1984...meet DRM. Source: jbonnain on Flickr. License: CC BY 2.0.

The New York Times reports that Amazon is offering free-of-charge replacement copies of the deleted George Orwell e-books Animal Farm and 1984. Those who do not wish to replace their e-books may get $30 or an Amazon gift certificate instead.

Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, apologized to customers for the deletions in July. And late Thursday, the company tried to put the incident behind it, offering to deliver new copies of “1984” and “Animal Farm” at no charge to affected customers.

Amazon said in an e-mail message to those customers that if they chose to have their digital copies restored, they would be able to see any digital annotations they had made. Those who do not want the books are eligible for an Amazon gift certificate or a check for $30, the company said.

The message included Mr. Bezos’s mea culpa from July. “This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of ‘1984’ and other novels on Kindle,” Mr. Bezos said. He went on to describe Amazon’s actions as “stupid, thoughtless and painfully out of line with our principles.”

It’s good to see Amazon admitting that they made a huge mistake here, and I applaud them for not making up excuses instead. Still, this highlights a huge problem with DRM’d e-books and e-book readers like the Kindle. Whether Amazon will pull a similar stunt in the future is uncertain, although the backlash from this makes it unlikely. However, it is important to remember that this could still be used for more nefarious purposes, such as oppressive governments coaxing Amazon into removing e-books that the government considers a threat to their well-being.

• The New York Times (cookies required)
• Slashdot

Textbooks. Source: "just the ones i'm getting rid of" by Plutor on Flickr. License: CC BY 2.0.

AOL Money & Finance reports that Flat World Knowledge, a textbook publishing company that publishes college textbooks under a semi-free license, will reach over 40,000 students at over 400 universities in the fall.

The increased adoption of Flat World’s free and low-cost open source textbooks follows two semesters of successful in-classroom trials. During Spring 2009 trials, Flat World textbooks were shown to reduce average textbook costs to only $18 per student per class, an 82 percent cost reduction compared to traditional printed textbooks averaging $100 per student per class.

“We’ll save college students and their families nearly $3 million in textbook expenses this semester,” said Eric Frank, Flat World Knowledge co-founder. “We’re on track to expand to 50,000 students in Spring 2010 and to 120,000 students in Fall 2010. By the conclusion of 2010, Flat World will have conservatively saved 200,000 students over $15 million.”

While I would prefer a fully free license instead of a semi-free one (the books appear to be licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0), this is still an improvement from the “traditional” model of overpriced physical textbooks that somehow manage to outdate themselves after only one year and digital versions or supplements that lock you in to a specific format or viewer and deny you the right of first sale.

• AOL Money & Finance

"Big Brother....is Watching YOU!" by Chaotic Good01 on Flickr (CC-BY)

David Pogue reports on his blog that Amazon has secretly pulled electronic copies of 1984 and Animal Farm purchased on its Kindle service:

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

According to Amazon, the person who let Amazon sell the copies of the books in question didn’t have the rights to them:

“These books were added to our catalog using our self-service platform by a third-party who did not have the rights to the books,” Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener said in an e-mail. “When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers.”

Herdener said Amazon won’t handle things the same way in the future. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances.”

It’s understandable for Amazon to be confused as to who holds what rights on these books; most of Orwell’s books are in the public domain in some countries — Australia is one example — but not, for instance, in the US or the UK. Even so, this incident only makes plain, for those who didn’t already know, the pitfalls of investing in closed systems like the Kindle Store and iTunes; there, not only do you have no rights to what you have purchased, but you may have no choice to unpurchase something, should they deem it necessary or desirable.

• New York Times blog entry
• CNet reporting on statement from Amazon

last book i've read - Credit: Ranoush on Flickr (CC BY-SA)

A BYU graduate study conducted a study that suggests that releasing gratis ebooks increases sales.

On March 4 of this year, Random House announced that it would release five books for free through its science fiction portal, all of which came in downloadable PDF files (among other formats). Hilton recorded the before and after book sales and found that “one of the five books has had zero sales in 2009. So no sales before or after the free version. But the other four books all saw significant sales increases after the free versions were released. In total, combined sales of the five books were up 11%. Together they sold 4,633 copies the 8 weeks prior to being released free and 5,155 copies the eight weeks after being released.”

If you read the article, you will notice that it is very good at pointing out the flaws in a study like this.  The real problem is that this is a promotion of sorts.  If you were to release all the books for free, would you see an increase in physical book sales?  I’d like to think so, but maybe we’ll never know.

• Bloggasm
• Boing Boing

Textbooks. Source: "The reason I don't sleep at night..." by Amanda Munoz on Flickr. License: CC-BY 2.0.

Ars Technica reports that the state of California has started a project to write free digital textbooks for the state’s public schools. The project is focusing on high school math and science courses.

Schwarzenegger has tasked California Secretary of Education Glen Thomas with making sure that the new textbooks are ready for deployment in fall 2009. Thomas will be collaborating with the State Superintendent of Public Instruction and the president of the State Board of Education.

Public education is costly in California and accounts for roughly 40 percent of the state government’s annual budget. The state’s current financial woes have forced Schwarzenegger to search for ways to cut some of the fat out of school spending.

“As California’s budget crisis continues we must find such innovative ways to save money and improve services,” said Governor Schwarzenegger in a statement. “California was built on innovation and I’m proud of our state’s continued leadership in developing education technology. This first-in-the-nation initiative will reduce education costs, help encourage collaboration among school districts and help ensure every California student has access to a world-class education.”

This is great news, however it is worth noting that the article points out a number of roadblocks in California’s school system with regard to textbooks. Hopefully these can be overcome, although that will be a huge battle. Even so, education, whether K-12 or higher, desperately needs free (libre) resources, and it’s good to hear that California is stepping up and starting this initiative.

• Ars Technica
• Slashdot

REMIX - Credit: bloomsburyacademic.com

Lawrence Lessig’s REMIX is now under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license.

The Bloomsbury Academic Press version of REMIX is now Creative Commons licensed. You can download the book on the Bloomsbury Academic page.

Sigh…I’m not sure media will ever experience the freedom that software has.

• Lessig

books in a stack - Credit: austinevan on Flickr (CC BY)

AfterDawn.com reports that a Finnish book rental service called “Bookabooka” is being threatened by copyright organization TTVK. TTVK calls the site the “Pirate Bay for textbooks.”

Bookabooka doesn’t host any e-books on its site, but instead allows students to rent their textbooks to their peers. Renting is conducted via traditional “snailmail” (i.e. postal service) and it is mandatory that the textbooks are originals (not xeroxed copies). Bookabooka acts only as an intermediate, connecting the students together and doesn’t handle the shipping or returns of the textbooks.

Despite these “small” differences between TPB and Bookabooka, The Finnish book publishers’ association (Suomen Kustannusyhdistys) is convinced that Bookabooka is breaking the copyright legislation and threatening their business. Annual school textbook sales in Finland were worth more than €100M in year 2007.

This is just outrageous. I don’t believe this is even within the scope of copyright law. Is this really any different than what Craigslist allows people to do? The article says that Bookabooka is not responding to the threats. Good for them. We need more services like this, not less.

• AfterDawn.com
• Slashdot

The MobileRead forums have been sent a DMCA takedown notice for linking to a Python script that allows Kindle owners to purchase e-books on their Kindles from stores other than Amazon’s own store.

As some of you may already know, this week we received a DMCA take-down notice from Amazon requesting the removal of the tool kindlepid.py and instructions associated with it. Although we never hosted this tool (contrary to their claim), nor believe that this tool is used to remove technological measures (contrary to their claim), we decided, due to the vagueness of the DMCA law and our intention to remain in good relation with Amazon, to voluntarily follow their request and remove links and detailed instructions related to it.

A quick backgrounder: kindlepid.py is a small Python script allowing you to derive a Mobipocket-compatible personal identifier (PID) for your Kindle reader. This PID in itself has nothing at all to do with reading any copyrighted content. It is only used to make legitimate e-book purchases at stores other than Amazon’s.

We believe in the freedom of speech and we encourage you to continue expressing your views and thoughts on tools like kindlepid.py. We only ask you not to provide any how-to instructions, source codes and/or links for obtaining kindlepid.py.

I have to wonder if Amazon suffers from being so big that its departments don’t talk with each other. How can their music division get the concept correctly while the e-book division can mess it up so badly? Make no mistake, Amazon’s Kindle Store is the iTunes Store of e-books, and Amazon is just as overzealous and controlling as Apple when it comes to their products, even after the point of purchase. Indeed, Amazon is worse: at least you can play MP3s on an iPod. Try reading a PDF on your Kindle without paying your “reading right” to Amazon first.

• MobileRead forums
• Slashdot

The New York Times’ Bits Blog reports that Amazon is going to allow publishers to disable the controversial text-to-speech function on the Kindle.

Amazon announced today that it will let publishers decide whether they want the new Kindle e-book device to read their books aloud.

Amazon maintains that the feature is legal and that it would in fact increase the market for audio books.

But it said, “We strongly believe many rights holders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver’s seat.”

If Amazon is so confident that the feature is legal, then why bend over for the interests of book publishers? Why not contest them, challenging them to test their theory of an “audio right” in court? Are there other e-book stores that Amazon is afraid the publishers will sell at instead? I certainly don’t know of any.

• NYTimes.com Bits Blog [Print version]
• Slashdot

Free - Credit: alicepopkorn on Flickr (CC BY)

January 1st was Public Domain Day.  Many works from authors who have died a long time ago have just entered the public domain.

Australian politician (and sheep breeder) James Guthrie (“A world history of sheep and wool”)
American film composer Edward H. Plumb (“Bambi” and many other Disney films)
American hymnist George Bennard (“The Old Rugged Cross”)
British painter and illustrator Lucy Kemp-Welch (the original edition of “Black Beauty”)
American screenwriter Jack Henley (“Bonzo Goes to College”)
American writer J. P. McEvoy (“Dixie Dugan”)
American author Betty MacDonald (“Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle”)
British poet Robert Service (“The Cremation of Sam McGee”, etc.)
English poet Alfred Noyes (“The Highwayman”)
English music scholar Percy Scholes (“The Oxford Companion to Music”)
American artist and author Marjorie Flack (“The Story About Ping”)
American writer Johnston McCulley (creator of “Zorro”)
British aircraft manufacturer Alliott Verdon Roe (as in Avro, as in the Arrow)
Serbian geophysicist Milutin Milanković (early proponent of ice ages)
British author and translator Lionel Giles (translator of the most widely-published English edition of Sun-Tzu’s “Art of War”)
Romanian-British rabbi and scholar Shulem Moshkovitz (the Shotzer Rebbe)
American financial analyst John Moody (of Wall Street fame)

…

Danish bacteriologist Hans Christian Gram (of Gram staining fame)
British-Canadian author, conservationist, and literary fraud Archie Belaney (Grey Owl)
Latvian-born ethnologist and musicologist Abraham Zevi Idelsohn (to whom the lyrics to “Hava Nagila” are attributed)
American cartoonist E. C. Segar (creator of “Popeye”)
American illustrator Johnny Gruelle (creator of “Raggedy Ann”)
American lawyer Clarence Darrow (of “Scopes Monkey Trial” fame)
American songwriter James Thornton (“When You Were Sweet Sixteen”, written in 1898)
Japanese martial artist Kano Jigoro (founder of judo)
American industrialist Harvey Samuel Firestone (of tire fame)

Sorry that this is late and that there has been no activity lately.  Remember, all the posters here are currently students, so when break rolls around, a lot of us lose touch with our computers.

• publicdomain