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Edifying exquisite equine entrapments

Tuesday, 20 November 2007

Do not fold, bend, mutilate or Kindle

I had some hopes for Amazon's e-book device - after all I buy paper books from Bezos via Amazon Prime weekly, I buy Subterranean Press's splendid editions, and I even end up susbcribing to the Folio Society's offers each year. I spend 8-12 hours a day reading screens and 1-4 reading paper books; I should be right in their target market. So I'm really sorry that KIndle is doomed.

I'll keep this short. Kindle requires DRM. DRM destroys value - it makes things do less and cost more, and means they will break suddenly without warning when the service inevitably goes bust.

If you have $400 to spend on a small gadget to read outdoors on, buy yourself an OLPC and give one away to a child elsewhere too. If you are still tempted by the Kindle swindle, read Mark Pilgrim's literary dismissal of it.

Posted by Kevin Marks at 01:04
Labels: amazon, books, DRM, DRM destroys value, Kindle, OLPC

2 comments:

ChrisW said...

Admirably to the point.

Now the *only* thing about the OLPC that makes me angry is that the give-one-get-one offer is restricted to North Americans. Someone wasn't thinking.

November 20, 2007 3:54 PM
Dima said...

Great post! I keep on making the same point about the OLPC for a couple of days already too.

As to your comment Chris, it seems that this issue has been resolved.

November 23, 2007 6:06 PM

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Kevin Marks
Kevin Marks works at BT as VP of Web Services. From 2007 to 2009, he worked at Google on OpenSocial. From 2003 to 2007 he was Principal Engineer at Technorati responsible for the spiders that make sense of the web and track millions of blogs daily. He has been inventing and innovating for over 17 years in emerging technologies where people, media and computers meet. Before joining Technorati, Kevin spent 5 years in the Quicktime Engineering team at Apple, building video capture and live streaming into OS X. He was a founder of The Multimedia Corporation in the UK, where he served as Production Manager and Executive Producer, shipping million-selling products and winning International awards. He has a Masters degree in Physics from Cambridge University and is a BBC-qualified Video Engineer.One of the driving forces behind microformats.org he regularly speaks at Conferences and Symposia on emergent net technologies and their cultural impact.
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