An Experiment in Scotch

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).