The Politics of "Free" Books in the Age of the Kindle

Kindle 2 Links and Shortcuts: The Politics of "Free" Books in the Age of the Kindle

The following links, along with the original sentences in which they are provided, are from the above-referenced chapter of The Complete User's Guide to the Amazing Amazon Kindle 2, which is available in both Kindle and paperback editions from Amazon.com. This reference material is not intended in any way to replace the text of this book, but instead is meant to make it more convenient for readers who have purchased either the Kindle or paperback edition to follow along and access the linked pages from a conventional computer. All material here is protected by copyright held by Stephen Windwalker and Kindle Nation Daily.

• it is no longer protected by copyright due to its publication date, and therefore in the "public domain,"
• it has been explicitly released to the public domain through a Creative Commons license or some similar device, or
• its price has been set at free or zero either temporarily or permanently by its author, publisher, or retailer in order to make it more widely available, as a promotional strategy for itself or other works, as a "loss leader," or in order to generate ancillary revenue with an alternative model in which the content drives traffic, affiliate fees, or advertising revenue.
• The Long Tail author Chris Anderson has been a leading herald of a downward price spiral toward free content, most recently in his book Free: The Future of a Radical Price
• Author Malcolm Gladwell has offered an uneven critique of the free content approach in his New Yorker review of Anderson's book at http://bit.ly/Gladwell-on-Free.
• The much-ballyhooed and often confused July 2009 "the Kindle ate my homework" controversy over Amazon's removal of two copyright-violating George Orwell novels from customers' Kindles put a spotlight on the our worst fears about DRM.
• To his credit, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos offered an exemplary apology for the company's actions.
• As I have written elsewhere, I believe it is likely that Amazon will eventually follow in the footsteps of Apple, iTunes, and the iPod with respect to DRM by loosening DRM restrictions on Kindle editions in the future, perhaps at a pricing premium.
  
• But such predictions from me fall far short of a guarantee, and as technology blogger Mike Elgan pointed out in an interview with Len Edgerly on The Kindle Chronicles 53, DRM is very much in Amazon's business interest now in exactly the same way it was, at first, in Apple's interest, because "the biggest buyers of books actually invest their time and money into a format which is Amazon's format:"
• Meanwhile, for an excellent introduction to DRM issues as they relate to ebooks, I strongly recommend DRM: A TeleRead Primer, posted on December 6, 2008 by Chris Meadows.