These notes are no longer current, but you might find them worthwhile as recent historical material to serve as context for current activity in this area. All items previously appeared in other LLN articles. 

Kindle owners find out about DRM's ever-present threat

Jacqui Cheng published this article on April 16, 2009 at ars technica. Excerpts:

Kindle users have been grumbling lately about Amazon locking them out of their accounts, reportedly due to an overly high volume of returns... In one case at least, not only did Amazon ban the user from making new purchases, it prevented access [that is, new downloads to a device replacing a defective Kindle] to already-purchased Kindle items. Other users have reported similar lockouts.

A bookstore that locks you out because you treated it like a library doesn't take away the collection already sitting on your bookshelf, after all.

It's worth remembering cases with legitimate downloaded music when businesses decided to get out of that business (e.g., MSN Music and Yahoo Music): They turned off their DRM authentication servers, which meant that purchased music could not be loaded to new devices at all. (After complaints, the companies agreed to leave the servers running--for a while. “To pretend this couldn't happen with already-purchased Kindle books would be an act of willful ignorance.”

In comments on this piece, one Kindle owner noted that when their Kindle died (and they got a new one), even though all content had been backed up, while books could be re-downloaded after registering the new device, expired periodical content could not: Downloaded articles could not be re-downloaded.

Kindle's DRM rears its ugly head...and it IS ugly

Dan Cohen posted this item on June 19, 2009 at geardiary.com. It's useful to note that Cohen loves his Kindle:

I love reading with it, I love how light it is, and I love the battery life. I also love the fact that it automatically syncs with the Amazon Kindle application on my iPhone and iPod touch. That means any book will open to the last page read regardless of the device last used. it is an amazing bit of technology that makes reading books across multiple platforms beyond simple.

But something happened...Cohen upgraded his iPod Touch to a new OS, and then his new iPhone arrived--which meant two new handhelds over threedays. He started reregistering all the apps.

When I got the Amazon Kindle app I knew there was one particular book I needed to download to both devices immediately. It’s a reference book that I wanted to make sure that I had on my device as the weekend began. But when I opened the app it only showed me a small subset of my books. “What?” I wondered. I went into that digital download portion of Amazon store and there I saw a list of all the books that I have purchased for my Kindle. “Great,” I thought “I’ll just choose the books that I want and click the ‘ download/send it to…’ Button next to the item.” I clicked and a few books gave back the message “successfully sent to”. A number of the books, however, including the one I was looking for, gave back the message that they were unable to be sent to my iPhone.... (Actual message: Cannot send to selected device)

He called customer service:

The customer rep asked me to send every one of the books in my Amazon library to my iPhone. Most of them gave the message that they were sent but a number of them returned the message “Cannot be sent to selected device.”

"Oh that’s the problem,” he said “if some of the books will download and the others won’t it means that you’ve reached the maximum number of times you can download the book.”

When Cohen noted that these books were not on any devices--he'd wiped them clean to reinstall--the rep sayd there's a limit to the number of times you can download: “Sometimes, he said, it’s five or six times but at other times it may only be once or twice. “ Reach the limit? You have to buy the book again.

Could Cohen find out the limit for any given book? Apparently not--the rep said it's entirely up to publishers “and I don't think we always know.”

I pressed — “You mean when you go to buy the book it doesn’t say ‘this book can be downloaded this number of times’ even though that limitation is there?” To which he replied, “No, I’m very sorry it doesn’t.”

This policy is apparently somewhere in the fine print of the Kindle EULA--and there's no way to find out in advance what the download limit is. Meanwhile, Cohen notes, Amazon wants you to upgrade your Kindle every year or two and Apple certainly wants you to upgrade your iPhone or iPod Touch every year or two. The net result: Sooner or later, you won't be able to download the books you purchase--even if you've gotten rid of all existing copies.

A second post on June 21, 2009 continues the “KindleGate” story. Based on that post, it appears that the “don't ask, don't tell” or “it depends who you ask” situation with Kindle ebooks and libraries may also apply to download limits--the reps are as confused as the customers.

It got so bad in fact, that one of the representatives along the way actually used the line, “Oh I’m sure you were told that yesterday because we were having downloading issues that they’ve been fixed.” Ah yes, and I can’t read this book because the dog ate my Kindle.

Summarizing the continued story... He found that he had an unrequested refund for the book he couldn't download. Calling Amazon for an explanation, he was told he could download an unlimited number of times to a specific device. What if he moved to new devices? That wasn't quite so clear. After talking to several reps, he believes the situation is this:

• ”You are able to redownload your books an unlimited number of times to any specific device.”
• ”Any one time the books can be on a finite number of devices. In most cases that means you can have the same book on six different devices.”
• ”Unfortunately the publishers decide how many licenses, that is devices, a book can be on at any one time. While most of the time that will be five or six different devices there will be times when it’s only one device.”
• ”At the present time there is no way to know how many devices can be licensed prior to buying the book.”...
• When you reach the limit and upgrade a device, that doesn't reset the number of licenses--but Amazon can release the license limit.

In other words, if his information was accurate, and the runaround I got this afternoon does make me continue to wonder, once you purchase a book you will have access to it going forward….

You just may have some hoops to go through along the way.

This is different from iTunes, which has a “deauthorize” function. Apparently, Amazon didn't design such a function into the Kindle Store functionality--deregistering a device doesn't automatically free up download licenses.

(Comments make it clear that Cohen wasn't an isolated example. One avid reader--with 170 purchased ebooks--had had two failed Kindle 1s, and found that seven books couldn't be loaded to his their new DX. A publisher also noted that nowhere in any of the information they entered, to publish books via Kindle, was there a place to enter a limit on the number of downloads.)

Early Kindle[1] Commentaries

• Peter Brantley posted "Kindling ebooks" at O'Reilly radar before the Kindle actually appeared. Thinking about the supposed ease of migration from packaged music to downloadable music, Brantley sees a difference:
  • "When one considers long form narratives, whether fiction or non-fiction, there is less of an impetus to migrate from print use except for the possible advantage of portability and more extensive support for visually handicapped readers; on the flip side, there exist some non-trivial barriers (drm, format wars, etc.) to electronic access. Exceptions to this equation tend to be concentrated in areas where consumption modes are inherently mass-market, and where volume exists in transactions; Harlequin may well be the single most successful ebook publisher in the market today. Replicating their striking success through niche markets, or across smaller-impact imprints, is likely to prove difficult."
• Tom Peters posted "Kindling" at the ALA TechSource blog on November 19, 2007. It's an early review (based on marketing materials and press coverage) that raises a number of questions. Peters has been a big ebook supporter for years. He closes with these questions:
  • "Will libraries have any truck with Kindle? Will Kindle knockoffs (with names such as Splinter and Tinder) soon hit the market? After the sizzle of the new begins to wane, will Amazon drop Kindle's price to $199, similar to what Apple did with the iPhone? Time will tell."
• John DuPuis at Confessions of a science librarian posted "Amazon's new Kindle" on November 20, 2007 (updated November 21 and 22), providing quick links to a range of early commentary and asking a few pointed questions of his own.
• Simon Chamberlain posted "Latest on e-books: Amazon's Kindle" at his blog. He links to somewhat negative reactions at Techdirt and Metafilter and some other discussions, sees some pros and cons and notes that he's probably not the target audience:
  • "I probably prefer reading off paper anyway (it’s not the resolution, so much as being able to flick from page to page and to have several books open at once). In an ideal world, I’d have paper and e-books, one for actually reading, the other available so I can do full-text searching when needed…"
• Andrew K. Pace has also been a big ebook supporter in the past--which made others wonder why he didn't report on the Kindle as soon as it emerged. He discusses this in a December 3, 2007 Hectic Pace post, "E-book malaise". Briefly, Pace thought that "by now we would have a device that smelled like a paperback, and we still don't have anything that even feels like one." After seeing the early failures in ebook readers, he's discouraged that the "perfect device" still eludes us.
• One complaint of many commenters is that new books cost $9.95 as Kindle downloads from Amazon--DRM and all. They think that's too high. Tim O'Reilly, who knows something about publishing costs, discusses this issue at O'Reilly radar in a December 5, 2007 post, "Bad math among ebook enthusiasts." It's an interesting read--and don't ignore the lengthy stream of mostly-thoughtful comments, which took the piece to 27 print pages as of December 10, 2007. For years, I've noted in speeches and writing that the "physical costs" of a book being a book--that is, printing, binding, materials and distribution--don't add up to much more than 14% of the book's price (not cost) in most cases; that still appears to be a reasonable estimate--which limits the savings for ebooks.

Commentary on Kindle [1] since December 19, 2007

• Steve Jobs dismissed suggestions that Apple might enter the ebook reader market and also dissed the Kindle with an odd observation, as quoted in a New York Times article and discussed in this ACRLog post (and many others): "It doesn't matter how good the product is, the fact is that people don't read anymore... Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole concept is flawed at the top because people don't read anymore."
• Paul Courant (University Librarian at the University of Michigan) calls the Kindle "a pretty poor substitute for a book" while noting some purposes for which it's much better than a book, and says ebooks "will really take off" when publishers "admit that on-screen...is not the best medium for serious and sustained reading, and develop and use technical and rights environments that allow cheap and convenient print on demand. It’s wonderful to be able to search and to skim on screen, but when you want to read, there is nothing like a book or a printed article."
• "Short Kindle supply is keeping e-book fans waiting" (ABC News) focuses on the supposed shortage of Kindles--but, once again, offers no clue whatsoever as to how many have actually sold.
• Thinking about Kindle and Ebooks - A long roundup of commentary from various sources and Walt Crawford's own conclusions (and his 7-year-old nine-part model of the ebook market), more easily readable in the PDF Cites & Insights 8:4, April 2008.

Ebooks in General

What's Happening with Ebooks?

Leslie Dillon from Leader's Digest September 2007

Amazon and Google will enter the eBook business later this year, but they’re taking different tacks. Amazon’s Kindle is a proprietary stand-alone device that will connect wirelessly to an Amazon eBook store. Google will simply index selected titles and charge for access to them (this project is separate from Google Book Search).

An article in the September 18 issue of BusinessWeek isn’t optimistic about Amazon’s foray into digital downloading. “The economics just don’t add up. And that’s unlikely to change with the company’s plan to ratchet up its digital merchandising this fall.” Usage restrictions are preventing wider adoption, and for Amazon, “there’s still much more money to be made shipping real stuff.”

(OPLIN 4cast #72, Sept. 18, 2007, “Amazon does downloads, sort of,” BusinessWeek, Sept 17, 2007 and “Envisioning the next chapter for electronic books,” New York Times, Sept. 6, 2007.)

A Book is a Book is a...

By Walt Crawford, Fall 2007

The discussion (argument, if you prefer) over book as package vs. book as story goes on, in and out of the library field. Summer 2007 saw some interesting back-and-forth among thoughtful libloggers on, as Iris Jastram calls it, the book-ish-ness of books. Her post is a fine entry point into the conversation, much of which took place on and around this post by Steve Lawson. Since I took part in this discussion, I'll only summarize to say that some of us feel that ebooks as general replacements for print books are non-starters (which leaves huge niche markets for ebooks and ebook readers), some of us feel that this view is a form of nostalgia and has no place in the younger generation--and some of us want to see books evolve to something different that doesn't work as printed pages within bindings.

Ebook Readers

Other early notes on ebook readers

Epaper, Kindle and Apple’s Tablet

By Leslie Dillon from Leader's Digest November 2007

Amazon’s Kindle apparently sold out 5.5 hours after it was launched. So even though it may never be a market driver, and in spite of the “ho-hum” reviews, its lack of additional features and no library model (yet), Kindle’s launch lets us know that ebooks aren’t going away and we need to pay attention to what’s happening in this space.

MIT’s Technology Review notes that E Ink, the company that makes e-paper, the display technology used by Kindle and by the Sony Reader, is now able to add filters to its monochrome e-paper displays, transforming them into color displays. As of yet, there aren’t any “commercialization plans” for the color e-paper, but Technology Review says, “Higher reflectivity versions [that make color displays possible] should go into commercial products...in about two years.” The company is also working to make E Ink technology video ready. So these new and forthcoming devices may be able to offer lots of missing features in the not-too-distant future.

Here’s what could be even bigger news: A tablet is reportedly being made for Apple by Asus. Experts at Gadgetell, a blog of “tech news, reviews, and interesting things” believe Apple will likely introduce its tablet with ebook functionality built in...not an ebook-only device.” In addition, Apple has apparently filed a “patent application seemingly destined for a new tablet.”

The techies at Gadgetell say that “Kindles launch shows us one thing: ebooks are not going away. Now all that is needed is a device that wows us. Will Apple be the one to do it again? We think so.”

(“E-paper comes alive,” Technology Review; “eBook’s future isn’t ebooks: the makings of Apple’s tablet,” Gadgetell, Nov. 26, 2007, via ContentBlogger, Nov. 28, 2007.)

[Editor's note:] Included because it's now more than two years later (as this is written, in late December 2009)--and color E Ink in a production device is still a promise, as is the supposed iTablet.

Related Articles

• Kindle Experiences - First-person commentaries on experiences with Amazon's Kindle.
• Sony Reader Experiences - First-person commentaries on the Sony Reader, another eink device.
• Ebook Reader Problems and Issues - Problems with Kindle and other ebook readers.
• Kindle and Ebook Reader Notes - Notes and news rather than commentaries.