, paying to download something is purely for the convenience of not having to hunt down a free copy. So I'm paying not for the music, but the ease of downloading it instantly. And thats not worth $10 to me.…

There are two flaws in your argument. First, the price is no longer fixed, Apple took care of that. Granted, Amazon didn't give that option before, but they do now. Second, the market obviously would bear $10, which is why the Amazon Kindle store took off as it did. If the market wouldn't bear it, people would not have bought the Kindle and the books. Remember, Capitalism doesn't care what the fair price is, but what people are willing to pay.

Re: Amazon to add "lending" feature to Kindle

#73

Post by ghshephard »

xiongchiamiov wrote: post #14
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.

I've never really understood this limitation. It doesn't exist for physical books (of which I've bought plenty), and it's the one thing that held me back from buying a Nook.

First - the publishers are profit maximizing, and they would prevent you from lending your physical books if they could. (In fact, they weren't big fans of Public Libraries when they first started springing up)

Second - The difference between a physical book and a eBook is that (A) you carry your _entire_ library with you all of the time and (B) your books are never lost/damaged.

I'm one of the 5% outliers who actually finds DRM encumbered eBooks (significantly) more useful than physical books - I never lose them, never have to move them, they never take up space, I never have to dispose of them, and can read them anywhere, any time.

Re: Amazon to add "lending" feature to Kindle

#74

Post by michaelchisari »

GHFigs wrote: post #71
michaelchisari wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My software may be free, but my labor is not. In other words, your previous answer was a cutesy lie. You do not, in fact, earn a living giving away software. You earn a living getting people to pay you to to write software. That you don't sell the software is irrelevant: you're still creating the software because there is money in doing so. What would the effect be on your creative output if nobody would pay you for…

I stand by my original statement, and I think the tone of your response doesn't particularly invite debate on that point, but I do want to address this:

How much software would you be writing if you had to crank widgets for a living instead?

I've done pizza delivery, tech support, coffee barista, construction, and a bunch of jobs I barely even remember.

I was writing software while I was doing all of it.

My side project is Appleseed, which I've written in my spare time, which is tens of thousands of lines of code, and six years in the making, without any particular economic incentive. I've always worked whatever job I could to pay the bills, but no amount of poverty has ever stopped me from coding, at one point I had to sell my only computer to make rent, and managed to find someone who could lend me an older laptop so I could continue coding. And everything I've written is open source.

Writers, like programmers, and artists, and other creative people, create because they love to do it, because they'd rather do it for nothing, than not do it at all.

Re: Amazon to add "lending" feature to Kindle

#75

Post by docgnome »

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…

Why do you say that people will always want to own physical books?

Re: Amazon to add "lending" feature to Kindle

#76

Post by docgnome »

ghshephard wrote: post #73
xiongchiamiov wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never really understood this limitation. It doesn't exist for physical books (of which I've bought plenty), and it's the one thing that held me back from buying a Nook.

First - the publishers are profit maximizing, and they would prevent you from lending your physical books if they could. (In fact, they weren't big fans of Public Libraries when they first started springing up) Second - The difference between a physical book and a eBook is that (A) you carry your _entire_ library with you all of the time and (B) your books are never lost/damaged. I'm one of the 5% outliers who actual…

Problem I have with that is that they may be more useful... right up until version X of some new reader comes out that, Oh I'm sorry, doesn't support the older DRM encumbered eBooks so you can just buy them again if you ever want a newer device. Not really a problem with physical books.

Re: Amazon to add "lending" feature to Kindle

#77

Post by kiba »

tzs wrote: post #70
htsh wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So if you have someone who is a great writer, they need to take time away from writing to do things that aren't writing, in order to make money? If writing is something we value as a society, then there should be a good way for good writers to make money by writing, instead of having to find ancillary things they may not be particularly good at.

Demand payment and release the book one paragraph at a time.

Re: Amazon to add "lending" feature to Kindle

#78

Post by docgnome »

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?

More of a pain than with physical books? I've lost books I've lent... real bummer but it happens.

Re: Amazon to add "lending" feature to Kindle

#79

Post by michaelchisari »

tyng wrote: post #68
michaelchisari wrote: post #6

I recognize that I'm posting an article by Cracked here, but anybody who's a regular reader knows that Cracked hits the nail on the head at least 2% of the time. They recently had an article about the future and artificial scarcity (using a colorful acronym), and this is a perfect example. You don't have to "lend" books, you can just make a digital copy and give it to your friend. Anything less than that is software…

"Planned scarcity" is the term. But I still think "lending" is a step forward to enable booking sharing, while preserving the incentive for writers to keep writing. Needless to say Amazon will take a cut in this feature, perhaps some to the book publisher and author too. Kind of works out for everyone.

I think you're getting it confused with "planned obsolescence". The economic term actually is artificial scarcity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_scarcity

Although the acronym Cracked uses is most definitely not the scientific one.

Re: Amazon to add "lending" feature to Kindle

#80

Post by lsb »

jules wrote: post #8
michaelchisari wrote: post #6

I recognize that I'm posting an article by Cracked here, but anybody who's a regular reader knows that Cracked hits the nail on the head at least 2% of the time. They recently had an article about the future and artificial scarcity (using a colorful acronym), and this is a perfect example. You don't have to "lend" books, you can just make a digital copy and give it to your friend. Anything less than that is software…

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

Because the book is an advertisement for whatever products he describes therein ("so they sat at the Au Bon Pain™, sipping Mochafrappalattes™ silently, watching each other"), and the advertisers pay per thousand books sold (CPM!), so the author wants to write well.
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