I agree with the main theme (that knowledge is often worth paying for), but you should be much more careful before advising technologies like Kindle which are heavily loaded with DRM and kill-switch. We all know how Amazon disabled all copies of 1984 from the Kindles once. The fact it was 1984 is a “funny” coincidence, but the point remain. Granting to a company (by itself, or because asked by a government to do so) the power to destroy all the copies of a book in the world in one click is not something we should do.
Until ebooks are respecting the rights and freedom we have with paperbooks (like a plain PDF do, but not a Kindle ebook), I would recommend to people to buy good-old paper books, even if they are a bit more expensive. Freedom is also worth paying for.
(Sorry if this is a bit out-of-topic, but it seems an important point to me; and yes I know that political arguments should be two-sided, there are positive aspects in Kindle and most ebooks, but I wanted to bring attention over a very negative aspect which is, IMHO, sufficient to overcome the positive ones).
Amazon removed one edition of 1984 due to it being sold by a company that did not have the copyright. Given how much backlash there was just over that, it is extremely unlikely that Amazon or any other major e-book provider will engage in any form of substantial censorship or removal of material. The risk does exist but it is so small as to not really need much attention paid to it.
A more substantial problem seems to be the great difficulty which one has in lending e-books. There have been some steps taken to handle this but they are still very suboptimal.
Given how much backlash there was just over that, it is extremely unlikely that Amazon or any other major e-book provider will engage in any form of substantial censorship or removal of material.
“Extremely unlikely” sounds pretty steep! What odds are you giving on that bet? Twenty to one? A hundred to one?
Of course, it depends on what you count as “substantial censorship or removal”.
What exactly are you predicting? What evidence, should it come to light, would prove you wrong?
1) In the next three years Amazon will not remove any already sold products on the Kindle due to copyright concerns. 87%
2) In the next five years Amazon will not remove any already sold products due to political pressure. (95%). (This is one of the vaguer ones but I think it should be clear.
3) In the next five years Amazon will not remove any already sold products from the Kindle because the product has been determined to be libelous or blasphemous in some jurisdiction. 95%.
4) In the next five years Amazon will not remove any already sold products from the Kindle that date from before 1920. 99%
5) In the next five years Amazon will not remove any already sold products from the Kindle. 80%.
6) In the next five years Amazon will not remove any already sold products from my Kindle. 98%.
7) (Most relevant to this discussion). In the next five years Amazon will not remove any already sold textbook or copy of a scientific journal. 92%.
I’m willing to make 5-10$ bets on any of these claims at these odds.
In all these cases, the relevant way of testing will be media reports of the removal of the texts, or in the case of 6 by self-reporting. Obviously there’s some overlap between some of these predictions. But they seem to be pretty decent estimates. I’ve focused on media reports because that seems given how much the last issue came up that seems like a safe way of separating the substantial and insubstantial accusations. I’ve focused on the Kindle primarily because I know more about it than the other e-readers but similar estimates would apply for the others.
So, given that they remove something, there’s a 10% chance that one of those things is on your Kindle? If they remove something, they’ll probably remove more than one thing, but still. Do you just have a lot of high-risk stuff on your Kindle?
That’s a good point. Hmm, 6 looks underconfident. Should probably be closer to .999 confidence. But that starts getting me worried that the most likely failure is a failure in my reasoning not in my model. So say .995.
I agree with most of your estimates. The only one with which I disagree is the 2, I would put it near the level of the 1, maybe at 90%, but doesn’t matter much. You’re reasoning on 5 years, which is a relatively short time frame, but that’s not the main problem either.
There are two problems which are not really accounted in your estimates, IMHO :
Black Swans : the probability is very low, but we can’t rule out some catastrophic outcome, like fanatics (from Tea Party or whatever) seizing power and wanting to ban evolution-related books. The odds are very low, but who would have predicted Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler or the Rwanda genocide ? I just don’t want anyone to hold the power to massively terminate copies of books easily, even if I’m pretty sure they won’t use that power. Because I’m just “pretty sure” of it. So I want to steer the future in a direction in which they just can’t hold the power. A dystopia like The Right to Read is not impossible either. And yes I know about the fallacy of using fictional evidence, but let me use it as a lossy compression to convey a concept in a few words.
The actual consequences of DRM, even without any intent to abuse from them : you can’t (easily) lend or give the ebooks for example. And what about the future ? When your Kindle dies in 10 years, what’s the chance that you can’t transfer the ebooks on the new device you bought ? Those problems are real and serious too.
When your Kindle dies in 10 years, what’s the chance that you can’t transfer the ebooks on the new device you bought ?
Personally, I tend to agree with Vornaskotti on this:
Of course, I don’t really control the books I buy from Amazon, who still has the power to close my account and at least in theory render all my books unreadable. In my case the same applies in here as with comics: I don’t really care. I’ve been getting rid of useless crap in our apartment in a steady pace for a couple of years, but for a long time the bookshelves stacked three novels deep have been The Great Untouchable. This year I conquered it too, and I’ve been taking my books to an antiquarian by the bagful.
It seems that I very rarely re-read books, even those I really like. If I do, it’s ten years later or so, and with that kind of frequency I can bloody well buy the book again, unless I want to borrow it from someone.
There’s a difference, though. The space an ebook occupies is far cheaper than the space a physical book occupies. I can see selling or giving physical books to reclaim their space, but, so long as you have any index whatsoever, getting rid of ebooks seems silly.
The main reason I didn’t put the predictions more than five years is because the ebook technology is changing very rapidly so I don’t feel comfortable making any predictions that far in the future. It also isn’t that relevant to the discussion in question since it isn’t that incredibly likely that one will have the same ebook reader now as one has in five years.
Regarding 1- right, most of the probability goes into extreme unanticipated events, although to be blunt, it seems like your politics are showing a bit in a mindkilling fashion. To only briefly touch on the mindkilling issues- the Tea Partiers have shown little interest in censorship or the like. Moreover, in the cases of both Stalin and Hitler, the censorship wasn’t at all a gradual thing. If one does have advanced warning about any censorship regime the e-readers have a really simple solution- turn off the external connection and don’t let any of their servers talk to it.
2 falls under what I discussed earlier in terms of borrowing and related issues. Those are all issues I agree are much more serious. There’s no question that ereaders do raise serious problems. I just don’t think that removal of material is one that is a high concern.
Okay, I think our estimates aren’t as different as I thought.
One of the stronger aspects of your earlier comment was “or any other major e-book provider”, which you’ve dropped here. After all, if there are four major providers (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google, Apple) today, and if we believe each has an 80% chance of not-censoring, and that they are independent, then that works out to only a 41% chance for all of them not-censoring.
Trouble is, bad PR consequences of e-book removal will also incentivize Amazon and other e-book sellers to make a stricter selection of what they choose to offer in the first place.
That’s a fine point, though this post is about paying for knowledge, not paying for freedom. Also, Amazon never had the power to kill all copies of 1984.
I agree with the main theme (that knowledge is often worth paying for), but you should be much more careful before advising technologies like Kindle which are heavily loaded with DRM and kill-switch. We all know how Amazon disabled all copies of 1984 from the Kindles once. The fact it was 1984 is a “funny” coincidence, but the point remain. Granting to a company (by itself, or because asked by a government to do so) the power to destroy all the copies of a book in the world in one click is not something we should do.
http://www.defectivebydesign.org/amazon-kindle-swindle explains it better than I do.
Until ebooks are respecting the rights and freedom we have with paperbooks (like a plain PDF do, but not a Kindle ebook), I would recommend to people to buy good-old paper books, even if they are a bit more expensive. Freedom is also worth paying for.
(Sorry if this is a bit out-of-topic, but it seems an important point to me; and yes I know that political arguments should be two-sided, there are positive aspects in Kindle and most ebooks, but I wanted to bring attention over a very negative aspect which is, IMHO, sufficient to overcome the positive ones).
Amazon removed one edition of 1984 due to it being sold by a company that did not have the copyright. Given how much backlash there was just over that, it is extremely unlikely that Amazon or any other major e-book provider will engage in any form of substantial censorship or removal of material. The risk does exist but it is so small as to not really need much attention paid to it.
A more substantial problem seems to be the great difficulty which one has in lending e-books. There have been some steps taken to handle this but they are still very suboptimal.
“Extremely unlikely” sounds pretty steep! What odds are you giving on that bet? Twenty to one? A hundred to one?
Of course, it depends on what you count as “substantial censorship or removal”.
What exactly are you predicting? What evidence, should it come to light, would prove you wrong?
So I’d venture the following:
1) In the next three years Amazon will not remove any already sold products on the Kindle due to copyright concerns. 87%
2) In the next five years Amazon will not remove any already sold products due to political pressure. (95%). (This is one of the vaguer ones but I think it should be clear.
3) In the next five years Amazon will not remove any already sold products from the Kindle because the product has been determined to be libelous or blasphemous in some jurisdiction. 95%.
4) In the next five years Amazon will not remove any already sold products from the Kindle that date from before 1920. 99%
5) In the next five years Amazon will not remove any already sold products from the Kindle. 80%.
6) In the next five years Amazon will not remove any already sold products from my Kindle. 98%.
7) (Most relevant to this discussion). In the next five years Amazon will not remove any already sold textbook or copy of a scientific journal. 92%.
I’m willing to make 5-10$ bets on any of these claims at these odds.
In all these cases, the relevant way of testing will be media reports of the removal of the texts, or in the case of 6 by self-reporting. Obviously there’s some overlap between some of these predictions. But they seem to be pretty decent estimates. I’ve focused on media reports because that seems given how much the last issue came up that seems like a safe way of separating the substantial and insubstantial accusations. I’ve focused on the Kindle primarily because I know more about it than the other e-readers but similar estimates would apply for the others.
So, given that they remove something, there’s a 10% chance that one of those things is on your Kindle? If they remove something, they’ll probably remove more than one thing, but still. Do you just have a lot of high-risk stuff on your Kindle?
That’s a good point. Hmm, 6 looks underconfident. Should probably be closer to .999 confidence. But that starts getting me worried that the most likely failure is a failure in my reasoning not in my model. So say .995.
I agree with most of your estimates. The only one with which I disagree is the 2, I would put it near the level of the 1, maybe at 90%, but doesn’t matter much. You’re reasoning on 5 years, which is a relatively short time frame, but that’s not the main problem either.
There are two problems which are not really accounted in your estimates, IMHO :
Black Swans : the probability is very low, but we can’t rule out some catastrophic outcome, like fanatics (from Tea Party or whatever) seizing power and wanting to ban evolution-related books. The odds are very low, but who would have predicted Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler or the Rwanda genocide ? I just don’t want anyone to hold the power to massively terminate copies of books easily, even if I’m pretty sure they won’t use that power. Because I’m just “pretty sure” of it. So I want to steer the future in a direction in which they just can’t hold the power. A dystopia like The Right to Read is not impossible either. And yes I know about the fallacy of using fictional evidence, but let me use it as a lossy compression to convey a concept in a few words.
The actual consequences of DRM, even without any intent to abuse from them : you can’t (easily) lend or give the ebooks for example. And what about the future ? When your Kindle dies in 10 years, what’s the chance that you can’t transfer the ebooks on the new device you bought ? Those problems are real and serious too.
Personally, I tend to agree with Vornaskotti on this:
There’s a difference, though. The space an ebook occupies is far cheaper than the space a physical book occupies. I can see selling or giving physical books to reclaim their space, but, so long as you have any index whatsoever, getting rid of ebooks seems silly.
The quote didn’t say anything about getting rid of ebooks? (It only said that if those ebooks happened to get lost, it wouldn’t really matter.)
The main reason I didn’t put the predictions more than five years is because the ebook technology is changing very rapidly so I don’t feel comfortable making any predictions that far in the future. It also isn’t that relevant to the discussion in question since it isn’t that incredibly likely that one will have the same ebook reader now as one has in five years.
Regarding 1- right, most of the probability goes into extreme unanticipated events, although to be blunt, it seems like your politics are showing a bit in a mindkilling fashion. To only briefly touch on the mindkilling issues- the Tea Partiers have shown little interest in censorship or the like. Moreover, in the cases of both Stalin and Hitler, the censorship wasn’t at all a gradual thing. If one does have advanced warning about any censorship regime the e-readers have a really simple solution- turn off the external connection and don’t let any of their servers talk to it.
2 falls under what I discussed earlier in terms of borrowing and related issues. Those are all issues I agree are much more serious. There’s no question that ereaders do raise serious problems. I just don’t think that removal of material is one that is a high concern.
Okay, I think our estimates aren’t as different as I thought.
One of the stronger aspects of your earlier comment was “or any other major e-book provider”, which you’ve dropped here. After all, if there are four major providers (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google, Apple) today, and if we believe each has an 80% chance of not-censoring, and that they are independent, then that works out to only a 41% chance for all of them not-censoring.
Right. But the key issue is how likely is it for any given user of a system to experience such a problem? That is I suspect very low.
One option is to make the bets about media reports directly.
Trouble is, bad PR consequences of e-book removal will also incentivize Amazon and other e-book sellers to make a stricter selection of what they choose to offer in the first place.
People know Kindle DRM can currently be broken, right?
Tried it, didn’t work for me. :(
Huh. Worked fine for me using files from a previously existing setup of Kindle for PC under Windows XP.
That’s a fine point, though this post is about paying for knowledge, not paying for freedom. Also, Amazon never had the power to kill all copies of 1984.