[KineJapan] Kindle problems-->short topical e-books

Wed Dec 18 17:21:59 EST 2013

After the revolution PDF and open source will be a lovely option. In the meantime, however, we should support avenues for translators to get paid, and Amazon direct is paying 70% royalties and keeping the fruits of precarious intellectual labor off the filesharing servers. Time to be a bit more precise with the boycotting, as well as with what we're willing to pay for.

Steve Ridgely
UW-Madison

On Dec 18, 2013, at 12:06 AM, Mark Roberts wrote:

> On Dec 18, 2013, at 8:59 AM, JORDAN ANTONY YAMAJI SMITH wrote:
> 
>> FYI, they have Kindle for Mac and Kindle for PC available as a free download. You might want to avoid Kindle for other reasons, of course -- but if not, this is one way around the issue until better cross-platform solutions become available. 
> 
> Yes, many other reasons, one of which being that a better cross-platform solution has already been available for years. It's called PDF. It's an industrial-strength solution, supported by literally hundreds of different vendors, scholarly journals and academic publishers. It just doesn't happen to be massively profitable for Amazon — so they launched a whole new ecosystem in a bid to grab the low end of the market.
> 
> This may seem off topic for KineJapan, but since a lot of academic research will henceforth be conducted using e-books, and since we are hoping for more material on Japanese cinema to become available in e-book form, it is perhaps somewhat relevant. 
> 
> I would hope, also, that we are interested in sharing our research more broadly, though I'm not sure how that's going to happen smoothly if people embrace closed systems and don't question monopolistic practices of vendor lock-in.
> 
> On the techno-economic plane, we have entered a historical period of retrogression in which companies like Amazon, Facebook, et alia. are pushing business models that undermine the original goals of the information revolution. The coins of the realm are now platforms and ecosystems, and the new business models involve creating closed or semi-open systems. The people who laid the foundation for the Internet as we know it (Berners-Lee, Cerf, et alia) have spoken out quite sharply against these models, though most netizens remain unaware of what's at stake.
> 
> We see this in the proliferation of e-book formats and stupid little reader apps. Surfing the Internet using tablets or smart phones, we are now constantly enjoined to download these specialized reader apps, each one offering us a little walled garden of content. E.g., "You are trying to read a Boonville Times article — don't you want to download our special Boonie-Reader app (registration required)?" Instead of using a regular browser and open standards like HTML 5, we are now expected to load up on a bunch of these different apps. Instead of seamlessly interoperating with URIs in one app, we are expected to bounce through a bunch of different crapware, with "don't you want our proprietary thing as your default?" screens.
> 
> Now, you are probably wondering, how is this relevant to research on cinema?
> 
> Just as blogs and social media have morselized the discussion of Japanese cinema that used to take place on this list, these new proprietary systems will have the effect of morselizing our research across various platforms and ecosystems. There are various trade-offs here, but already if we want certain books or research sources (e.g., Schilling on Shiro Kido), we'll have to buy into yet another ecosystem with its creeping vendor lock-in, "new" crappy little reader app, etc.
> 
> Similarly, I have now see Amazon "bookmarks" appearing in my social media stream. These are URLs, but they point to something inside the Amazon silo, sort of like Facebook links that are only really legible for people who already belong to FB. Just as I never bother with FB links because they generally take me to a registration screen (I don't hand over all of my family photos and personal details to creeps like Mark Zuckerberg), I will soon recognize and ignore these Kindle links as well. 
> 
> When it comes to research tools, there is a pretty compelling consensus that the way forward is to use open systems as much as possible. E.g., PDF was originally developed at Xerox and then commercialized by Adobe, but with so many different apps and vendors that now support it, it has essentially become an open system. I don't see that the same can be said of Amazon's kit, nor will it have equivalent acceptance for years to come, if ever. 
> 
> M.
> 
> 
>> 
>> Jordan
>> 
>> 
>> On Mon, Dec 16, 2013 at 3:27 PM, Mark Roberts <mroberts37 at mail-central.com> wrote:
>> On Dec 17, 2013, at 5:52 AM, anne mcknight wrote:
>> 
>>> Keep your eyes peeled for new releases (you can sign up for the mailing list via news at expandeditions.com), and if there are projects you'd like to see in print, or ones you'd like to do yourself, please get in touch.
>> 
>> Looks great, Anne!
>> 
>> One request: PDF. It's the industry standard, and best for those of us who plan to never buy a Kindle.
>> 
>> M.
>> 
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>> 
>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> ––––––––––––––––––––––––––
>> Jordan A. Yamaji Smith, Ph.D. 
>> Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature
>> Department of Comparative World Literature & Classics
>> California State University, Long Beach
>> 1250 Bellflower Blvd. 
>> Long Beach, CA 90840
>> 
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