Hi there,

Saw you'd written about the Amazon / 1984 flap, and I thought you might be
interested in the petition we launched yesterday:

http://defectivebydesign.org/amazon1984

We have over 1400 signatures already, and signers include Lawrence Lessig,
Clay Shirky, Cory Doctorow and other notable authors, librarians, and
scholars.

The petition opens:

“We believe in a way of life based on the free exchange of ideas, in which
books have and will continue to play a central role. Devices like Amazon's
are trying to determine how people will interact with books, but Amazon's
use of DRM to control and monitor users and their books constitutes a clear
threat to the free exchange of ideas.”

Please have a look, and if you support the cause or think it would be
interesting to your readers, a blog post would be great!

Thanks,

-Holmes Wilson
Free Software Foundation

Not to mention as roro80 brings, BB is watching and for dollars/legal means will strip the elastic right out of your socks…seems (saw this w Henry Ford and his tromping other upstart mfg of cars for decades) when you have one man make a proprietary piece of software/ plastic box that will run no other platforms… there's the rub for consumers.

And roro80, if you contact me personally through tmv, I will forward to you the name and addy/ website of reliable and good people out of the northwest who can turn your cassettes into cd's/ and/or mp3s for very little $, esp if some of those are legacy that you really want to keep. One of the nice aspects of copyright, you can duplicate to new media for personal use.

I love that you love books and champion them There are good things to be said about other means of delivering content, much. But books have my heart too roro80.

And ChrisWWW, your insight is right on… now we can wait and see if….

dr.e

Not to mention as roro80 brings, BB is watching and for dollars/legal means will strip the elastic right out of your socks…seems (saw this w Henry Ford and his tromping other upstart mfg of cars for decades) when you have one man make a proprietary piece of software/ plastic box that will run no other platforms… there's the rub for consumers.

And roro80, if you contact me personally through tmv, I will forward to you the name and addy/ website of reliable and good people out of the northwest who can turn your cassettes into cd's/ and/or mp3s for very little $, esp if some of those are legacy that you really want to keep. One of the nice aspects of copyright, you can duplicate to new media for personal use.

I love that you love books.

dr.e

The entire Kindle thing, while being a good idea that's been rumbling around in the heads of all those involved in product design for many years, leaves me a bit…uncomfortable. One of the greatest things about books is that they last if properly cared for. We can go to libraries and find treasures from centuries ago. If we were to die off as a species, aliens could come to our planet in a few hundred years and find a record of almost everything we've done worth recording. Digital media just changes too quickly. If you're not careful, you wake up one morning and find all those pictures you took at your kid's 8th grade graduation no longer are in a viable format that can be read by your computer. I've got a drawer full of cassette tapes and VHS tapes that could be pretty tough to play in 5 years.

And of course, all that's not even touching on the main issue of this article: the Big Brother factor.

Anyway, I like books.