The types of bestselling free Kindle books

Periodically I go on binges where I browse the Kindle bestsellers list and download most of the top 100 free books, more or less indiscriminately, without consideration for quality. I mean, what the hell, it's free and my Kindle 2 still has over 1.2GB of free storage (out of 1.4GB user space). Even the worst piece of formulaic pulp trash might be funny in a so-bad-it's-good kind of way; or at least there may be some anthropological interest (oh, so this is what women fantasize about?). Most of the stuff goes totally unread of course — I don't have time to even glance at a tenth of it — but I suppose I like having the option.

Anyway, it's interesting to note that as of January 2011, the top 100 free Kindle ebooks list consists of the following:

Count	Type	Example	Notes
50	Gutenberg ebooks	The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes	Kindle conversions of public domain etexts from Project Gutenberg; mostly classics.
7	Games	Every Word	IMO Amazon should segregate these in their own section.
5	Thriller/Mystery	The Perfect Woman	Mostly in the gruesome-crimes subgenre, not the sleuthing subgenre.
8	Erotica/Romance	Rough Cut	Romance readers might claim that these are two categories but I defy you to draw the line among these titles.
2	ChickLit	Stuck in the Middle (Sister-to-Sister Book 1)	Apologies for the derogatory label but what do you want me to do with a cover and title like that?
11	Christian Fiction	Fools Rush In (Weddings By Bella, Book 1)	Often disguises itself quite stealthily as other genre fiction.
6	Other Fantasy	Don't Die, Dragonfly	Mostly spirits-and-vampires stuff, not Heroic Medieval Fantasy Product.
8	Alleged Nonfiction	The Winners Manual	Includes many crappy cookbooks and the Bible.
3	Other Fiction	The Stolen Crown	Arguably the bravest authors here, as non-series non-genre fiction has the least "author stickiness" of any fiction. Which isn't to say the writing's any good necessarily.

The state of Kindle backups and data portability, February 2010

I recently plugged my Kindle into my workstation's USB port for the first time. In ordinary operation, there's no need whatsoever to do this, but I wanted to try backing up my ebooks. Also, since writing this I wanted to confirm my suspicion that the current Amazon DRM scheme is more akin to Apple's FairPlay "speed bump" than a serious playback control technology.

In short, it is.

The Kindle connects as an ordinary USB mass storage device with a simple folder structure, containing four root-level directories:

• Audible: audio ebooks? (empty in my case)
• documents: ebooks
• music (empty in my case)
• system: Not exactly what it sounds like — it doesn't actually contain the operating system, only auxiliary data files used by system software. I suppose it's sensible enough not to let some clueless user bork their OS by accidentally dragging this file to the trash. (I suspect that there's a backdoor code that will mount the OS/firmware as well; at least, that's how I'd design this device if I were a developer and wanted to debug it.)

For each ebook, the documents folder contains at least one .azw, .azw1, or .tpz file, and usually a .mbp or .tan file that stores some auxiliary data. Your "clippings" file (containing excerpts that you highlight or note) is stored as a plain .txt file (yay).

Free samples and free public domain ebooks from Amazon are not DRM-restricted. Purchased books, of course, are.

Incidentally, no technology in the Kindle device prevents copying. As noted, the Kindle mounts as an ordinary USB mass storage device, and it is inherent in the filesystem abstraction that you can do simple things like copy the entire contents of the documents folder onto your hard drive. You can do it once or a thousand times, and no technology even tries to stop you. This is an inherent function of the type of device that Amazon has made.

What the files' DRM prevents, in theory, is "playing back" the files' content on some other device after it has been copied. But of course, it doesn't really do that in practice. Without going into details, there are downloadable programs on the Internet, widely available in source and executable forms, which can extract the contents of a restricted AZW file.*

So, in short, it's trivial for you to back up your ebook library. If you're a programmer, it's also pretty easy to write a script that will harvest your entire ebook library, shuck off the obnoxious DRM enclosure, and transcode the contents into some other format. Nontechnical users, unfortunately, don't have easy access to the DRM removal/transcoding step, although this may change as the transcoding software matures and distribution channels route around the legal jurisdictions where this software is banned.

Anyway, as I wrote in my earlier post, I'm hoping that the content production cartels will eventually realize that DRM serves Amazon's interests, not theirs, and abandon even the "speed bump" DRM currently in place. In the meantime, I've found that the value of having a dozen unread books in my bag at any given time, and being able to buy and read a book instantly at midnight on a Sunday, is sufficiently huge that I'm willing to make the compromise.**

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*Even if this weren't true, people determined to infringe copyright for monetary or other gain will do so. DRM does not prevent the widespread, willful, uncompensated distribution of copyrighted content. The only thing that DRM does is prevent legitimate paying customers from getting the value from their books that they have been promised by electronic booksellers' use of the phrase "buy this book".

**A compromise, incidentally, that I was never willing to make with iTunes DRM. I suppose that the value I get in my life from reading greatly exceeds the value I get from music.

Electronic goods markets: end-to-end wins?

Hypothesis: As industries of cultural production adapt to digital distribution, content publishers in each industry will follow, with minor variations, the four-phase pattern set by the music industry:

1. Denial: Publishers pretend that digital distribution does not exist, attempting to salvage business models based on distribution of physical media. In some cases, publishers use the legal system to try to make this fantasy a reality. Regardless of the legal outcomes, this proves unsustainable in the long run. During this phase, publishers may make halfhearted forays into digital publishing, which invariably fail because they are deeply and deliberately user-hostile.
2. Faustian Bargain: A technology company designs a system which disguises computers' fundamentally general nature with a fig leaf of DRM. The disguise allows this company to strike a deal with major content publishing cartels to distribute content. Because a technology company has taken control of the technology, the system finally works in a way that doesn't make customers want to tear their hair out. The DRM system fails to prevent widespread copyright infringement, but it provides a hook for the technology company to build a vertically integrated stack which is somewhat inconvenient for customers to exit.
3. Clash of the Titans: Publishers realize that they are in a weakening bargaining position with respect to the technology company, which has acquired considerable monopsony power due to its control of the platform. Publishers butt heads with the technology company over prices and other contractual terms. This, too, proves unsustainable.
4. End-to-End Wins: Publishers realize that architectures which embed control in the distribution mechanism put more power in the hands of middlemen than endpoints. Conversely, end-to-end architectures, wherein the endpoints negotiate the transaction and any number of interchangeable mechanisms carry data between them on a best-effort basis, place power in the hands of endpoints rather than middlemen. Publishers furthermore realize that publishers and customers are the endpoints; that in the long run both are best served when the customer can purchase a bundle of data which is not bound (even weakly) to the sales channel, the software stack, or the physical device, all of which are intermediaries between the content and the customer. Publishers finally offer their content in a portable format via multiple sales channels.

This is just a hypothesis. I'm not sure I believe it. However, as evidence that expecting the final stage is not laughably utopian, I offer Sony and Warner's deals with eMusic and the introduction of MP3s on iTunes as evidence that stage 4 is already happening for music.

Detailed application of the above model to current hoopla in the e-book market left as an exercise to the reader. However, I will note that one reason I bought a Kindle is that I thought book publishers were so ornery, retrograde, and technophobic that they'd never progress to stage 4 unless they had an obnoxious would-be monopsonist (viz., Amazon) to frighten them through stage 3.

(A counterpoint to the above argument would be to observe that certain goods, like streaming video and computer games, appear to be evolving in the direction of fairly strong architectures of control. Neither Netflix streaming nor Steam give you much freedom w.r.t. your "purchase". It's unclear whether this means their respective markets haven't progressed far enough yet, or there's something fundamentally different about these media.)

False advertising