Freedom Friday: e-book rights
Sorry about the late post — had trouble with my Internet connection, and couldn’t be bothered to fix it over the holiday weekend
We need e-books that respect our first-sale rights. Copyright holders have every right to control distribution, but not to control it beyond the first sale. As soon as you sell something like a book (or even a DVD), you’re also selling the right for the original purchaser to lend, give away, or sell their copy.
The Kindle reader has been called the ‘iPod of Books’, but it’s not even close.
The iPod is (primarily) a music player that allows you to play standard-format tracks. It also happens to be able to play DRM-wrapped AAC and Audible audio-book files purchased from the iTunes store. The Kindle reader only supports DRM-wrapped, closed-format documents.
The iPod / iTunes DRM scheme is relatively lax — items can be on up to 5 authorized computers and many iPods, and can be legally burned to CD (a DRM-free format). The Kindle DRM scheme locks content down to one device, without any legal (or even known, as of this writing) way to extract it or transfer it to another device.
Steven Poole points out that e-book readers in general don’t hold a candle to books; while most of his points are more humorous than profound, some are spot-on.
The real strength of a book is that it is knowledge contained in a compact, resilient, standard form that can be easily lent or re-sold. Every single eBook reader I’ve encountered — and the Kindle is no exception — uses a DRM scheme that entirely destroys my ability to lend or re-sell a book, even though first-sale doctrine implies that I have the right to do so.
Kindle is being launched at a time when the music industry has finally noticed that selling content without DRM restrictions is a viable business model — most people will pay for DRM-free legal audio tracks as opposed to getting free illegal copies. Are people really more likely to illegally copy books?