SOPA, cockroaches... and crystal meth.

Well… I think by now we’ve all heard it. An elderly woman who loses her home and car because her grandson is cooking meth in the basement… and asset seizure law doesn’t really give a crap who owns the meth lab… but takes it away from granny so that it is no longer available to be used for criminal acts. It’s sad really… this sort of situation. But it really does behoove someone to know what is going on in their own home… no? It’s not a “chemistry set” and nobody needs that many boxes of Sudafed.

So… SOPA. Provisions of the law will work similarly to asset seizure in a drug raid. But in effect… it would be like seizing someone’s house and property if the cockroaches living in their house were cooking meth between the walls.

When you have what could be considered… an infestation… living in your house. You can do due diligence in calling the Orkin Man… and making sure you’re not leaving food out for the little buggers… but it is nearly impossible to have a home and know what every little creepy crawly inside is doing at any given moment.

And not only is this now an absurd analogy… it’s what SOPA is basically expecting Internet companies to do. Peer into the minds of the little cockroaches that are file sharing illegally produced copies of the Twilight movies… or the latest album by Slipknot… (really a self-punishing act… no…??) or they’ll huff and puff and blow their entire business back into the early 1990’s.

It’s chilling… the idea. I mean… I’m all for corporate responsibility. A CEO should take full responsibility for any crimes committed by their employees on their watch. But this is holding the CEO accountable for crimes committed by their CUSTOMERS. Like suing the gun manufacturer because someone committed murder with a handgun. Might serve them right in some instances... but...

Makes no sense. If I choke someone with a bunch of bananas... you going to go after that Chiquita lady with all the fruit on her head for it?

Anyway… the business model for companies who benefit from intellectual property is outdated. Rather than buck up and change their business model… they’re trying to push our government into protecting it. Not that this has ever happened (ahem) before in the United States as we started to bleed manufacturing jobs… and the family farm slowly turned into a hobby for fans of Jeff Foxworthy. Nope… we’ve never tried to dig in our heels and try to keep progress from happening by kicking and screaming and refusing to let the good old days pass…

*laugh*

I’ll tell you… I really… really dislike online piracy. Oh… I’ve done my share of downloading. But try to find a legal copy of Helena Bøksole’s last album in the United States… and you’d hit a torrent site too. I am NOT flying to freaking Oslo for it. If it’s out of print, hard to find… or I’m looking for something innocuous like a subtitle file… yeah… I download. I’m sure I’ve downloaded something that is copyright protected. Especially when I’m too lazy to hook up my USB turntable to listen to something… so I grab the mp3 off the internet…but I don’t make it A HABIT. I don’t download things because I’m too cheap to buy a legit copy. I'm just too cheap to buy an 8-Trak Player. (Yes... I do still have a few.)

And that’s the thing in a nutshell. If people had been buying legit copies of things all the while… THIS WOULDN’T BE HAPPENING. And why aren’t they? Sure… I like free stuff just like the next person. One of the reasons I buy CDs still is because I like the liner notes. Or in some cases… the sound quality of the CD is just so much better than I could do if I bought a copy on MP3 and then burned it off to listen to in my car. I buy CDs… when I don’t have to… because I like the product… and can afford it.

So entertainment industry… if you want people to buy legit copies of movies and music and whatnot… do what any other business does. Lower costs... increase value… maximize sales. Cut out the middle men… distribution… etc. Break yourself up into small, profitable chunks. Rethink your business strategy. MOVE OFFSHORE. Worked for most other industries no? Software companies? Again… lower costs… increase value… maximize sales. You want to keep me from buying a pirated copy of your operating system? Provide me KICK ASS customer support when I buy a legit copy. Give me VALUE… and I’ll shell out $300. The thing is… I’m NOT going to shell out $300 when the only reason you’re putting out a new version… is because someone in your marketing department decided Windows 7 sounds better than Windows XP. Or Windoze whatever is buggier than a hot July and if you don't put out an updated copy... you'll implode. Stop selling me cosmetic updates… give me REAL value… something so new that you deserve another $300 of my hard earned money… and I won’t even consider borrowing a copy off my neighbor.

Pharmaceuticals? That’s a different story. It’s a case where R&D needs to balance profit and demand… and there is a maze of legislation that makes the situation so sticky… it’s covered in flies. I don’t have an easy answer. If I didn’t take prescription medication daily. I’d die. Lucky for me my drugs cost pennies a pill. But if you were deciding on rent or food vs. going without your drugs… yeah. Well… it’s a lot different from pirating an operating system.

Health care… in America… is broken. If money was provided by the government for R&D into new drug treatments… I think whatever is developed should end up having a shorter patent duration than when the research is fully funded by a for-profit company. And in the same token… more money for drug research then needs to be provided by the government. Will this happen? It’s about as likely as my finding the cure for cancer in my lunchbox. But it’s what needs to happen. Something NEEDS to happen… because it’s a quality of life thing.

Kindling for my Fire...

Since August, I have gone from being a died-in-the-pulp paper book reader to having four e-readers in the house. (OK. One is my husband’s…but I did order it for him so he’d keep his mitts off mine.) I have now found the one gadget that I couldn’t live without. I like my iPhone. It’s a decent phone… and it seamlessly integrates with my Outlook at work and calendar at home taking the place of the Palm I used to have… what’s not to like? No manual syncing… and occasionally I play a few fun games on it. But I’m not a heavy phone user… and not a real big fan of texting either. (It takes too long because I refuse to devolve the English language into a series of lol brb Ihtgpdgm “I hope the grammar police don’t get me” shorthand phrases.)

But my Kindle… has saved me from being too cheap to buy books. Not MONEY cheap… but space cheap. I stopped buying fun books to read when we ran out of bookshelf space. For a long time… I just didn’t read unless it was something trashy I knew I wouldn’t keep after I read it. (That I could buy used… or really cheap at Borders.) I read out of the library… or I borrowed books from other people. Anything to keep from adding to my net total of books.

But I love books… so the next thing I did was join paperbackswap.com… and start getting rid of books I knew wouldn’t be re-read… or that I could probably find in the library from now until doomsday. (Copy of the Iliad… Shakespeare’s Plays…etc.) Then I got rid of any hardcovers I could spare. Then I let go of a few books that I “liked” but didn’t love. And any books I owned specifically for work… I actually brought to work.

But in August I bought the wi-fi Kindle because the price finally seemed reasonable. I am a pretty heavy Amazon user… was an early adopter of Amazon Prime… and now use Amazon’s subscription service to purchase a majority of the household dry-goods in bulk. I like Amazon’s customer service. I like their MP3 downloads better than iTunes. (Stuff on Amazon occasionally goes on sale like a normal CD would.) So I figured… why not? I’ll give this Kindle thing a try….

I was reading the Jim Butcher “Dresden Files” books… and had managed to Paperback Swap the first few… but I really liked them… and kind of wanted to hang on to them and not re-swap them. So…I bought the next book in the series for the Kindle. And then the next… and then was kind of hooked on the whole idea of WANTING to read something… and then being able to in about three minutes.

Really… that’s what it takes from turning your Kindle on… navigating through the Kindle store… making the purchase… to completed download. I timed it.

So… after that… I decided any fiction I was interested in would have to be bought for the Kindle. It started with fiction… then I bought ONE cookbook for the Kindle… then a new Thesaurus… then all of a sudden I was a full-blown Kindle user. And when they announced the Fire… I put it on pre-order. The only thing that disappointed me with the wi-fi Kindle… was that I couldn’t see some books in color. Not necessary for most reading… but it was the one thing that was keeping me from buying a lot of travel books and cookbooks for the Kindle. Plus I kind of wanted a tablet computer anyway. And having something small and portable to watch movies on that was a little bigger than my iPhone seemed like a good idea. So… I figured… $200… what’s not to like?

All around… it’s a nice device. But it’s not perfect at anything it does. I don’t like reading on it for prolonged periods of time…e-ink is a thousand times easier to read. But I DO really like it for anything with color photos…cookbooks… to “how-to” books… travel books…etc. And it’s great for the odd Android game I like to play…light web-surfing…and as a kitchen computer. (I love youtube cooking shows. Being able to prop up a tablet in the kitchen to watch them is pretty handy when trying to follow a recipe.) What I don’t like is Amazon Prime movies.

The movie selection is OK… but maybe I don’t like it because I’m a long-time Netflix user. The Amazon Prime Movie interface just sucks. I don’t like not being able to have some sort of queue or playlist feature. If there IS one… I haven’t found it. So it’s pretty much useless because I can’t surf around on my computer for a list of stuff I’m interested in… I have to browse through their entire catalog of Prime movies to find something I’m interested in watching. I do like the rental feature though… because my corner video store was just killed by the two Redbox machines nearby… and I’m kind of sad to see it go. The local video rental store was such an icon of 1980’s and 1990’s movie watching culture… I refuse to support Redbox. So now… I’ll rent from Amazon.

So the Kindle Fire…It’s not so much an e-reader as it is an “Amazon Content Delivery Device… now with Internet!”

And then I was watching Woot… and came across the Kindle DX (wide format) for $200. Damn. Bigger e-ink screen… for $200. And my workplace has gone 5S crazy… and I need to get rid of at least a half-shelf of reference books. For $200… I could download PDFs of all of my manuals and literature into one device. A couple of clicks later… and now I own a Kindle DX… and yeah… the bigger screen rocks. And you really can look at a regular sized page of text without going blind. The handy rotate feature makes it even easier than my Kindle Wi-fi. I loaded all of my manuals and literature onto it… and got rid of four binders worth of paper. The only thing I kept paper copies of were my color publications… and wide format publications.

And with three Kindles I can’t part with… of course I bought my husband one.
What I don’t like about the Kindle… any of the Kindles… is the file organization. On the e-ink Kindle… it’s clunky. If I have 300 documents I want to load into a collection called “Reference Material” I copy it onto my Kindle using the USB feature… and then I have to go onto my Kindle… and individually add each and every document into that collection. Ugh. Cludgy. Obviously not geared towards managing complicated directory structures… and organizing documents. It’s a DISPLAY device… and it does that wonderfully.

It makes me wonder what the next step for hand-held devices is. Five years ago… my Palm Tungsten was my indispensable device. Now it’s kind of… “Palm what?” And with the iPad becoming so popular… I wonder if it will kill e-ink devices. (Which for dedicated readers… is just SO MUCH easier to read than a backlit screen. Please, please, please keep making something akin to e-ink…tech gods… are you listening?)

The only thing I’m not too upset about that everyone else seems to be is pricing. I don’t mind paying near “full-price” for an e-book. The current pricing structure is antiquated. It’s based on the distributor/consignment model that bookstores use. People think that since it costs so much less to “produce” an e-book vs. a paper book… it must automatically be 80% cheaper. But books are priced so everyone who “handles” them gets their fair shake. Your average paperback book… what is it… 40-cents in paper… maybe 60 cents in ink and binding materials plus labor? The largest cost is in shipping and warehouse space. And since some printed paper books will always be needed… the profit from high-volume sales books will ALWAYS have to cover for art books… coffee table books… small releases… and other books that can’t be formatted easily for print on demand. (Photos that bleed off the edge… NOT easy to do on a POD press. There’s still a ton of trimming that needs to be done...etc.) If we priced books based on the cost of production without any thought to distribution… I think the variety and number of publications would go down… not up. Books aren’t paper and ink. They’re not JUST shelf space. They’re the blood, sweat and tears of the author. They’re ideas and emotions and knowledge passed from one person to another. They’re history and laughter… reference and religion. And do you really want all of that cheapened?