Kindle garten, jeff bezos

03/12/14 1
‘Kindle’-garten, Jeff Bezos,
and the Future of Reading:
Property rights and the ownership of
learning
The Sixth International Conference of the Book
Catholic University of America, Washington D.C.
25-27 October, 2008
Michael A. Peters
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

03/12/14 2
Googlization of reading
 1998 Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded a company called Google
developed out of work on hypertextual search engines in 1996 as
graduates in Stanford’s Digital Library Technologies project
 2002 Google Library Project – alma mater at U of Michigan; began
digitizing the library in 2004
 December 2004 "Google Print for Libraries" project
 Google partnered with five major libraries--Michigan, Stanford,
Harvard, Oxford's Bodleian, and the New York Public Library--in an
attempt to scan the pages of 15 million volumes.
 Google is now aiming to scan at least 32 million books
Source: Jonathan V. Last (2007) Google and Its Enemies

03/12/14 3
Criticisms of Google Reading
 book-reader interface is unwieldy
 difficult to navigate through the books
 what may be read is full of poorly explained limits
 "page unavailable" messages often appear in the middle
of books
 for some books ads are embedded in the browser
window
 American Library Association proclaim superiority of
brick and mortar libraries

03/12/14 4
Digitization of books: Google Competitors (1)
 OnDemandBooks - "Espresso" can take the digital text of
a book, print it, and bind it into soft cover in about four
minutes - http://www.ondemandbooks.com/home.htm
 Open Content Alliance (OCA) est. Microsoft and the
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in 2005 – building joint digital
collections for free public access (400,000 books) -
http://www.opencontentalliance.org/index.html
 Yahoo! provides web hosting for the OCA
 HarperCollins announced that it would scan 20,000 of its
titles and provide the texts to all search engines free.
 "Million Book Project" - China (18 digitization centers)
and India (22) joined with the Library of Alexandria and
eight U.S. universities -
http://www.archive.org/details/millionbooks

03/12/14 5
Google competitors (2)
 Carnegie Mellon's "Universal Library," already has
about 500,000 books digitized.
 "Quaero" (Latin – seek) – French initiative for state-
owned search engine (€300million) consortium led by
Thomson - multimedia indexing and search tools;
production & distribution of multimedia documents;
access to cultural heritage
 Japanese Ministry of Trade allocated $151 million, to a
three-year multimedia search project led by Hitachi
Consulting
 Germany to invest €120 million over five years in next-
generation search technology in a project called
Theseus, involving companies like SAP, Siemens and
Bertelsmann (breakaway from Quaero).

03/12/14 6
Google & Copyright
 Twin sources: Partner Program & Library Project
 works published after 1978 are protected by copyright
for 70 years from the author's death
 works published between 1923 and 1978, they were
given an original copyright protection of 28 years from
first publication and another 67 years of protection upon
renewal of the copyright
 Out-of-copyright books account for about one-sixth of
all titles. Most books--75 percent of them--are in
copyright, but out of print. Only about 10 percent of all
books are both copyrighted and in print

03/12/14 7
Copyright ownership
 Google ignore copyright protection - If a book is in the
public domain, its full text is displayed to users; if the
book is protected, then Google shows users only a
"snippet" of the text surrounding the search result
 Authors Guild filed suit in New York's Second Circuit
on the grounds of copyright infringement
 Publishers are seeking only to stop Google from
scanning books without explicit permission
 Google maintains that by giving copyright owners the
chance to opt out of the program, it has performed due
diligence with respect to the copyright.

03/12/14 8
Failure of ebook but success of
online ‘libraries’
 The SONY Bookman, an eBook reader, debuted with a
CD-Rom, cell phone-sized screen and keyboard in
1992
 the Softbook, the eBookman and RCA’s REB 1100
debuted in 1998 - bigger viewing surface, touch
screens instead of keyboards, faster, longer battery life
but more expensive than PDAs
 Sony’s new eBook reader with E Ink screen – new
screen flexibility touted as new Guttenberg – released
in 2006
 Form and reading experience are critical; light, portable
and legible as traditional paperback

03/12/14 9
iRex Technologies Digital Reader
What is the iLiad?
 The iLiad is a portable device that lets you read
and write as you do on paper everywhere you go.
 Everything you like to read, like books, newspapers
and documents, you can now take along on a device
as small and light as a single book. Even in bright
sunlight the display of the iLiad offers you perfect
readability. With the iLiad can you also send, receive
and share documents with family, friends or business
colleagues.

03/12/14 10
Mission & Partners
 Our mission is to provide solutions for
reading written digital content with the
ease and comfort of print on paper,
combined with the interactivity, flexibility
and up-dating ability of digital information.
 Partners: E-Ink, Phillips, Micronix,
WACOM, VisionObjects, 4D Objects,
Arinc, Solidam

03/12/14 11
Amazon.com – Jeff Bezos
 In the spring of 1994, I came across a startling statistic: Web
usage was growing at 2300 percent a year. I had never seen
anything grow so fast, and I don’t think many people had, except
for perhaps in a petri dish.
 So the question was: What’s the first best product to sell online? I
made a list of 20 different products and force-ranked them
according to several different criteria. I was looking for something
that you could only do online, something that couldn’t be
replicated in the physical world.
 I picked books. Books are incredibly unusual in one respect, and
that is that there are more items in the book category than there
are items in any other category by far. There are more than 3
million different titles available and active in print worldwide.

Source: Jeff Bezos, A BOOKSTORE BY ANY OTHER NAME, July 27, 1998

03/12/14 12
‘A bookstore by any other name’
 ‘First of all, you can use computers to sort,
search and organize. Second, you can create a
super-valuable customer proposition that can
only be done online, and that is selection. There
are lots of categories where selection is proven
to be important: books, in particular, with the
book superstores, but also in home construction
materials, with Home Depot, and toys with Toys
‘R Us. Online, you can have this vast catalog of
millions of titles, whereas in the physical world,
the largest physical superstores are only about
175,000 titles, and there are only three that big.’

03/12/14 13
Book 2.0
 ‘Kindle – Amazon’s amazing wireless reading
device $359.00’

03/12/14 14
Cellular broadband
 The Amazon Kindle incorporates cellular
broadband service.

03/12/14 16
The Future of Reading
Jeff Bezos and Kindle – ‘a portable
reading device’

03/12/14 17
Release of Kindle, Nov 16 2007
 “Kindle is a purpose-built reading device with wireless
access to more than 110,000 books, blogs, magazines,
and newspapers. The wireless connectivity isn’t WiFi—
instead it uses the same wireless network as advanced
cell phones, which means it works when you’re at home
in bed or out and moving around. You can buy a book
directly from the device, and the whole book will be
downloaded wirelessly, ready for reading, in less than 60
seconds. There is no “wireless plan,” no year-long
contract you must commit to, and no monthly service fee.
It has a paper-like electronic-ink display that’s easy to
read even in bright daylight. Folks who see the display for
the first time do a double-take. It’s thinner and lighter than
a paperback, and can hold 200 books.”
 Source: Jeff Bezos’ Letter to shareholders, April 2008

03/12/14 18
‘Surpassing the book’
 We started by setting ourselves the admittedly audacious goal of
improving upon the physical book. We did not choose that goal
lightly. Anything that has persisted in roughly the same form and
resisted change for 500 years is unlikely to be improved easily. At
the beginning of our design process, we identified what we believe
is the book’s most important feature. It disappears. When you read
a book, you don’t notice the paper and the ink and the glue and the
stitching. All of that dissolves, and what remains is the author’s
world.
 We knew Kindle would have to get out of the way, just like a
physical book, so readers could become engrossed in the words
and forget they’re reading on a device. We also knew we shouldn’t
try to copy every last feature of a book—we could never out-book
the book. We’d have to add new capabilities—ones that could
never be possible with a traditional book.

03/12/14 19
Beyond the traditional book
 You can search your books.
 Your margin notes and underlinings are stored on the server-side in the
“cloud,” where they can’t be lost.
 Kindle keeps your place in each of the books you’re reading, automatically. If
your eyes are tired, you can change the font size.
 Most important is the seamless, simple ability to find a book and have it in
60 seconds.
 Our vision for Kindle is every book ever printed in any language, all available
in less than 60 seconds.
 From a publisher’s point of view, there are a lot of advantages to Kindle.
 Books never go out of print, and they never go out of stock. Nor is there ever
waste from over-printing.
 Kindle makes it more convenient for readers to buy more books.
 Anytime you make something simpler and lower friction, you get more of it.

03/12/14 20
Bezos’s ‘anthropology’ of Kindle
 We humans co-evolve with our tools. We change our tools, and
then our tools change us. Writing, invented thousands of years
ago, is a grand whopper of a tool, and I have no doubt that it
changed us dramatically. Five hundred years ago, Gutenberg’s
invention led to a significant step-change in the cost of books.
Physical books ushered in a new way of collaborating and
learning. Lately, networked tools such as desktop computers,
laptops, cell phones and PDAs have changed us too. They’ve
shifted us more toward information snacking, and I would argue
toward shorter attention spans.
 If our tools make information snacking easier, we’ll shift more
toward information snacking and away from long-form reading.
Kindle is purpose-built for long-form reading. We hope Kindle and
its successors may gradually and incrementally move us over
years into a world with longer spans of attention, providing a
counterbalance to the recent proliferation of info-snacking tools.

03/12/14 21
(A Play in Six Acts)
Act I: The act of buying
Act II: The act of giving
Act III: The act of lending
Act IV: The act of reading
Act V: The act of remembering
Act VI: The act of learning

03/12/14 22
(A Play in Six Acts)
 Act I: The act of buying
 When someone buys a book, they are also
buying the right to resell that book, to loan it
out, or to even give it away if they want.
Everyone understands this.
 Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild,
2002

03/12/14 23
Act I: The act of buying
 You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast,
sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the
Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party,
and you may not remove any proprietary notices or
labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may
not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize
any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or
circumvent security features that protect the Digital
Content.
 Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service, 2007

03/12/14 24
Act II: The act of giving
 [I]f he lent her his computer, she might read his books.
Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for
many years for letting someone else read your books,
the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he
had been taught since elementary school that sharing
books was nasty and wrong…
 Richard Stallman, The Right to Read
 [Y]ou can’t give them as gifts, and due to restrictive
antipiracy software, you can’t lend them out or resell
them.
 Newsweek, The Future of Reading

03/12/14 25
 As you may have read in the newspapers over the
past few days, we’ve been criticized by the
leadership of a small, but vocal organization
because we sell used books on our website. This
group (which, by the way, is the same organization
that from time to time has advocated charging public
libraries royalties on books they loan out) claims that
we’re damaging the book industry and authors by
offering used books to our customers.
 Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild

03/12/14 26
 Libraries, though, have developed lending
procedures for previous versions of e-books —
like the tape in “Mission: Impossible,” they
evaporate after the loan period — and Bezos
says that he’s open to the idea of eventually
doing that with the Kindle.

03/12/14 27
 It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander
when you were in any public place or within range of a
telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A
nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of
muttering to yourself — anything that carried with it the
suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide.
In any case, to wear an improper expression on your
face… was itself a punishable offense. There was even
a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime…
 George Orwell, “1984″, Book One, Chapter 5

03/12/14 28
 The Device Software will provide Amazon with data
about your Device and its interaction with the
Service (such as available memory, up-time, log
files and signal strength) and information related to
the content on your Device and your use of it (such
as automatic bookmarking of the last page read
and content deletions from the Device).
Annotations, bookmarks, notes, highlights, or
similar markings you make in your Device are
backed up through the Service.
 Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service

03/12/14 29
 Another possible change: with connected books,
the tether between the author and the book is
still active after purchase. Errata can be
corrected instantly. Updates, no problem.

03/12/14 30
 Day by day and almost minute by minute the
past was brought up to date. In this way every
prediction made by the Party could be shown by
documentary evidence to have been correct;
nor was any item of news, or any expression of
opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the
moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All
history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and
reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.
 George Orwell, “1984″, Book One, Chapter 3

03/12/14 31
 If they can somehow strike a deal with textbook
publishers, I could see a lot of college students
switching to this. Get rid of all your text books
and have this single electronic device.
 Ankit Gupta

03/12/14 32
 School policy was that any interference with their means
of monitoring students’ computer use was grounds for
disciplinary action. It didn’t matter whether you did
anything harmful — the offense was making it hard for
the administrators to check on you. They assumed this
meant you were doing something else forbidden, and
they did not need to know what it was.
 Students were not usually expelled for this — not
directly. Instead they were banned from the school
computer systems, and would inevitably fail all their
classes.
 Richard Stallman, The Right to Read

03/12/14 33
 Your rights under this Agreement will
automatically terminate without notice from
Amazon if you fail to comply with any term of
this Agreement. In case of such termination, you
must cease all use of the Software and Amazon
may immediately revoke your access to the
Service or to Digital Content without notice to
you and without refund of any fees.
 Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service

Kindle garten, jeff bezos

Empfohlen

Empfohlen

Weitere ähnliche Inhalte

Was ist angesagt?

Was ist angesagt? (20)

Ähnlich wie Kindle garten, jeff bezos

Ähnlich wie Kindle garten, jeff bezos (20)

Mehr von mpt001

Mehr von mpt001 (20)

Kürzlich hochgeladen

Kürzlich hochgeladen (20)

Kindle garten, jeff bezos