Kindle Piracy. We Didn’t Start The Fire
Pirate eye by Cayusa
I’m not a pirate I just consume a lot. If companies make getting media fun and easy, I’ll gladly pay for it. If they make it annoying or impossible (conventional music industry, hulu, US only film streaming) I’ll pirate it. It’s not the product that people pay for, it’s the distribution. Copyright is historically not about the creation of media per se, it’s about copying it (publishers). Anyways, this is a comment I left in response to a Rhythmic Diaspora.
A friend gave me some Kindle books which I ignored for months. Then I had to take a flight and I downloaded them, which was worthwhile.
You can drag and drop any PDF onto a Kindle (I copied the directions to the hotel there for example). The thing is that the formatting sucks, the text doesn’t fit and flow and it’s hard to read. I have to change the display to landscape to see the text properly.
So, it’s not really a replacement for buying books. I don’t think it’s a big deal to read a few PDFs on the Kindle. You still get higher value and a better user experience from buying the books, where I think it’s right for a content provider to compete. Too often they try to slap your hand when offering a mint would do.
I think the Kindle business is good enough that they’re OK with people reading a few PDFs. The pay product is more than just the text, and it’s something that I personally don’t mind paying for. On a long flight, however, I was glad to have a bit more options than I can rightly afford.
Use Calibre and convert PDF to kindle’s native format. Kindling with PDFs is really dull.
The kindle is best suited for .azw (Proprietary Amazon file format similar to EPUB sans the freedom – i.e it has DRM) or .mobi. It can be hacked to run epub but then again why bother when you have calibre. It is not the best device for PDFs :( a real downer if you like me have a lot of academic content in PDF.
It’s a great little device if you read fiction a lot though. Just not the best device for “heavy” content like tables, graphs and images. It handles text exceedingly well.
I’ve bought a few books on amazon but mostly because I could not pirate them!
My reply to your comment:
“Indi – I agree, I’ve thrown a few PDFs on the Kindle and, though it’s quite handy to have them available on there, the experience is pretty poor.
Currently I don’t think that the Kindle is a replacement for many types of books, specifically those with colour and big bold imagery, or books that are just tactile. However, I’ve got to the stage where I’d always rather read a work of fiction on the Kindle than on paper. The convenience and ease I love.
In a few years I’m sure the Kindle will be an all colour all singing thing, that it will develop like the iPod did, and we won’t even consider “real” books as an option”
Much the same as PravNJ, except I don’t read much academic stuff!
I don’t think it replaces a lot of books either.
For the kid we’ve been getting these science books (dinosaurs, human body) and they all have pop-ups and interaction on each page (and no load time). They’ve also started including huge posters. Life size T-Rex jaw!
Those books are awesome and give me more faith in the form.
Where are you getting these ‘pop up’ books from? Looking for some fun ones for my junior monster too.
http://thepiratebay.org/
got to this site and you can download anything with ease…
@Suresh – there’s a good shop in Mount on Galle Road, past Templars Road there’s a Family Bakers and an HSBC. There’s a bookshop next to the bakery, though I forget the name