By Jan Carroza
The e-reader excitement comes with real issues about who owns what. When you buy a book, you can do anything you like with it. I can give it to a friend who gives it to another friend and so on. I can buy a textbook and resell it when the course is over.
With new technology come new issues. When I buy a Kindle book from Amazon, I might like to loan it to a friend. Nook, Barnes and Noble’s e-reader, has a book lending feature called LendMe, which allows you to lend to a friend with a Nook or BN’s e-reader software for 14 days. This is better than nothing, but how many friends return books in 14 days? Next, licensing rights come into play. Some publishers don’t allow rights to “loan” their content at all. You see how messy this gets.
Amazon deleted an Orwell book after a copyright dispute from Kindle owners. One of the nice features of the Kindle is that it allows notes, highlighting and annotations. And so in the case of Justin Gawronski, a 17-year-old from Detroit, his file with his book and notes vanished. “They didn’t just take a book back; they stole my work,” he said. “It illustrates how few rights you have when you buy an e-book from Amazon,” said Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer for British Telecom and an expert on computer security and commerce. “As a Kindle owner, I’m frustrated. I can’t lend people books and I can’t sell books that I’ve already read, and now it turns out that I can’t even count on still having my books tomorrow.”
So now you get a Nook, a Kindle, a whatever. Then the next greatest version of e-reader comes out. Let’s say you want to get Apple’s. Now what about all those books you bought? Ah, the plot thickens. You don’t lose your CD or DVD collection every time you get a new player.
New technology is very exciting and there is an eager marketing for these new devices. Fox Business News on Dec. 29 suggested that Apple might sweep the competition away with an e-reader that is a multimedia tablet. You can watch movies, listen to music, read, and send emails. Calling it the Kindle Killer, FBN says Apple is seeking exclusive rights to content. Imagine that the next big book would come out first on their e-reader (Apple has been reserving several domains, like iSlate).
The devils in the details as to how these issues play out. Stay tuned.
Sources for this blog post include: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10421296-1.html, http://ow.ly/QREd, http://shenews.projo.com/2009/07/good-reads-1.html, http://inventorspot.com/articles/kindle_vs_nook_sony_ereader_holidays_34813, http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/12/22/calibre-e-book-app-can-now-convert-books-to-nook-format?icid=sphere_blogsmith_inpage_engadget
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