I've used a kindle for years and have bought hundreds of ebooks through Amazon's platform. The convenience of being able to carry a library with me in a single device is undeniable. ~14 years of support seems reasonable, especially in the context of modern tech. And yet decisions like this always upset me. For all the limitations of physical books, I can hand my physical books to my literal children and grandchildren when I die. As long as I tend to the book, I have it. The fact that this isn't guaranteed for DRM-locked ebooks, for all their advantages, makes me feel like we are somehow going backwards, despite our progress technologically. Instead of a future where products get unambiguously better, the future seems filled with products that come with significant trade-offs. The trade-offs are beginning to not feel worth it to me.
Lots of us felt the same way since the beginning of ebooks. If you lose your Amazon account, you lose your books, which means you never really owned them.
There are (and have been) DRM-free eBook stores. You _might_ be able to strip the DRM from your Amazon books. However, the process and ease of doing so seems to change often, I don't know if it's easy or hard right now.
In the future, consider supporting ebook manufacturers and stores that don't lock down your device, and sell DRM-free books. Kobo is one example. We have a bunch of these in our household. They don't require an account, I can just upload books via USB port on any computer, and they are pretty hackable.
We are going backwards. The concept of a library would be illegal if invented today. They are only allowed to exist today because they've been around for hundreds of years. There are still people who attack them and try to shut them down.
I buy both physical and digital books and much prefer digital, reading on my kindle is more convenient (especially to adjust the font size). For sharing with family, I have a family library set up with Amazon and the experience is really smooth.
I do enjoy owning physical copies of books I liked, and they are part of the “decor” at home at this point. I have limited space so I have 2 completely stacked bookshelves, and then piles of books around the kitchen on top of the cupboards etc.
> I can hand my physical books to my literal children and grandchildren when I die. […] The fact that this isn't guaranteed for DRM-locked ebooks
In fact, the opposite is pretty much guaranteed. To my knowledge, you can’t inherit Amazon Kindle licenses, and you definitely can’t give them away otherwise (which is the obvious next thing to do when inheriting books you think somebody else has a better use for than you).
I genuinely don't understand how one company can be so bad at naming products for multiple decades. It makes Sony's names for its headphones seem downright catchy.
We had a good laugh when our IT informed us that Remote Desktop was being renamed Windows App. I really wonder what is going on over there because from where I'm sitting it makes no effin' sense at all.
This is dumb enough that it can’t be accidental. I genuinely believe the strategy is to create vague but recognizable brands but avoid labeling _products_ with recognizable names.
Microsoft seem to think that it’s better to have some names we all know like 365, Azure, Copilot snd then the products are just floating around under those brands.
That’s the only conclusion I can draw but I have no idea why they would want this.
I don't disagree that reading news articles online today is a deeply unenjoyable experience. At the same time, I think not enough people acknowledge that the decision to put so much content online for free is how we ended up in this hellscape. Even when a website has a paywall, the cost of the paywall often dwarfs what you would have paid for a print equivalent of the same paper or journal, which is what enabled the flourishing of journalism in the 20th century.
We like writing because the fact that we can create good writing says something about ourselves. If AI can create writing that surpasses, say, a Tolstoy or George Eliot, that will fundamentally change our self-perception. Is that a good thing or bad thing? Well, let's first cross the bridge of an LLM writing War & Peace and see how we feel.
One thing I'll note about this is that the writing reminds me of the much contested "MFA workshop" style that has launched a thousand think pieces.
---
The story was decent! I thought it was insightful and it made me reconsider some aspects of AI use. I am skeptical that an AI could write something on par with the Iliad, or Anna Karenina -- but perhaps I will be disabused of that notion someday. Still, this is a level of quality I am surprised to see to come out of an AI (though, as in your story, the LLM seemed to require its own "choreographer" in the form of your editing and polishing). Very thought provoking.
reply