I’m probably the wrong person to talk to about electronic books. I actually read through a whole book on my fourth-generation iPod once, so I’m kind of dedicated to the idea.

The big deal for me is that, at night, I don’t like having a reading light. Seriously. That’s really the big deal for me. Everything else is worth putting up with if you can, at a minimum, read self-lighting material.

When I picked up my iPod touch, I was really excited to try out the Kindle App, and then subsequently disappointed on how little I liked it. Look, my intention was not to buy electronic books. It was to read my collection of electronic books.  It was _readable_ yes. And grabbing the sample chapters of books I was thinking about reading is neat and all, but it’s nigh-impossible to get my large books that I’ve been reading onto the kindle app, and it’s surprising how badly formatted they are when they get there.

So I looked around. I remember someone, probably Andy Ihnatko, singing the praises of Stanza’s iPhone App, so I tried it, grabbed a handful of books, and am now happy as a pig in mud.

Over the weekend, I finished Rudy Rucker’s “Postsinglar.” It’s about the singularity, and another singularity, and actually a few more singularities and the subsequent fallouts there from. If you love Rudy Rucker, you’ll love this  book. If you don’t love Rudy Rucker, it’s still pretty good. I find him a far more tolerable version of Neil Stevenson. Sci-Fi Nerds, Flame On.

Anyway, one of the many great things about Stanza is that it is automatically tuned in with feedbooks.com, which has as good a collection of electronic books as any I’ve come across. I’ve already downloaded more reading materials than I’ll get to months.

Which gets me to the question here: Why are book publishers so hung up on only _selling_ electronic copies of their books? I can go to a library and get just about any copy of any book I want to read. How is the Internet so different?

I love libraries. I really do. But the electronic books they have at the Milwaukee Public Library are so DRM ridden and locked down (YOU ACTUALLY HAVE TO CHECK THEM IN AND OUT (!!??!)) that they’re virtually non-options. I call them “untronic” books because as far as I can tell, they only exist to discourage the library from actually getting an electronic book distribution system that works. 

I’m invested in making a living off of writing and selling books. I really am. But I don’t understand how cutting out people who want to read, recommend and share your books on their terms fosters that goal.

If libraries want to remain relevant, and don’t become the second great institutional tragedy since the failure of the newspapers to adapt to the world where data is no longer scarce, they need to find away to make themselves into resources as great, if not greater, than services like feedbooks or even the DRM-riddled Amazon Kindle service.

Dear Friendly Folks at Netflix.

I'm having nothing but trouble with your view on demand services. I have a Windows Vista laptop with all the latest patches and service packs but it will not play your on demand videos. The system continually tells me there are problems with the DRM. I follow the instructions to reset the DRM, but I they never seem to clear up the problem.

Please consider abandoning the hostile DRM wrappers that make your service non-functional. Not only do they make it hard for legitimate, long-time customers such as myself to enjoy your service, they actively lock your product and service into a single delivery mechanism, which, I'm sure you understand, limits your firms abilities to respond to changing marketing conditions.

I understand that there are market pressures that prevent your firm from operating without DRM systems in place, but that doesn't mean your firm should only provide service to a single class of PC users. In that regard, I support expanding your streaming service to other set-top-boxes like the Playstation 3. I would consider even spending a small increase in my subscription fee for the ability to stream netflix movies to the PS3.

One thing, however, I do not support, is the addition of a premium charge for blue-ray disks. I will not pay an additional fee to include blue-ray disks in my netflix cue. Please do not enact one, as it will merely curtail my enjoyment of the blue-ray platform.

Thank you very much for your time, consideration, and timely response,

Gabe Wollenburg
Netflix consumer since March, 2004.

PS. Please note that a copy of this message has been posted on my blog at writelarge.com/openlettertonetflix