Bruce Keener’s Lifestream

I wrote an e-book on Time Management for Technology Users a couple of years ago, and have been making it available for free on my Keener Living site. I am now in the process of significantly updating the book, adding a lot more content, and also wanted to ensure it can be read satisfactorily on the iPhone. So, given that I have the Amazon Kindle App on my iPhone, and that my e-book is stored on my Kindle, I figured I could just use the "transfer capability" within the iPhone app to make it available on my iPhone. Not so. I can access any of my purchased books from the iPhone, but not my own (free) e-book.

So, I researched it in the help section of the Amazon site and found this:

The entire selection of books available for reading on Amazon Kindle can also be read on Kindle for iPhone. The Kindle Store contains many of the best sellers from leading publishers around the world. You can also download free book samples from the Kindle store and read the first chapter of a book before you decide to buy.

If you already have a Kindle and Kindle book library, you can access the Kindle books you already own, even if you don't have your Kindle with you.

Periodicals such as newspapers, magazines, and blogs, and personal documents cannot be viewed on Kindle for iPhone.

(Emphasis on last sentence is mine.)

Bummer. So, now I cannot see how my e-book would look on the iPhone. I will remedy this by making an ePub version, which I can then download to the Stanza app on my iPhone. I had planned on making an ePub version, anyway, but I now need to step it up just for my own testing purposes. (I need to test especially because of the graphics within the e-book, to make sure they are readable on the iPhone ... they can be read well on the Kindle, but the screen and resolution is different for the iPhone.)

I really don't get why Amazon has placed this limitation on the documents that can be viewed with their iPhone App for Kindle. On one hand, Amazon talks like they want to make Kindle books available in a variety of formats for use on any reader. On the other hand, they won't even let me view on own properly formatted documents on the iPhone.

And, as indicated in this Mashable article, Amazon has even released the source code for the Kindle.

Yet, according to this TechCrunch article, Amazon is Killing Mobile Apps That Use Its Data.

And, they are continuing with what I call frivolous patents (they began this years with their patent application for their use of one-click purchasing). Now they want to patent the use of ads within e-book readers.

What's up Amazon? Do you want to be open or closed?

Now that I have recommitted myself to being a fan of open source software, I am seeing more and more mention of it. (Naturally ... once you gain an interest in something, you are more prone to notice it more in your everyday life.)

For example, the picture above is from a tweet today by Chris Anderson.

Additionally, Gina Trapani today wrote The Effects of "Share Alike" and Alex King wrote Breaking News: WordPress is GPL.

Just thought I'd share these links with you. By the way, the link shown in Chris Anderson's tweet is currently returning a "404 - page not found" error.

Open allows experimentation. Open encourages competition. Open wins. Amazon needs to get with the program. Or, like AOL and MSN, Amazon will wind up another online pioneer who ends up a belated guest at the party it planned to host.

Those are Tim O'Reilly's concluding remarks in his recent Forbes piece Why Kindle Should Be An Open Book. It is a marvelous write-up, with lots of great examples of why an open publishing format, such as ePub, makes sense.

In thinking about my own e-book library, I have about 100 books in eReader format, maybe 40 in MS Reader format, another 100 or so in MobiPocket format, and 30 on my Kindle. The vast majority of these have DRM protection and formatting. If I lose my readers for these books, I lose the books.

Tim O'Reilly's article, and a conversation I had last night with my good friend Thomas R. Hall, has gotten me stirred up into ensuring as many as possible of my future e-book purchases or downloads are in ePub format. I also realize that I need to convert my own Time Management e-Book to ePub format and I will work on that this week.

A lot of my entries over the past few days have dealt with the topics of open source and/or free. I used to be a huge supporter of open source, and then just let my interest slide as other items got so much higher on my list of interests. It feels good to be getting my interest back in this area and to support it.

Anyway, I encourage you to read O'Reilly's article: very insightful.

There is a huge amount of discussion surrounding the publication of Chris Anderson's Free: The Future of a Radical Price. I have not read the book yet, but have read much of the surrounding discussion.

Because this is a subject of considerable interest, and likely to be so for a while, I thought it would be good to post some links to material that discusses the book. So, here goes:

• Update: Chris has made his book available for free viewing via this link at Google Books. He has indicated he will also make it available for free in other e-book formats.
• Tech Is Too Cheap to Meter: It's Time to Manage for Abundance, Not Scarcity An article in Wired Magazine by Chris. This article apparently lays out many of the key points from his book. It is a very interesting read. And, at least when I read it, there was a link to a free audio version of the book (about 285 MB) ... I do not know if that link will remain.
• A TechDirt article, entitled Chris Anderson, Malcolm Gladwell And A Look At Free. This article is well-written itself, but also has links to some other really major discussions, such as a critique of the book by the famed Malcolm Gladwell and views by Seth Godin and Mark Cuban.
• Freemium and Freeconomics, an article by A VC, which largely agrees with Anderson's views. I became aware of this link via a tweet by Michael Arrington, which said "I refuse to engage in the free/freemium debate. It's settled. Free won." (and then gave the link to A VC).
• A second TechDirt article, entitled Mark Cuban Remains Confused about Free, with a link to a second article by Cuban.

 I find this to be a hugely fascinating subject. Once I have time to read "Free" on my own, I'll offer my own thoughts.

This tweet from Tim O'Reilly (@timoreilly) really caught my attention, so I thought I'd share it with you. Normally one re-tweets things like this, but in this case I wanted a medium that let the text standout in big letters, so I just did a screen capture of his tweet.

What do you think? Are we going to see the $200 per barrel in the near term?

Since one of the cool things about Posterous is that it will take an email and turn it into a post, I thought I'd give it a try.

Also, I am testing the picture attachment posting feature. If all works as advertised, you are seeing a picture of the breakfast I had this morning: biscuits and gravy, scrambled eggs, bacon, grits, coffee, water. Yes, Mom, I ate it all, except for the bacon I kept to give to Booger and Bouncer ... gotta take care of my boys, dontcha know.

Some may think that my decision yesterday to use an open-source, GPL theme on my Keener Living blog is fortuitous, given that Matt Mullenweg today wrote an article noting that the Software Freedom Law Center has issued a legal opinion that WordPress themes are GPL and must be licensed as GPL.

First off, as best as I can determine, this is a legal opinion, and not a court ruling. It will likely take the latter to really put this issue to bed. 

Secondly, as I indicated yesterday, my decision to go with a GPL theme was based, primarily, on my desire to show more support of open source, as I believe it is an important movement and one that needs to grow. I especially noted that I want to see AI software be open source (although I recognize as a practical matter that some of it is classified and resides behind a wall of secrecy). To me, this is the most important part of my statements about open source. My own personal use of it at this time for blogging is largely symbolic of my desire to see it used in AI development. I believe that our own evolution (or extinction) depends more strongly on the next 25-40 years than the past 150,000 years have had.

Nonetheless, Matt's article is an important one and should be read by anyone who is interested in what GPL really means in a practical sense. Another very practical article sprang up on the net yesterday, having been created by Alex King and being based on his many years of experience in working with the business side of using open source and GPL software. The article, Open Source Contract Considerations, is a valuable read.

In a somewhat related vain, it seems to me that there is a growing tendency for web users to expect products to be free, or really cheap. I noted yesterday that a lot of people are slamming Amazon and The Economist for the pricing of the Kindle subscription to the Economist. After going ahead and subscribing to it and giving the June 27 edition a read, I personally feel that the pricing is fine. But, I seem to not be in the majority on this.

I think a lot of interesting times lie ahead for people wanting to make money off web-based products and services.

Your thoughts?

By the way, I found out today that this blogging platform, Posterous, is not open-source. I doubt that will impact my desire to continue to use it, though. I think it has a lot going for it.

Update: The Red Sweater Blog has a very interesting write-up on this matter: Getting Pretty Lonely

Update #2: And this TechDirt Article has a great write-up on the book "Free," including criticisms of Gladwell's review of the book.