Please release e-books from their chains

WIRED: The Kindle electronic book readers have a vast array of titles but too many restrictions

WIRED:The Kindle electronic book readers have a vast array of titles but too many restrictions

I COULDN’T quite bring myself to buy a Kindle, nor a Kindle 2, Amazon’s range of portable electronic book readers. The latest version costs $369 (€278), and – in the harsh words of every e-book sceptic – lets you do the one thing that every seedy secondhand bookstore already has covered: it lets you read books, anywhere.

But I’ve been talking to those who did succumb, and I’ve also ended up using Amazon’s limited Kindle lite application on the iPhone. They are both a fascinating and exciting flash-forward to a bright future of reading and literature in a digital age, and a sign of how slowly it will take us to get there. Especially in Ireland – as you’ll see, one of the downsides of the Kindle is that it doesn’t actually work properly outside the confines of the United States. You can’t even see the present of electronic books in Ireland, let alone the future.

Here are the positives to the Kindle (if you’re in America). There’s a reasonable range of books to read on it – over a quarter of a million, mostly recent bestsellers. E-books are cheaper to buy than new printed books. They download instantly the moment you buy them. The Kindle comes with a free always-on wireless link which means you pick up those books (or magazines, or newspapers) any time you want.

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The device itself is light, flat enough to fit in a pocket, and uses “electronic ink” (which means that the screen displays text like normal print – it doesn’t glow in the dark like a laptop screen, but you can read it in bright sunlight like a paperback). The batteries last for weeks.

All in all, the Kindle competes just fine as a “better book”. Unfortunately, as a product of the internet age, it sucks. Everything that makes digital better than analog isn’t included in the Kindle plan. I can’t read or search the books I’ve bought on anything but the Kindle (if I can read e-mail on my phone and on my computer, why can’t I read Tom Clancy on either?).

If I break my Kindle or want to move to another e-book reader, I lose access to all the books I’ve bought (when my house burns down, I lose books, but my computer is backed-up).

And, of course, Amazon will refuse to deliver an e-book to my Kindle if I’m not in the US.

None of these represent a limitation of what’s possible. What they are is a deliberate decision to restrict the technology. They’re calls made by lawyers to constrain the possibilities of what the Kindle can do.

These restrictions are in place for the same reasons that the first versions of iTunes were limited. Just as Steve Jobs had to cut a deal with the record labels to put legal music online, so Amazon’s Jeff Bezos cut a deal with publishers to create a new e-book market.

The specifics of that deal are unknown, but limiting the Kindle to the US, and preventing books from being read on ordinary computers or transferred to other platforms were surely part of it.

These deals are constantly being renegotiated, which means that you’ll never be quite sure when your Kindle will suddenly lose a feature or two at the publishers’ whims. For instance, the Authors Guild complained that Kindle was denying them cash, because it had a “text to speech” function, and they deserved more money if their works were spoken aloud.

For most of us, the idea that the moment you read a book aloud you are violating some unspoken contract is crazy. Unfortunately, the moment the guild started complaining, Amazon turned off that feature on the Kindle. Everyone who had a Kindle 2 found themselves instantly “compliant” with the new deal.

Down this path leads the road to the Kindle’s obsolescence. A few years after Apple launched the iPod, music labels gave up on the restrictions they had originally demanded. They didn’t do it because of some flash of user-friendliness: they did it because to do otherwise would be to permanently trapped in Steve Jobs’s monopoly.

I’m absolutely sure that Bezos’ elevator pitch to the publishers was that his Kindle would be the iPod of the printed word. What he may not have mentioned is just how much record labels have balked at being imprisoned on the iTunes platform.

Music and literary publishers want absolute control over their works. To do so, they hand over absolute control to the technologists. In the end, music gave up on restrictions because it wasn’t serving their business, and it wasn’t pleasing their customers. All it meant was that pirated, restriction-free content was more user-friendly than their own costly iTunes versions.

Eventually literary publishers will realise the same thing. They’ll provide restriction-free e-books because, despite the Kindle’s amazing technology, slapping restrictions on how books are used is just postponing the future.

Books with chains belong in monasteries, not the present day.