Tag Archives: amazon

Tarot History, Takei Respect, DRM Woes, Work Tunes, Illusions in Motion, and Comic Book Stuff

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This entry is part 50 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

Hopefully, after today’s utter insanity and stress, things will fall back into a more “schedule-friendly” rhythm at work. We should be past the point where a project that should have ebbed has continued to flow… right over top of a new project that was planned to start in the down-time.

In the feed, there’s what I consider a nice story about the insistence on DRM (Digital Rights Management) has come back to bite the company that insisted upon it in the ass. Seems a publisher that vehemently insisted Amazon only sell it’s ebook editions with DRM in place, is now in the sticky situation where it’s no longer happy with Amazon’s terms and charges, but can’t pull out without more or less using it’s entire customer base–because they’re locked into only being able to read the books on Amazon readers… because of the DRM.

Even more “fun” is the tidbit in the article that mentions Tor Books, which dropped DRM from it’s ebooks a couple years back. Ostensibly, DRM is in place to prevent piracy. Well, it seems that since dropping DRM, not only has Tor not seen an increase in piracy, they’ve actually seen an increase in sales.

Same thing happened when Amazon really jumped into the MP3 game… challenging iTunes by offering DRM free downloads. That may not have been a clear-cut victory, but Amazon’s music sales aren’t too shabby.

DRM has always treated legitimate customers like criminals and done little to nothing to deter, let alone stop, actual criminals. In most cases, it seems that it’s created more who break the law–by stripping out or otherwise circumventing the DRM so they can use their products freely.

People pirate stuff because they can’t get it legally in the form they want to make use of it. This is a lesson you’d think everyone would have learned when Napster was the biggest thing. People went there to effectively steal music because there was no legal way to get it in that format.

Ebooks are popular because people love the format. It’s bad enough that there are so many competing formats (which offer very few differences when it comes to the actual content… outside of which device you can use to read them). Adding serious DRM to them does nothing but open the door for things like a content producer getting screwed over by their DRM provider.

Maybe this time around, companies will learn.

Probably not.

X-Men, Marshmallow Men, Puberty, Fire Phone, Isolation, and the Clown Motel of Your Nightmares

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This entry is part 48 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

Technically, I’m still in the middle of my last big road trip.

See, the plan was, after quitting my job at the newspaper up in rural NY (with nothing else lined up), I was going to cruise down to Atlanta for Dragon Con that year, then continue on down to Florida for a little while, bounce back up North (stopping to visit people I knew from college who were in the DC area), then up through northern New York, across the top of the country, down the West Coast, and then back east via a southern route that would let me hit Florida and DC again.

I’ve kind of been “stuck” in the DC area for the past decade. Never did make it all the way back to the northern New York bit. (Even though I’ve been back to my home town nearly two dozen times.)

So, technically, still in the middle of that trip.

Over the past week, two road trip ideas have come up. One, a return to New Orleans with some of the people I was with the last time I was there (back in 1993). The other, prompted by the Clown Motel item in today’s feed, with some new(er) friends who I know are good for adventure (and share a quirky, twisted, sense of humor).

I’d like to say both of those will happen.

But the last bunch of road trips I’ve tried to do have fallen short of actually being do-able. Mostly for financial and scheduling reasons. Sometimes, the problems aren’t even mine (though lately, they really have been).

Sure, I’ve managed a Dragon Con trip or two in the past decade… but not recently. And there was that one trip out to the Jersey Shore (which only happened because a friend has a house there and a bunch of us were heading out from the DC area). But, other than those rare exceptions and the trips home for holidays, my wanderlust has been seriously unsatisfied.

I like travel. I really, really do. What I don’t have is one of these three things at any given moment: time, money, or traveling companion(s).

Currently, money is tight and I have no paid vacation. I do, though, have a handful of people willing to go on two different trips. A while back, I had time and people, but seriously lacked money.

It feels like I really can’t win.

Not that that’s going to stop me from continuing to dream about these trips and trying to pull off miracles so I can do them.

Miracles are just few and far between these days.

(As are teleporters… which would really make all this a moot point.)