Thinking about a few things -
- Big Bloggers are playing up the whole ‘Banned Account makes Kindle unusable’ story without understanding what happened. To make matters worse, they’re dragging in DRM which has nothing to do with the issue.
- TechCrunch just put up another ‘our Amazon source’ rumor of 300K Kindle 2s sold. They’re even claiming that they broke the news of Kindle 2 (without mentioning the little fact that they were off on the release date by 4 months).
- So many blogs giving air time to an Ashton Kutcher Vs CNN Twitter subscriber race.
It just feels like -
- Blogs seem to love to pander to the lowest common denominator.
- Blogs don’t hold themselves accountable.
- Blogs care more about traffic and clicks than about the integrity of what they report/write.
Blogs are much closer to TV than they are to newspapers.
Yeah! Can’t believe it - I’m a blogger, and still, have to admit that bloggers don’t have as strong a concept of journalistic integrity as, well, journalists.
Newspapers are far from perfect. However, without newspapers there’s going to be a huge void. Am going to write more about this - However, with the demise of newspapers we are suddenly going to be left with a huge absence of credible news sources.
Filed under: thoughts Tagged: | future of newspapers
DRM has a lot to do with it! What are you talking about. If there were no DRM do you think that anyone would care that this guy had his account banned? He would be able to go read anything from anyone else. As it is now he can read a lot from other stores if he is willing to break DRM. He can read a lot of public domain if he is not.
The banning has everything to do with someone being a problem customer and getting banned.
It happens all the time.
People are bringing in DRM even though its not the main issue – I understand why people are so passionate about DRM. However, trying to play off every story as being a battle for the good and against DRM gets very tiring.
DRM is central to the issue. Maybe THIS guy was a bad customer, but we all know it never ends there. What happens when YOUR account is banned for something you feel is minor and you can no longer access the books you’ve paid for?
If they were DRM free they could be read by other devices or a computer.
See why it’s all tied together? This post is terribly, terribly flawed both in execution and logic.
yes, from your perspective.
now, for a second, let’s look at it from my perspective –
1) you’re taking an outlier case of someone who was abusing amazon’s returns and exchanges policy. and assuming it applies to everyone – it doesn’t.
when you say – what if it happens to me, you’re trying to get me to fear something that will only happen if i abuse the system. i don’t and won’t so have nothing to worry about it.
2) without DRM no one pays for content. To be more precise, only people who have an internal moral compass pay – everyone else doesn’t.
3) every content provider who’s pushing DRM-free is only doing it because that’s their only option. Or for a competitive advantage. altruism is the best way to fool people – it’s like starbucks donating 5 cents on every bottle of water they sell (Hint: the company they bought over used to donate 50 cents per bottle). Its taking people’s ‘i want to feel good, i want to buy stuff from good people’ social instinct and abusing it.
4) If authors don’t want to give away their books for free – that’s ok with me. The Internet has trained people to expect a LOT – to the point that it’s unrealistic sometimes. Most of the companies that went with the ‘free’ model have perished.
YouTube, Facebook, etc – they’re all struggling.
DRM ensures that content creators get paid. Anti-DRM totally ignores that. As a blogger I’m a content creator. I do nothing except blogging and making sites – so DRM is essential for me.
Just because customers have rights doesn’t mean content creators don’t.
Personally I believe that your team members come BEFORE customers. DRM ensures these people get paid. for good honest work they’re doing.
Well let me tell you something as a consumer; If you found a way to DRM this blog, that’d be the last you saw of me, my advertising-reading eyeballs or my wallet. So go ahead and pimp DRM all day. Be the music business. Some people never learn from history.
As for your preposterous notion that companies will only institute draconian measures on those who abuse them, may I suggest a perusal through the archives at Consumerist? That’ll clear that little fallacy up for you real quick.
It STARTS when customers abuse a system. It ends where we’re all treated like criminals just to have the right to enjoy what we purchased.
There are no ads on this blog.
While I agree with you that its wrong to assume guilt and start treating customers like criminals.
That is not what is happening. A customer who abused the system got banned.
It has nothing to do with us. It’s the first time I’ve heard of someone getting banned from their Kindle account. 1 out of 500K (perhaps 1 out of 700K) is not bad.
BTW, Consumerist was doing so badly that the parent company had to sell it.
For a real website that really helps people, instead of just spreading fear and panic, take a look at Martin Lewis’ Money Saving Expert.
DRM is not the issue. The greater concern for me is that there was nothing resembling journalistic integrity in any of the rabble-rousing stories that were posted about this in the past few days, a week after the issue itself had been resolved. I care much more about the fact that Channel Web, Ars Technica The Consumerist and quite a few others climbed over each other to up the attack, even if it meant saying the deactivated Kindle could do nothing else and was “totally worthless,” or citing additional shut-down accounts without detailing them or properly verifying them. Truly sad.