The Scholar’s Space

Georgia’s post on Kindle made some very good points. Interested readers may be willing to follow Ariadene’s thread a little longer and  look at an article in Slate which discusses some features of the new version.  Many  people shared Georgia’s irritation at the high clunkiness quotient in the original product, but AMAZON seems to have gone a long way to overcome at least some of these dorky things, and the new item is bigger, thinner and sleeker-looking than Kindle 1. But, some of the other complaints remain in force. The gadget is still pricey, pegging in at about $350 US, give or take.  And the DRM doesn’t seem any looser than on the last go-round.  The Kindles, pere et fils, are will probably go into some kind of technology museum one day, but the technology in itself is only part of the story, and not really the most interesting part either.  The Slate piece considers this side of things attentively.

Slate

Information Week  published a long article on other aspects of the e-book movement, including a speculation that AMAZON may turn out to be the victim of its own success and wind up cannibalizing itself. There is some danger, to AMAZON, that the various hand-held devices now around in great numbers will be modified by their manufacturers to allow downloading of e-books. Why should you buy an extra gadget, one that’s  pretty heavy and definitely not cheap, to read books on the commute or in the doctor’s office when you’ve got one with you that will do the same thing, perhaps not as well, but well enough for a few minutes reading here and there.  This is the best that many people can manage  nowadays, and this market may be the bigger one.

We’ll see.

The Stanford Center for Internet and Society runs the famed Fair Use Project, responsible for taking on a number of high-profile cases recently. The Center magnificently prosecuted Carol Shloss’ fight with the James Joyce estate to a beneficial settlement. I always recommend reading its details to worried scholars asking for advice about how to persuade reluctant (ie, risk-averse) publishers to accept a claim of fair use in scholarly commentary and criticism. Now the Center’s Anthony Falzone has turned his attention to another fair use case, one involving the transformation of an online photo of Barack Obama into a series of iconic posters, by artist Shepard Fairey.

There are cases all over the map on the issue of the extent to which an artist can build upon another’s work without permission. Historically, both in terms of process and product, art involves much more direct and literal appropriation than literature does, yet the same copyright rules apply to both. The issue will be the degree to which our courts are ready and willing to give fair use sufficient scope to accommodate transformational uses — even commercial ones — in a digital era. As the Washington Post story linked to above recounts,

To create his Obama poster (which he did in less than a week), Fairey grabbed a news photograph of the candidate off the Internet. He sought an Obama that looked presidential. “He is gazing off into the future, saying, ‘I can guide you,’ ” is how Fairey reads the image. The artist then simplified the lines and geometry, employing a red, white and blue patriotic palette (which he plays with by making the white a beige and the blue a pastel shade). He uses a lot of red along with boldface words: PROGRESS or HOPE or CHANGE.

The story goes on to note Fairey’s thoroughly non-traditional view of copyright:

Who knows how many do-it-yourself reproductions of Fairey’s Obama have been scanned off the Internet. “I have no idea. I think a lot,” says the artist, who put the image on the Web in a downloadable file. “I’ve seen it on stencils, fliers, shirts, Web sites, places we had nothing to do with.” Copyright infringement? No, no, no. “This is exactly what I wanted to happen.” This isn’t a limited-edition print. It’s unlimited. He charged $25 to $45 for the first runs of 950 posters, to pay for the printing of the all the rest, which were free. Fairey says he hasn’t made a dime off Obama nor does he think he has unfairly glommed onto the candidate.

The fair use debate is always about the scope of copyright itself, debated in terms of the role of the primary, some might say the only, meaningful limit on copyright. It will be a treat to watch it unfold.

I haven’t been all that enthusiastic about or interested in trying out the Kindle. I saw one shortly after they were introduced. It looked painfully clunky, but the person using it said she really liked it. She paid a lot for it, and from what I understood, the selection of books for it was not that great. But that’s to be expected for  a newly introduced product in this industry. Publishers seem to be really wary of putting their stuff out there where just anyone can get copies and do terrible things with them.

But my lack of interest was more basic than whether a book I wanted to read would be available anytime soon or whether the device lacked the elegance of the iPhone, or even it’s hefty price tag. It was the DRM. I just object, philosophically, to having my books tied to a specific vendor with a specific device. I felt the same way about DRM on music files. Never bought music from the iTunes store (geez, can that be true? not even one little song? you know, I just don’t recall ever buying one). I just bought a CD from time to time, ripped it immediately and loaded it onto my iPod and iPhone, and stored the disc away in case I needed to rip it again. Things happen to digital files.

But, when I learned that the Administrative office here at UT Austin’s Libraries had purchased one and that the Administrative staff were taking turns using it to get a feel for it, I decided to give it a try. Wouldn’t cost anything (even the download of a book or two would be paid for by the Libraries), and I do like to know firsthand about such things. So, I looked for several books that friends had recommended recently and not surprisingly, none of them was available. But finally, I hit upon Obama’s Audacity of Hope and thought that might be a nice read (it was). I finished it in about a week, and, to my surprise decided to download another, Thomas Friedman’s Flat, Hot and Crowded, which I’m about 1/3 of the way through now. I am recharging the battery, which says something right there. It lasted comfortably through one book but not two. It only takes about 2 or 3 hours to fully charge the battery though.

So here’s what I think: downloading the books whose owners are willing to make them available is quick and easy. The wireless connection is great. I can’t imagine any device that hopes to keep up not having its own ability to send and receive information. But that’s about where my praise ends.

I was ok with the screen readability and adjustable type size, but there are big tradeoffs with eInk. The flashing thing that happens every time you turn a page is really annoying; no backlighting is really annoying. You have to have external good light to read in.

I absolutely hated the way you go from page to page (the location and operation of the keys that one presses to make these functions happen): clunky doesn’t begin to describe it really. The design could not have been worse, at least not that I can imagine. You can barely touch the device without skipping to the next or a previous page. Building those keys into the edges of the device, practically top to bottom, is just plain stupid. And its angular edges give the device a hard, angular feel that I just didn’t like. It’s little keyboard has a rigid resistance that makes typing a chore. Well, it’s always a chore on any keyboard that small, but when you add in physical resistance to touch, it’s too much. Of course, there’s not much typing one would do on a Kindle. Sort of makes me wonder why the designers rejected a soft keyboard. Oh, wait a minute, that would suggest a touch-screen. Right.

That pretty much sums it up. The books need to be freed from DRM and the reader needs touch-screen technology. Get rid of all the buttons and that oh-so-1990’s move-the-cursor-up-and-down-the-page, line by line and click-on-a-line to select an item; make it easy and intuitive to highlight, bookmark, look up words, connect to the Internet for additional research. Oh, wait a minute, again. I think I’m describing my MacBook with touch-screen or an iPhone that’s a little bigger. Neither of which exists yet, but ought to.

So, from what I hear, a new Kindle will be announced Feb 9, a week from today. I’d advise a little imagination, a little bravery on the part of the publishers and Amazon: move to a DRM-less flowable text format for content; don’t try to freeze the form of the book at dawn of the 20th century digital (ie, nothing more than a static book in digital form; no real taking advantage of future possibilities); make the device cool and desirable by making it do more; make it easy to do whatever it is it does. Clunky boxy can’t stand to hold it NO; Slinky sexy beautiful can’t live without it YES.