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The Right to Free Technology?
Dyrwen66
the other's insaneDenver CORegistered User regular
the other's insaneDenver CORegistered User regular
I recently added a book to my wishlist and ended up clicking on the Kindle version first. I said aloud, jokingly "I want the paperback, not a $200 investment in reading" and went to add the paperback version. This led me to think though: Shouldn't the Kindle be cheaper if you want to revolutionize the reading experience?*
I understand it's expensive to make and maintain, of course, but it's a bit like: How would you teach people to write without giving them a pen for free? If everyone had a Kindle, then the idea of buying a book on the go, or choosing an electronic version over a physical one wouldn't seem difficult or strange. It would be the first place to go, since the Kindle would become your primary mode of consuming literature.*
Right now there is a price point problem. People either can't afford it, don't want to invest into something that will change, or something that isn't going to last. To approach the business of reading, I think you have to work at it from a different angle. People already know how to read, so they want to buy books. People are used to having the thing that is "reading" already in their minds and all they want is to pick up a book and do it. The Kindle puts a step between readers because they have to use a device to do something they already know how to do: read.*
By removing the device's detrimental elements and forcing it into the one area where most people have problems with it, you force the Kindle into the reality of being the place to go for reading to be done. Sure they can still buy paperback version if need be, but ideally, the Kindle will become what iPods became for music. A cheap and effective way to consume entertainment on the go. In the past you had to sit in a car, or god forbid, at home, to listen to music, but now you can participate in the enjoyment of music everywhere.*
You can already do that with books, but to do that with the Kindle, I think the ease of which people enter into the electronic book reading agreement needs to be simpler and cheaper, so that people can't find a good reason not to use the Kindle to read.
I understand the idea of free Kindles is a bit insane, but the business of book buying online seems like a better market once everyone has ways to buy books off Amazon in a quick and easily digestible fashion. No more waiting for books to arrive in the mail, or feeling like you have to buy from used sellers to save money; people can simply buy a book and read it immediately, with the same satisfaction as visiting a bookstore.
---
Alternate technological consequences of cheaper hardware:
1 laptop per child's charity organization: http://laptop.org
$100 Laptop: MIT's cheap laptop idea
There are similar initiatives to make laptops and netbooks cheaper around the world so that people can always have access to the internet or at least information software.
Internet as a human right: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10374831-2.html
Making technology as accessible as possible will arguably make people capable of learning from anywhere in the world, as well as improving communications throughout the world between families and people in general.
I'm curious as to the future implications of products and ideas like this, since obviously television never caught on as something necessarily needed for survival in society. It was always a safety first kind of option with a relationship with the news channels when people still used bunny eared tvs. Outside of news and entertainment though, TV has always simply been a distraction for people to use, mostly there for entertainment only. I suppose there are documentary-like channels and public service areas, but since they're owned by certain types of companies, they aren't made for free.
The internet isn't free to maintain, nor are the sites located on it, but cable survives off advertisements having commercials everywhere and people paying a monthly fee. Arguably people are still paying for the access rights to cable lines with modern broadband on the internet and the sites online survive via adverts on the side in lieu of forced commercials like on TV. To make it accessible for “free” seems like more of a government mandated area, in the case of Finland, where access is relatively cheap, so it might as well be made free up to a point, and for those who want better access, they can pay for it. Much like healthcare; if you want free service, wait in line and get it; if you want service right away, you end up paying for it out of pocket.
Will we see free internet in our time or will companies continue to be able to dole portions of it out for a modest fee? Will we come to use electronic reading materials for free, while paying for the software that will go on it? Will we manage to get access to a computer in the same way we have access to a refrigerator when we rent an apartment? Perhaps not the best analogy there, but the principle is that you get hardware because it's necessary for survival with limited open source abilities, but outside of that you end up paying out of pocket.
(I wrote the top half first as a kind of open letter to Amazon, then thought the implications were a bit broad, hence the discussion into the outcomes of such a system, however impractical in a capitalist society like ours. Arguably, people are still getting paid, but some are giving up their market shares.)
I understand it's expensive to make and maintain, of course, but it's a bit like: How would you teach people to write without giving them a pen for free? If everyone had a Kindle, then the idea of buying a book on the go, or choosing an electronic version over a physical one wouldn't seem difficult or strange. It would be the first place to go, since the Kindle would become your primary mode of consuming literature.*
Right now there is a price point problem. People either can't afford it, don't want to invest into something that will change, or something that isn't going to last. To approach the business of reading, I think you have to work at it from a different angle. People already know how to read, so they want to buy books. People are used to having the thing that is "reading" already in their minds and all they want is to pick up a book and do it. The Kindle puts a step between readers because they have to use a device to do something they already know how to do: read.*
By removing the device's detrimental elements and forcing it into the one area where most people have problems with it, you force the Kindle into the reality of being the place to go for reading to be done. Sure they can still buy paperback version if need be, but ideally, the Kindle will become what iPods became for music. A cheap and effective way to consume entertainment on the go. In the past you had to sit in a car, or god forbid, at home, to listen to music, but now you can participate in the enjoyment of music everywhere.*
You can already do that with books, but to do that with the Kindle, I think the ease of which people enter into the electronic book reading agreement needs to be simpler and cheaper, so that people can't find a good reason not to use the Kindle to read.
I understand the idea of free Kindles is a bit insane, but the business of book buying online seems like a better market once everyone has ways to buy books off Amazon in a quick and easily digestible fashion. No more waiting for books to arrive in the mail, or feeling like you have to buy from used sellers to save money; people can simply buy a book and read it immediately, with the same satisfaction as visiting a bookstore.
---
Alternate technological consequences of cheaper hardware:
1 laptop per child's charity organization: http://laptop.org
$100 Laptop: MIT's cheap laptop idea
There are similar initiatives to make laptops and netbooks cheaper around the world so that people can always have access to the internet or at least information software.
Internet as a human right: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10374831-2.html
Making technology as accessible as possible will arguably make people capable of learning from anywhere in the world, as well as improving communications throughout the world between families and people in general.
I'm curious as to the future implications of products and ideas like this, since obviously television never caught on as something necessarily needed for survival in society. It was always a safety first kind of option with a relationship with the news channels when people still used bunny eared tvs. Outside of news and entertainment though, TV has always simply been a distraction for people to use, mostly there for entertainment only. I suppose there are documentary-like channels and public service areas, but since they're owned by certain types of companies, they aren't made for free.
The internet isn't free to maintain, nor are the sites located on it, but cable survives off advertisements having commercials everywhere and people paying a monthly fee. Arguably people are still paying for the access rights to cable lines with modern broadband on the internet and the sites online survive via adverts on the side in lieu of forced commercials like on TV. To make it accessible for “free” seems like more of a government mandated area, in the case of Finland, where access is relatively cheap, so it might as well be made free up to a point, and for those who want better access, they can pay for it. Much like healthcare; if you want free service, wait in line and get it; if you want service right away, you end up paying for it out of pocket.
Will we see free internet in our time or will companies continue to be able to dole portions of it out for a modest fee? Will we come to use electronic reading materials for free, while paying for the software that will go on it? Will we manage to get access to a computer in the same way we have access to a refrigerator when we rent an apartment? Perhaps not the best analogy there, but the principle is that you get hardware because it's necessary for survival with limited open source abilities, but outside of that you end up paying out of pocket.
(I wrote the top half first as a kind of open letter to Amazon, then thought the implications were a bit broad, hence the discussion into the outcomes of such a system, however impractical in a capitalist society like ours. Arguably, people are still getting paid, but some are giving up their market shares.)
Just an ancient PA person who doesn't leave the house much.
Dyrwen66 on
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Thats... kind of a big deal.
I don't doubt that the cost of developing shit like eReaders is huge, but it seems like the distribution end would end up making you the money in the long term. Sure you make a huge chunk making people buy the initial hardware, but you would figure that every purchase made through the eReader is high on the profit margin too, since there's no physical copy that takes up space that has to be paid for. Arguably the cost of a $8 paperback, with all the warehouse space, printing costs, and development of paying the author/ editor/ agent, etc would mean that there isn't much profit to be made unless many people can buy your affordable book. If more books were electronic in nature and people had a cheap and effective way to read them on hand, more people would use it than do now, and it would become as profitable as the physical-book industry, which is all I'm really saying here.
So yeah, the price is high to make hardware, but is that cost negligible if there was enough market share for electronic software digitally distributed?
Otherwise... I don't think so
The music and Ipod comparison doesn't apply since having you're whole music collection available on the go is extremely convenient. You can mix and match music as you wish and since songs are 3-5 minutes long you can go through multiple while driving or working out, not to mention that music can be paired with most activities. The same thing doesn't apply to reading as in general you read a single book until you complete it which takes hours and you can't pair reading with most other activities which means that carrying a single book is just as good as carrying the Kindle.
I also don't think your idea works from a financial perspective. If the Kindle costs $200 and Amazon were to give it away for free then they need to somehow recoup at least $200. Presumably this would be through people buying books, but in my experience the average person doesn't read that much to begin with and I don't think the price of books is the reason why. Anyway, while I don't have the numbers if we say Amazon makes $1 per book you would need each free Kindle user to purchase 200 books that they wouldn't have otherwise purchased to makeup the loss. You can put in your own numbers if you feel $1 is to low, but it just seems unlikely to me that having a Kindle would cause people to buy the vast number of books needed to recoup the initial loss.
Because they can.
Right now e-readers are aimed squarely at the early adopter demographic. The only real barrier to that demographic is interest level, since they have the income to easily afford $200 for a gadget and $X each for e-books to read on it.
Eventually, as with most technology that doesn't fail, the hardware cost will decrease in order to reach more casual demographics, thus increasing the adoption rate, and so on.
That's a completely different issue than allowing people in developing countries increased internet access.
I wouldn't recommend it.
Definitely agree with you on the luxury item point. There are plenty of technologies out today that manage that kind of profitability because people are willing to pay for them outright. In the same way that Alienware still makes money off two thousand dollar computers even though some people can make a comparable computer for 800$. Ultimately we'll probably just have to wait for ereaders to drop in price after enough people have them, but then again that might not happen anytime soon since we're still in the "find out what electronic device works best for reading" phase of technology.
and the iPad is gonna eat a lot of kindle sales.
Well, point taken, though my initial post is more taken from the perspective of if I were Amazon. Arguably I would want everyone to *need* a Kindle to survive in this technological world. I would want ebooks to be the primary reading material. How would I go about doing that? By making it nearly free and charging for the books and software that people want to put on it. I know it's not necessary right now, but as a technophile, I naturally want more things to be electronic and less physical, since ultimately I think that will get it out to more people in more ways, though right now hardware is one of the major things slowing things down.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Feel free to add me on whatever network, it's always more fun to play with people than alone
I'm pretty sure you can check out eBooks from a public library.
http://shenews.projo.com/2009/08/sony-reader-bor.html
Or data loss of any kind really. I hate it enough when a book falls apart, gets lost or whatever but this is easy enough to mitigate through simple methods. I wouldn't want to lose a library of material due to a hiccup somewhere in the works. I'm admittedly ignorant of the in's and out's of various eReaders though, so maybe that sort of thing is a negligible risk.
i'd be fine with just making that a government service, like roads.
If I recall, amazon refunded the cost of the book, and only took the book off because they didn't actually have the rights to distribute, not because of censorship.
It wasn't a freedom of expression thing, it was an "Oh shit, we'll lose millions" thing, and they ended up not taking anything from consumers.
I agree that an infrastructure change would be more pertinent to our current economic climate, whether it's practical or not. Things like communication and information should be free, just like access to healthy treatment should be free. The news is important to people and is essentially free to access online, though we all pay per month to connect. Being able to access the world's information, communicate freely with others, and entertain ourselves feels closer to something necessary for civilization's progress. In the same way that a library makes information accessible for free, so should the government provide the means to access a world wide web of information to its citizens so that they can be both as productive as possible and have the means for success placed squarely at the head of the newest technological innovations. And hell, given the fact that the internet is as old as it is, it isn't really that "new" anymore anyway, but it is necessary for modern life. Just as anyone with the money to pay their bills, practically.
Things like electricity do need to be considered, but paying for the production of energy feels more apt than paying for the ability to see and digest information. Seeing as most of the money we're giving to the cable, telephone companies and the like is there simply for customer service and maintenance of their cable lines; as well as marketing and the like.
Yeah, that's how I remember the incident too.
I don't care if it's censorship or not. I don't want anyone, anywhere to be able to decide I no longer own something for whatever reason. Reimbursement doesn't really change anything about it for me.
As long as the kindle has that kind of functionality, I'm not interested in it or any other eReader device that has the same capability.
edit: I guess that was kind of off topic.
I do feel the same kind of enthusiasm for progress through altruistic means. But until we get replicators going, I don't see very much coming our way that's free.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/07/telco-wont-install-fiber-sues-to-keep-city-from-doing-it.ars
Some areas are already working on this. Monticello won their lawsuit, but the telecom companies do usually sue the first town/city to do this in an area. Same thing happened to Hawarden, and they were the first town to try this.
"Excellent idea! I think South Korea should try that!"
I mean, guy, are you serious? Sometimes over half of your foreign aid gets straight out stolen by cruel people who don't give a shit about humanity. So long as there are assholes like that, we need guns and bombs.
As for the OP, rights can not take away the rights of another person; i.e. I have freedom of religion, but I can't force you to buy me a church. To make tech a right gives the government the right to steal from inventors and buisnesses who, deprived of their profit motive, won't have as much incentive to invent or spend on R&D, create far less tech, and then everyone suffers for it.
Margaret Thatcher
Something like 75% of the US population has access to the internet in some fashion in our current system, though naturally 40% lack high speed internet. That means they're essentially stuck with dial-up and technology from nearly a decade ago. Now, our speeds are in decline in the US and the government is actually trying to make it possible for 100 mbps to be accessible throughout the US by 2020, but currently it doesn't look like the legislature will push through with the FCC's plans per se. The idea being that it would cost around 300 billion bucks to push something like that through; now arguably that is government subsidy that is furthering progress of technology throughout the country.
If left to their own devices, sure the cable companies might slowly increase speed like they have over the last decade or more, though considering there's a 50% jump in your monthly bill simply to push your speeds up 5-10 mbps, one can only imagine what some companies would try to charge consumers for the privilege of using their fancy new technology. Companies are not deprived of a profit motive. Hell, Comcast alone jumped their profits from 4% to 8% over 10 years and that's just with normal attempts at business.
If we're going to get down to slowing progress by subsidizing industry, let's look at countries that are trying it. According to the NYT the countries leading the way are usually places like South Korea, Sweden, and Japan. They get internet nearly twice as fast as the US and they get it cheaper. Their industries are given breaks for advancing technology and, imagine this, it actually makes companies try to advance technology. This isn't that hard a concept: Capitalism wants to make a profit. If you let them get free money by advancing current standards of tech, they tend to jump on board (once their lobbying power that's trying to keep things the way they are so that they aren't as heavily regulated).
Essentially: If you subsidize growth in something like technology, oddly enough, it makes for more growth in that sector. It's not as if the rest of the world suddenly gave up on making their internet faster because their governments are the type to heavily regulate industry and subsidize growth. The US does a fine job of pushing the "big scary government" issue that somehow we're going to destroy our huge goddamn tech industry simply by throwing money at it for doing what they're supposed to be doing in the first place-- Advancing technology. Government involvement is certainly the first way to make a step towards universal use and coverage for Americans, and frankly I don't see why not to try it.