Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

A user at MobileRead was talking about how he had liberated an ebook of DRM and it got me thinking about the different words and terminology that eReaders and eBooks are intertwined with.

1. Take DRM for instance. Digital Rights Management sounds so much better than ‘making things inconvenient for everyone so a minority can’t read without paying’.
2. Similarly, ‘liberting a book’ sounds so much better than ‘doing something that’s outside of the purchase agreement I entered into’.

There’s literally a war of words going on in eReaders and it’s worth exploring.

Kindle, eReaders Vs the Physical Book

The Kindle Vs Book discussion sees some of the best examples of the power of words -

1. Nicholson Baker called the Kindle’s screen a ‘four by five window onto an overcast afternoon’.
2. Mr. Baker also has this gem -
   

   The Kindle 1’s design was a retro piece of bizarrerie—an unhandy, asymmetrical Fontina wedge of plastic.

   It had a keyboard composed of many rectangular keys that were angled like cars in a parking lot, and a long Next Page button that, as hundreds of users complained, made you turn pages by accident when you carried it around

3. Mark Sarvas’s article is titled Kindling and amongst other things it talks about authors labeling the Kindle ‘evil’. In the article he refers to Amazon’s paying bloggers 35% of revenue as ‘thievery’.
4. Sven Brikerts at the Atlantic paints a beautiful image of what books mean -
   

   The book is part of a system. And that system stands for the labor and taxonomy of human understanding, and to touch a book is to touch that system, however lightly.

By painting the Kindle in dark and menacing shades Authors are using the power of words to turn people against a device that, in the long run, will get them a larger share of the pie.

Digital Rights and the Circus therein

With digital rights you have all these warring terms -

1. Digital rights management. 
2. Piracy.
3. Stealing.
4. User rights.
5. Liberating Books.
6. Copyright.
7. Copyleft.

Plus you have Cory Doctorow turning the term DRM against the proponents by claiming that DRM violates the digital rights of users.  

eBooks are a new digital rights battle ground and you see a lot of attempts on all sides to create new terms and carve out more and more for themselves.

There are two extreme views -

1. Publishers want a lot of money per sale and books to be available only to those who pay top dollar.  
2. Proponents of ‘information wants to be free’ want everything to be free.

All the terms listed above are war. Whoever paints a prettier picture and makes stronger appeals to our ethics and values wins.

the choice of eReader names

eReader names do a good job of conjuring up a vision (and not always the one the companies intended) - 

1. Kindle is an eReader kindling a revolution in books. Critics use the name to paint an image of book-burning.
2. B&N intended Nook to be a safe place you could read books at. They missed the obvious opportunity for confusion.
3. Hearst will have their Skiff Reader sail into the stormy seas and if they aren’t careful the wicked ocean is going to swallow it up.
4. Plastic Logic’s Que is not just an eReader – it’s a proReader.
5. Mirasol displays keep referring to buttefly wings (it’s even their logo) as that paints a much better picture than interferometric modulator.

Amazing that even the technology underlying eReaders is beginning to get magic words to describe what it is.

Of course you have Samsung and some other manufacturers who miss the value of a good name completely and use titles like E6 and E101. What a waste.

Good, Evil and the Greater Good

One of the most malevolent trends is the proliferation of people claiming to be sacrificing their own interests for us -

1. Good – is what you get when a company can’t beat another company on pure value.  
2. Evil – is what the competitor company is (or perhaps it’s strategies). 
3. Openness – is what the losers in the race want. Let’s share the prize since #1 getting the prize is so non-open. 
4. What’s best for books – is usually what’s best for their bottom-line.
5. Ensuring Quality of books – is usually ensuring they get their cut and keep their control.

It’s amazing how companies who never cared about books or readers now suddenly want to bend over backwards to ‘save’ us.

Using terms like Good and Evil is great because -

1. You never have to explain exactly why someone is good or evil.
2. It instantly attributes a bunch of other qualities to the ‘good’ company (or bad qualities to the ‘evil’ company).
3. It plays on really, really strong notions of good and evil most of us grew up with.

Closing Thought – The word is mightier than reality, for now

In the initial stages, when there are just 3-4 million people walking around with eReaders, its easy to paint a wrong picture of ereaders.

1. You call them evil and talk about how they destroy books.  
2. You talk about the future of books and the importance of staying away from eBooks.  
3. You take figments of your imagination and turn them into reasons not to buy eReaders.
4. You set an unrealistic bar ($100 color eReaders) and anchor people against them.

However, we have passed the inflection point.

Every eReader owner is exposing the concept and the devices to new people every day. It’s hard to hold an eReader in your hand and not marvel at the convenience and ease of use.

Seeing is believing. When people hold it in their hands they’ll see -

1. The eReader has no horns and no interest in their souls.
2. It makes things easier and very, very convenient.
3. There are lots of features physical books can’t match.

At that point the words they choose are the words from their experience. The grey window of Nicholson Baker’s overcast afternoon will be replaced by a pretty, eminently readable black and white screen.

Filed under: thoughts Tagged: | book wars, ereader terminology