Nov 18
Editorial David
amazon, apple, book, download, DRM, e-book, ebook, electronic, file, freedom, iphone, ipod, kindle, market, mobile, mobile phone, mp3, pdf, phone, sharing, store
Electronic Book Readers
With the release of the International Kindle from Amazon, the subject of e-book readers is heating up. This is one of those technologies I want to love, who wouldn’t? You have a low power device that gives you a much more natural, ink on paper, like reading experience than any backlit LCD screen can. Then with Amazon you have an integrated discovery and delivery method for receiving books to your reader, just like Apple did for the MP3 player with iTunes.
Then again, I’ve just compared the Kindle book store to iTunes, perhaps this is where the problems start. We all know that in its early days, iTunes was locked up with DRM to the point of madness, the only way to free your content was to burn everything to audio CD and re-rip to MP3. Of course, things are now better in the digital download music market, with DRM gone and a choice of music stores. Although, both the movie and e-book industries have yet to catch up to the current state of sanity we enjoy with music downloads. I remember many years ago when I experimented with the e-book store for my Palm Pilot. Not only were your e-books tied to your credit card number, but they were tied to your device too. If either changed there wasn’t a clear route for how to get your books back. So when I did inevitably change my device, I lost my books.
With the Kindle, things aren’t quite so restrictive, from what I’ve been able to find out, not having one myself, your books are only tied to your Amazon account. This means that you can transfer to new Kindles, and also to the iPhone application. Unfortunately, Amazon haven’t released an application for other mobile platforms yet. Still though, the Kindle isn’t the only e-book reader out there (there’s also Sony and Bebook readers), but you can’t get your Amazon e-books on any of them. Whereas, the music I buy from any music store on the web can be played on any device I like. So the Amazon e-book system still ties you to the one device, just like iTunes with the iPod, which I submit is a reason not to use iTunes. The same goes for all current e-book stores.
My phone vs the Kindle. Which would you rather carry around?
I think the e-book and movie industries needs to learn from history. All encompassing ecosystems like iTunes work for a while, until the market (i.e. consumers) learn enough about the restrictions that DRM puts on them. Electronic documents already have a standard, PDF, which is so ubiquitous, it would be hard to imagine any other format being used. Yes, PDF’s can be copied without restriction, just like MP3’s. Although, a recent study has shown what many people believed all along, file sharers buy the most music, and I am certain that the same will be true for books and movies when they are available DRM free. Currently, the only way to get DRM free e-books and movies is illegal. Which is a shame for those industries, because by not using DRM free formats they are denying themselves a large and enthusiastic market segment.
Finally, lets look at the devices themselves. Despite the attractive features I mentioned at the beginning of this, it is still another device to carry around and look after. E-book readers are fairly large when compared to the likes of MP3 players and mobile phones. They are also expensive, the cheapest setting you back over £200. Sure, I imagine they’d be nice to have laying around at home. Although, in our busy lives, sometimes the best time to read a few pages of a book is in those strange little pockets time during the day (as David Allen would put it). Is it really worth carrying around something the size of an e-book reader? In these days when convergence seems to be an irresistible force, I find it hard to believe that e-book readers will get a firm foothold when mobile phones can do the same job, with a PDF application providing a free or inexpensive electronic book reading function.
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Sep 9
Personal David
cd-rom, clonecd, DRM, micro, micro sd, miniaturisation, minimalism, mp3, piracy, rip, sdhc
I don’t tend to write too much about my actual life on this blog, although there’s a project I’m working on right now which has had a definite tech dimension.
My project is called Operation Clearance, it is me & my family clearing out our house of all our old unwanted possessions. My aspiration is to own as few items as is practical. I was partly inspired by the 100 item challenge, although I’m not holding myself to a firm number of items. Instead, I’m challenging myself to get all of my possessions into a single Ottoman (not including my clothes, but I’ve already given them an equivalent treatment). If you think I sound crazy, then think about the last time you moved house, now compare that memory to how it’ll be for me when I move, which I am planning to do in the near future. You see, not so crazy now, eh?!
What was the tech aspect of this? I discovered while excavating some of my cupboards a stack of CD-ROMs, mostly games, with a few applications. So here I had a stack of discs I’m unlikely to use, potentially taking up valuable space in my Ottoman, that wasn’t good. So did I simply throw them away, or did I keep them? Y‘know, just in case. Well “just in case” is the enemy of any clear out, so my answer was to cheat!
Squeezing all these discs into Micro SD makes me happy.
I decided I would take an ISO image of all the discs and save them to a Micro SDHC card, then throw the discs away! If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it is possible to create a file, based on any physical drive, which is an exact bit for bit copy. Your computer can then “mount” the file as if it were that same real physical drive. Given that you can currently get Micro SDHC cards with capacities of up to 16GB, you can fit an awful lot of CD images on them. Best of all, the physical size of a Micro SD card compared to even one CD is practically non-existent!
If at this point you’re wanting to ask me why didn’t I try trading in or selling these games, then let me answer you in advance – Firstly, I couldn’t sell them as I’d already dumped the boxes for them last year. Secondly, since I was keeping “back up” copies for myself, I thought it would be of questionable legitimacy to sell them when I still had copies for myself.
The only gotcha with this idea was that all of my games had copy protection, which prevented me using the universal ISO format. Fortunately, help was at had in the form of Slysoft’s CloneCD. They generously offer a twenty one day trial, and I only needed one day to image my discs. So I confess, I didn’t buy it. Although in the future, if I want to re-burn these images (which are proprietary to Slysoft applications 
), I promise you Slysoft, I will buy a lifetime licence!
At this point in the story, I really must launch into a rant. To image these discs, I really shouldn’t have needed to use a specialist application, but I did because of DRM. My story is yet another text book example of how DRM makes life harder for legitimate uses of media, while the real illegitimate copies are being freely traded across the internet. So, thank you very much to all computer game companies, your copy protection measures hampered my legitimate project, while not preventing the “piracy” you impotently sought to defeat.
Deep breath, relax …
Now, if you want to try clearing your shelves, then I really recommend you do as I have. Further to this, many years ago, I MP3 ripped all of my music CD’s, so I’ve been able to throw away those CD’s too. Anything to reduce the number of individual items clogging up your shelves and cupboards. George Carlin wisely said that a house is just a place for our stuff, and every now and then we have to get a bigger house just to fit in even more stuff. So join me in getting rid of all your physical media. In the age of terrabyte hard drives, physical media should be dead if we all had any common sense.
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Sep 7
Editorial David
android, copyright, DRM, iphone, mobile, mp3, music, online, piracy, rights, spotify, streaming, subscription, symbian
The Spotify application and its "home page"
You have no doubt heard about Spotify, in fact given the amount of e-mails I get asking for invites, I’d be amazed if you haven’t. In my opinion, Spotify plays a crucial roll in the world of on-line music distrobution. Before you commit your money to buying a whole album, I believe, you have a right to try before you buy. Much to the chagrin of music companies, illegal file sharing perfectly fits the roll. You get the try the album with no hassle and no money changing hands, and then, as long as you’re honest, when you’ve made your decision, you can choose to delete the album, or go and buy it from a DRM free online music store. To me, doing this, while of questionable legality, was the nearest on-line alternative we had to the headphone booth in your local music store.
However, Spotify came along and took away all the grey area of illegally sampling music. With Spotify you can stream music across the internet and listen to it as much as you like. With adverts if you pay nothing, and without if you pay £10 a month, we’ll return to the premium service below.
That is not to say that Spotify is perfect. When it first started it was more perfect that it is now. Since it’s been going, the record companies have been stamping their ignorant size 12 boots all over it, so that we now have region restriction on some albums, while others have been pulled completely, even though Spotify are constantly adding more and more tracks. To the record labels I say this; the more restrictions you put onto a service like Spotify, which you should be thanking your lucky stars for, the more you will push people back towards illegal file sharing. It’s a simple mathematical matter of convenience. Spotify is actually more convenient than getting music via file sharing. If you prevent people listening via Spotify, they will by simple human nature, opt for the next most convenient option. Sorry, but it’s a fact of life and you can either work with it, or be burned by it. I’m not saying it’s right, but it’s how things are.
Now, lets look at Spotify premium. For some people who would spend hundreds of pounds a year on music, and hate the adverts, then this £10 a month could represent good value. Speaking for myself, I just don’t get that much new music, so £10 a month is an expensive option for me, just to block adverts, which to be honest, aren’t that intrusive (and if I’m saying that, then that means something). So I will stick with Spotify making advertising revenue from my listening, and I think the majority of Spotify users are the same.
Spotify Mobile running on Android
The next generation of Spotify is a version for your mobile phone. As of today, we know that Spotify Mobile is available on the iPhone and Android phones. So hopefully, we will soon see it available on other platforms like Symbian.
I find the prospect of the mobile Spotify being a premium only feature somewhat self-defeating. However you look at it, paying to effectively rent your music, never has been, and never will be, a good deal for the consumer. I don’t see the added value of a mobile application is going to change this. Let’s prove this by contradiction. If you weren’t prepared to pay for Spotify premium on your desktop, but the addition of a mobile app would change your mind, then you are effectively saying you’d be willing to pay £10 a month to have an application on your phone. I find it hard to believe anyone would fall into this category.
Conversely, if Spotify made their mobile application available to everyone, they would be expanding their prospective advertising audience. Advertising revenue must be valuable to them, given that it’s unlikely many users pay for premium. Speculatively, they must only be surviving on advertising revenue, with the addition of some venture capitol.
To conclude, please Spotify, reconsider the mobile application. We all love you, and want to use your service, but £10 a month for no ads and a mobile app is too much. Just mirror your desktop business to the mobile world, and everyone wins.
P.S.
NO, I don’t have any Spotify invites to give you, but I will make a blog post, if and when I do 
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Dec 31
Editorial David
2008, 2009, android, DRM, DRM free, g1, google, green, linux, predictions, windows, xp
Last year, I made a post on my LiveJournal, with my predictions for what the tech world had in store for us through 2008. Given that today is New Year’s Eve, I thought it would be a good time to review my predictions!
Here’s a summary of my list; underlined are the ones I think I got right:
- There will be a successful Linux phone
- Microsoft will extend support for XP
- The bandwidth draught of 2008
- Some computer builders to drop desktop PC’s and focus only on laptops
- Google will make a chat bot which will answer all your search questions
- There will be a Facebook killer
- DRM free music sales will take over DRM music sales
- Wireless chargers will trickle through, at last
- Green computing will become a big issue
- Some TV shows will be available on-line before they are broadcast on TV
So, my predictions were about 40% accurate. 
There was a Linux phone, the G1, based on Google’s “Android” platform. Sure it may be early to call it a success, but it’s had plenty of attention on the tech press.
Microsoft did indeed grant XP a six month stay of execution, by means of extending the “Vista Business downgrade” loop hole.
DRM free music world wide really took off this year. In the UK alone, we now have four major DRM free music stores: Tesco Digital, Play.com, 7digital and Amazon.
Green computing is an issue, particularly with the super efficient “Atom” CPU’s found in netbooks.
I was disappointed about the wireless chargers. We were seeing lots of prototypes and hearing lots of talk during 2007, but come 2008 it all went quiet.
So there we have it, looking back on what actually happened in 2008, it’s been a heck of a roller coaster ride in the tech world. Because the circumstances of the global economy are now so different, and so many unpredictable things before the economy tanked, I am not making any predictions for 2009. I think it’s all too tough to call.
Okay, okay, I will make one call for 2009. I hereby predict that all of the big-name “Web 2.0″ social media sites (such as Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Flickr, etc) will survive the global recession.
–
Lastly, 2008 saw the launch of this, the fourth incarnation of my personal website. I have been pleasanty surprised with the traffic it has received. While still modest, it’s more than I hoped for. So thank you to everyone who stops by to read this, I am grateful, and I hope you’ll stick with me as I find more to write about in the next 12 months.
Sincerely,
David.R.Gilson
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Sep 24
Editorial David
DRM, EA, fail, Spore
According to an article on The Register, EA has climbed down significantly on it’s DRM stance with Spore.
However, take a look at this quote from a post on the Spore forums.
SecuROM as been discussed and discussed so much and it causes arguments in threads. If you want to talk about DRM SecuROM then please use another fansite forum. If there is any change you will be able to read it on the official Spore site.
Please do not continue to post theses thread or you account may be at risk of banning which in some cases would mean you would need to buy a new copy to play Spore.
They’re taking flak for a DRM scheme that effectively made people rent a game instead of owning it. They then threaten to take the game away from people who want to talk about how displeased they are about said DRM.
Yeah, really smart move. I am sure that move will generate all the good will they deserve.
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