How the entertainment industry encourages piracy

I have always been respectful of rules and regulations. I respect the artists, and I am glad to provide them with a compensation for their work.

I buy movie DVDs, and music CDs.

And then I get angry.



More and more times it happens that, inserting a brand new DVD in the player, I am given a nasty advertising against illegal copies, warning me that piracy is a crime.

Why me? I am the one who bought this bloody DVD, am I not? So why are you inflicting this punishment on me, with this stupid advertising that my player can't skip?

I know why. Because you can't inflict that on the ones who are actually doing the illegal copying. And what's more annoying is the thought that the illegal copies don't have this advertising.

I, the one who have paid good money for this movie, can't watch the movie the way I want it. And you know what I need to do to watch the movie again without the additional pain? Why, rip it, of course! Once I convert the legal copy into an illegal one, I can do whatever I want with the movie.

Some other things that drive me mad? Go to a movie theater, pay 8 EUR, and you have to endure 25 solid minutes of advertising. Hey! The movie theater was supposed to be for the movies. Ads are for TV! No way. Nobody is listening. And the illegal copies are ads free ...

And then there is the prices. I bought DVDs ten years ago. They cost 15,000 lire, or about 7.5 EUR. That was in the period when few people had DVD players, so I suppose that they would sell much less than what they sell today. And what's the price today? Regular price is 16 EUR, for a movie just out of the theaters schedule. The top performers at the box office cost even 25 EUR. WTF?

It's really hard to stay honest. Piracy seems very appealing, and it's the entertaining industry that is pushing me in that direction.

Ebooks: let's not go the Al Gore's way

I have bought Al Gore's latest book, Our Choice, which is also available as an iTunes App.
The first impact is amazing. The visuals are great, and the look and feel is really pleasing.
However, after the first minutes of fiddling with this product of the ebook making postmodern way, I felt bitterly disappointed.

• First off, the app, without any warning whatsoever, either in the iTunes description or in the app itself, starts downloading extra data. The size of 52 MB mentioned in the description seemed big enough for a book, but I though that the better experience would justify it. Not so. The real size of the application after it finished downloading is 1 GB (ONE GIGABYTE!). And this for a book that preaches about avoiding waste!
• After seeing that, of course, I wanted to search the book for "waste". Only that there is no search function, which makes the ebook pretty much similar to an expensive book on paper.
• Except that it is not on paper, and the difference is clear when you leaf through the beautifully illustrated pages, and suddenly Al Gore's voice booms up from what looked like a picture but is a video. If I were reading next to someone who's sleeping, that would be a nasty surprise.
• No bookmarks, highlighting, word look-up, and all other facilities that users of modern book readers rightfully expect.

If I have to judge by this example, the future of ebooks should be wasteful and without searching facilities, meaning that it is intended for the readers to read it the way the author wants, not the way you want to use it. If it weren't for its loud obnoxious audio interruptions, this ebook could easily compare to medieval parchment books.
Summing up, do we want this example to be the future of ebooks? I don't think so.
Someone may say that within one generation we will have iPads with 1 TB of data, and so I am slowing down the progress of technology. It could be. My first computer had 20 MB of storage and that was 25 years ago. In the intervening years I have gone through the amazement of using a laptop with 200MB, then replaced by progressively bigger ones with 2, 16, 120, 260, and now 512GB. Storage for tablets is following a similar ascension. But even if my iPad had 1TB of storage instead of 16G, I would not want a "book" that starts talking or playing videos to me when I try to read quietly. If I wanted that, I could easily use the Kindle text-to-speech facility, or listen to an audio book.
BTW, the book makes a good job of explaining the problem, but then sucks at the conclusion ("be good, because God said so" or something along those lines), so I felt no regrets when I deleted it from my iPad to leave room for more deserving bytes.

A world of ebooks

I am a bibliophile, or, to say it in plain English, a book lover. I have been collecting books since I was in first grade. I read books at high speed, which is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because I can squeeze useful information out of a book very quickly, and that's useful for my job, and for some of my hobbies. A curse, because when I travel one book is usually not enough to keep me busy for the whole travel, and I need to carry or buy more, with negative effects on the weight of my luggage and my on my back. Ten years ago I had a brief but intense experience with electronic books in a Palm hand held device. It didn't last long, though. The quality of ebooks and readers in that period was less than optimal, and I have left the matter rest for a while.
In the meantime, I kept collecting electronic books, mostly PDF editions of technical books that I keep in my laptop for quick reference. Reading them from cover to cover, though, is not a pleasant experience in a laptop. Ditto for reading fiction or essays. The laptop screen is not comfortable for such exercise.
Then, last year, I bough an ebook reader.
That changed the whole business. Reading ebooks became very similar to reading paper books. The size of the screen and the ability of increasing font size makes your reading a pleasure. As for my back and luggage problems, that's solved hands down. The weight of the device is the same, no matter if I carry one ebook or one hundred.
Suddenly, the dozen of ebooks that I had kept idle in my laptop sprang to life, and I was able to read them like a paper book, easily, comfortably, and with pleasure.
I started buying more ebooks, both of fiction and of technical matters. The latter are especially welcome. Whenever I travel to conferences, I am tempted to buy some useful book, and then I regret when it burdens my backpack during the trip home, and fights for room on my overcrowded book shelves. No more of this. Now, when I visit a book booth at a conference, I simply take note of the interesting titles, and then I buy the ebooks at the publisher's site directly. If there is no ebook, I can easily convince me that the book is not really needed.
A few months ago there was some new development. My ebook reader's screen was faulty. It was showing a few unwanted lines at the bottom and the top of the screen, making it difficult to read menus. No big deal. I sent it to the manufacturer, which replaced the screen for free. The only trouble was that the replacement took three months! During that period, I experienced reading ebooks (to which I was by then addicted) with my Android phone, using a wonderful application named Aldiko. The user friendliness of this app more than compensated for the smaller screen size, and I was able to read technical and fiction books with little problem. But I was missing the big screen. So the delay of the back shipment was partially responsible for the lowering of my defenses, when I entered an Apple store and I couldn't leave without a new iPad.
I felt guilty for a while, but the guilt disappeared in a matter of hours, when I loaded all my ebooks in the iPad, and saw what a difference a bigger and colorful screen does. Compared to the six inches of my ebook reader, the iPad is huge, and the reading is even easier and more pleasurable. I was hooked.
Since then, my personal library of ebooks has grown rapidly. I have bought 90 (yes, ninety) books from O'Reilly, including many that I had already bought on paper, and now I am giving away to friends and libraries.
I need to spend a few words of praise for O'Reilly. In the jungle of book publishing, O'Reilly is the best and more user friendly publisher available. The quality of its books is excellent, the choice of catalog vast and modern, the service impeccable. There are other publishers that offer comparable quality (e.g. the Pragmatic bookshelf or Manning) but not the same rich catalog, or a similarly vast catalog (e.g. Packt Publishing) but not the same quality.
If I have to note any negative points about O'Reilly, is that there is no wish list in their shop. So, for now, I am restricting my wishes to my list on Amazon.