By publisizing the vulnerabilities of the kindle you are screwing over thousands of writers. Adding a disclaimer at the end of the post does not really clear you morally. I am truly dissapointed that techcrunch would do such a thing. This disgusts me.

Thanks Captain Obvious.

Ronist: So the first person who realized you could put illegal music on the iPod screwed over thousands of artists? It was inevitable, not that persons fault. Blaming Michael here is pointless.

And if Michael did not write about this, do you honestly think that no one else will figure out these functionalities? Don’t be absurd and keep your disgust to yourself

The best bet is to convert the PDFs to .mobi files, which you can do with the mobipocket software. That way you get all of the lovely formatting still.

Anyway, everyone already knew you could do this. The kindle isn’t meant for people who pirate ebooks anyway… they’ll use the cheaper Sony Reader, or a blackberry, or a palm, or pocket pc, or whatever.

is there a good directory for the legal books?

I don’t think the Kindle is going to be any more significant in the marketplace than any other nearly-dedicated ebook reader. Devices like the iPhone can do a respectable job of displaying books, but also provide the owner with lots of other functionality when they aren’t reading a book.

WOW! Great find Michael!
No Payperpost rant today? And yes…I can read ripped book on my Windows Mobile device as well …..or just print them and kill a few trees

Hi Mike, Did I miss a post - the last post I read was when you were trying out the kindle when you were having a few drinks or something and you really did not sound that positive.You are now calling it a breakthrough device. What happened to make you change your mind?

Arr, matey, ARR!

http://www.scribd.com

enough said.

There are some people who will never steal some people who will never buy, some people will never do anything wrong some people dont know what is wrong, how ever god made every one equal and customers require service and hense have to be provided with products.

http://tekno-world.blogspot.com

you can also pirate books by photocopying them.

Or by writing out all the words by hand into a blank notebook or large piece of paper.

OMG I NOW ADVOCATE PIRACY!!!11111

Adam - I’ve now had a kindle for a few days. It’s a decent way to read a book, but the design is flawed and ugly (two different things), and the browsing experience is just stupid. I do like the device, though. I’ll be taking it on an upcoming trip to Europe and we’ll see how it goes.

My biggest gripe is the fact that I constantly hit the page forward or back keys by accident. And if you forget to turn the wireless functionality off the battery doesn’t last very long.

@12 LOL

Or you could dictate the book to a parrot and let it loose in a colony of parrots and in turn send them to all your friends.

PDA,s and Phones are too small to give you a good-reading experience.

Kindle, can do a better job, and being able to read pirated ebooks can be a boost for Kindle sales.

Just like PS2, that occupied the market due to the huge availability of pirated games, and iPod/MP3 players surfed the wave of pirate content, piracy can be a powerful boost for Kindle

@Ed: Project Gutenberg is a great place to get free, out-of-copyright books:
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

@ 14

That is assuming that a parrot can train other parrots to talk - a ridiculous assumption IMHO. That and everything else.

The internet is about the free exchange of other people’s work - didn’t you get the memo?

..the Kindle looks like a piece of junk. i cant believe they spend million$ on design research and came up with this.

now the Sony reader that is one slick device. only problem is it’s a one-trick pony. who needs to carry around another useless ‘high maintenance’ gadget that you have to handle with kid gloves.

what i’d like to see is something with the form factor of the Sony reader, same crisp resolution but add wifi and handwriting recognition. Now that would be a killer device!

I always felt that the same people who might not feel bad about pirating films and music, would find their conscience pricking if they did the same to a book.

Somehow books hold a higher moral value for most of us, I feel.

Mike - thanks for the clarification. So I guess I now have to decide whether I want the pleasing design aesthetic of a Sony or the Wifi/Web functionality of the Kindle. Enjoy your trip to Europe.

Adam - or wait until a better device comes out.

@18

Although a bit expensive, there already exists a reader with wifi and a touch screen: the iliad (http://www.irextechnologies.com/products/iliad). It even supports pdf besides mobipocket.

LOL, you convinced me to buy it with this article. I didnt know they had books on bittorrent

Ripping CDs you’ve purchased and putting them on your iPod is still legal, Mike.

Kindle+scribd could’ve been a good combo, disregarding any possiblity of copyright suits ofcourse.

I still think Kindle is a useless and ugly thing Seriously, books can be read on an PDA, smartphone, iPhone and laptop. Music players are making way for these multifuntional devices, why does anyone need another single-function device? It reminds me of those “email machines” that some people give to their grandparents.

@14

OR you could read the book out loud, record it, then use speech-to-text technology to convert the audio into a text file and then burn it to hundreds of CDs and strap them all to carrier pigeons, sending them all over the world! This plan is both diabolical, ingenious and diabolically ingenious!11

Just a reminder — the vast amount of available material (eg at http://www.gutenberg.org) to which this article applies can quite legitimately be used on the Kindle.

The use of other material (eg, unauthorised Bittorrent downloads) is not stealing. It may well be a breach of (c), and under some of the newer regulations (in the US and UK, for instance) may be even be declared criminal. It may be immoral. It may be uncool. It may starve writers (or more likely force a publisher to skip a lunch). But it is not stealing.

(c) is already a legal minefield. Let’s not go sticking false flags in the ground.

–
Chris

“the vast majority of content on most iPods comes from home-ripped CDs or was obtained in violation of copyright laws”

Well come on, which is it? The casual reader will interpret that sentence as “most iPods are stuffed with pirated content”.

I don’t know how much pirated music ends up on iPods (and neither do you), but the bulk of the content on my own iPod is ripped from CDs I own. iPods are so mainstream now, an awful lot of iPod owners wouldn’t know how to start a Bittorrent client. It’s likely they burn CDs for each other, but that’s a small scale thing comparable to home taping.

What idiot thinks Kindle doesn’t support ebook standards?

Mobipocket and Kindle support OPS 1.0, the official ebook standard since 2000. It will also support OPS 2.0, the official ebook standard since 2007. OPS 1.0 is a standard for files to be converted into ebooks using Dublin Metacore data, an XML schema, and so forth.

It also supports conversion from Word, RTF, Simple HTML, and PDF (beta) but you’re saying Amazon should sell devices that it’s not easy to convert things into?

That worked so well for Sony…

This post is really biased from the first sentence to the last. Next, are you going to blame gun manufacturers for homicides? What about DVD player manufacturers for pirated movies and how about blaming Windows for being able to download pirated MP3s. This post is full of generalizations and I was truly shocked that it came from Tech Crunch. That is truly the most useless way to review a product.

Nice clarification John H. If you read this blog, your likely to conclude the world is filled with people stealing all music, movies, and now books and putting it on ipods and now kindles. I don’t think so. And Techcrunch doesn’t have any data to prove otherwise.

How about we assume that most people are honest and will pay for the content they value? It is not so novel an idea.

I am Kindle owner, and happen to like it a lot. It’s not perfect, but neither was the first generation ipod. The design could be better, but overall I actually like it better than the book experience since I can make the fonts bigger and carry around an assortment of books.

I don’t necessarily like Kindle’s current design, but to those who say that multi-function devices such as Windows Mobile, iPhone, etc. are the way to go, I think they are missing the most obvious feature: Size. Yes size does matter.

As someone who reads a fair bit on mobile devices, I can tell you that reading on a larger screen provides a lot more possibilities. A 320 by 240 screen just cant do a lot more than a fiction. If you want to read memos, docs with diagrams, tables, charts, illustrations, math, formatted bullet points and so on, large screen helps a lot. Now a small laptop isn’t going to do it. it can be bulkier and more power hungry and more expensive.

The free availability of content is a good thing, since you wont think the device is locked. If it was you would be complaining that it is a closed world. So what should a designer so: doomed either way!

The current Kindle’s issues are more to do with ergonomics and business model. Both will be improved by massive customer feedback as we see already such as requests to be able to share books, button layout, keyboard size, etc. If the feedback is dealt with, next version may prove to be the killer device, so my bet is on waiting.

Actually, it is correct that the Kindle does NOT support current standards. While Mobipocket is based on OEB, it doesn’t comply with this standard.
The new standard is based on XHTML+CSS. What we usually call .epub is actually OPS, a standard for the structure of the text, and OCF, a standard for the container.
Check the IDPF website for some extra information: http://www.idpf.org/

This new standard should make everything much better for both the publishers and the users. For the publishers, it means that instead of having to deal with multiple file formats, they’ll juste have to generate a single epub file. For the users, epub is a much more capable format than Mobipocket currently is, because it provides much more advanced possibilities, like font embedding (do you really want all your books to look the same ?), stylesheets and advanced layout options (should be very useful for newspapers).

What all those portable readers currently lack, is a good support for typesetting rules. The lack of hyphenation for example, means that you’ll get a lot of white space between 2 words when you ask for a larger font. If the words are too far away from each other, your brain won’t actually understand the whole sentence as easily. Lack of proper typesetting is a real issue, most people won’t realize what’s missing, but they won’t enjoy or understand the book like they should.

Finally: unlike music, there’s thousands of e-books available for free. Not only public domain books, there’s also more and more Creative Commons books available (Doctorow, Stross, Watts… for those of you who enjoy SF).

This “news” is an obvious consequence of the Kindle’s format support which has been known from the start.

To portray this as some sort of vulnerability or fault on Amazon’s part is ridiculous. For one thing, unlike with recorded music, there is a huge library of classic novels and other writing in the public domain. Why shouldn’t the Kindle be able to read a Project Gutenberg .txt file of Jane Eyre?

A less obvious point is that the quality of “pirate” ebooks is poor compared to legit versions. If the file has been produced by scanning a book, the pirates, who can’t operate openly, don’t have the same proof-reading resources available to legitimate scanning enterprises. So the accuracy and formatting of the text is poor. As Cory Doctorow has pointed out, the purpose of these texts is for a few nerds to swap them in a strange gift economy; they are not actually readable copies. Consider that MP3 piracy covers mainstream music - whereas “pirate” book scanners are *not* generally scanning mainstream novels (crossover hits like Harry Potter excluded). You won’t find pirate Catherine Cookson or Frederick Forsyth.

You might think that any book with a legit electronic edition would be pirated in short order through breaking copy protection (if any). However, while there are tools to convert .LIT to .txt and so on, they don’t work very well and generally break spacing around hyphens, miss out quotation marks and so on. (The tools may have improved lately - I haven’t tried this in a while; did you convert a book and then actually try reading it all the way through, Mike?).

While the Kindle may be as important as the iPod, I think it’s important not to take the analogy between digital music and ebooks too far.

I would prefer that FictionBook (http://fictionbook.org/index.php/Eng:FictionBook) would get more momentum on the internet. This is THE e-book format in Russia and has a great potential.

There’s this:
How about we assume that most people are honest and will pay for the content they value? It is not so novel an idea.

And there’s this:
The internet is about the free exchange of other people’s work - didn’t you get the memo?

And somewhere in there, the idea that copyright violation does not equal stealing.

There’s a difference between considerate fair use and/or copyleft on the one hand and piracy on the other, but the lines get blurred all over the ‘net. And what angers me are the people who seem to feel entitled to violate copyright. Taking someone’s work, for which they’ve asked for compensation, and not paying them = theft (whether you classify it as such legally or not). And you are not entitled to do so, no matter how easy technology may make it. Advances in auto manufacturing and GPS don’t entitle you to track down your enemy and run him over.

If someone was going to pirate books, the Kindle isn’t going to change their behavior either way - they’d do it with or without it. The Kindle doesn’t enable piracy, it just gives people who pirate books another device to read them on. Which is, in my opinion, hardly worth mentioning.

I agree w/ 37 & 38 - enough said.

So what is the real story here? An ebook reader shows text without doing DRM? Hey that’s great, what a pity it doesn’t show pdf natively.

Why should the device care about DRM stuff? Is that really what you want? I’d much more want to read all this freely available tutorials, ebooks and stuff on a device i paid hundreds of dollars for.

I hope there will be at least one or better more big players on the ebook-reader market that just don’t close anything. why not just build some hardware and let people decide what to do with it? just like with pc’s (nearly). Install linux or any other operating system that fits and that they like most. That whole DRM stuff doesn’t really avoid people from stealing stuff it just hinders people not stealing anything from beeing free in their decision about what to read (or listen when we talk about DRM in music which is nearly the same topic).

What exactly is your point? The fact that people can read pirated content on the kindle, a point that is obvious to the point of inanity? What exactly should be done about it? Why is this a problem any more than the fact that people can use any other media device for using pirated content?

Also, allow me to present my own true (but totally misleading and pointless statement):
The vast majority of money is either earned legitimately or stolen from small children at gunpoint.

As you can see, it’s about as relevant as your statement about iPods.

Pirated files aren’t going to be as rampant on the Kindle as they are on the iPod for a very simple reason. To pirate stuff onto the Kindle, people would first have to buy it.

Mike, I’m sure that all of the book authors out there who make a living as writers will thank you for this post.

Now, let me just lift all of *your* work and make some money off it.

Oh, what’s that you say? Copyright laws?

Pshaw.

I own a sony ebook reader, and it has been very easy to convert my text files for viewing with it.

…. then why would you explain it!

http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

OMFG, like ebook piracy is so bad. You should be so ashamed of yourself.

>> OMFG, like ebook piracy is so bad. You should be so ashamed of yourself.

>>OMFG, like ebook piracy is so bad. You should be so ashamed of yourself.

Glad you find the issue of copyright violation so funny, Chris.

But it’s a serious issue.

Many of us make our living from producing content — photos, words, music.

If we choose to give it away, fine. If we choose to charge for it, that’s our right.

It ain’t yours for the taking. Period.

Hey, here’s a thought. Why don’t you hand over one of your paychecks to me? Yeah, that’ll work.

Sound good?

Didn’t think so.

But that’s essentially what you are doing when you steal copyrighted work.

Frank: There is an open reader already, the iLiad from iRex. All of these devices are actually running Linux 2.4.

On the iLiad, you can ask for shell access to your device and then pretty much do whatever you want with it. I’m still working on a GTK application for it that enable the download of e-books and RSS feeds from my website using this device WiFi connection.

No big newspapers or recent books like on the Kindle, but anyone with an iLiad will be able to read thousands of public domain and CC books + any RSS feed for free.