This seems to be happening over and over again. Two years ago, everyone wanted to be a platform, now all that embracing open API stuff has turned to shit.
Basically, the idea seems to be that once you've used your API ecosystem to grow to a certain size, you can fuck over the developers that allowed you to get to that point by building on top of your platform and by attracting users to it or keeping them engaged. The only way to get around this is to become so big that the platform can't shut you down (Zynga, Twitpic).
Twitter says, stop building clients, build in these verticals. Who is going to stop them from going after the most profitable verticals tomorrow once developers have proved that there's money to be made there? As a developer, why the hell would I want to deal with this?
Open API's seem to be the antithesis of the profit motive, or atleast, that's how it seems to be. Sad.
You're generalizing a little too much for me, but I think you are spot on where it counts. Developing for a walled garden is a fool's game. It might make you a lot of money short-term, but long term you're always going to be sucking up to somebody who can cut off your lights just because they had a bad morning.
What's interesting to me is how much these small apps are functioning like slot machines at Las Vegas. 100 slot machines just eat money, and nobody notices. Then one kicks off and makes a big winner and everybody cheers -- thereby drawing more people over to play the slots.
The only thing a situation like that is good for is the house.
Let's not rewrite history here. The API that was used must have been PAAPI since it's the only Amazon API that allows access to their catalog. That API has very clear terms of use, and the terms haven't changed that much in the recent past. If a company decides to build a product or business using an API knowing that it goes against the terms of use, it is a huge risk that they have to assume.
I don't think it's deliberate evil, rather it's the old "Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely" mixed with arrogance and less-then-steller thinking through of the effects.
You open your platform, and people use it. Then LOTS of people use it. And suddenly you're more powerful because of it. And then something threatens your business. And the executive team go "What? They're using OUR OWN TOOLS to weaken our business? That can't be allowed to happen, cut them off!"
The idea that someone could abuse their business through their API originally didn't occur. Then, once it did, there's a backlash because "They" are supposed to be building "Our" business, not their own at our expense.
This is some tough shit. No quick answers. Its different for different industries, mediums, etc.
Some API owners are making poor decisions, but there are plenty others like NPR, Amazon, and Netflix that are innovating and sharing their stories on problems they face and what went into their decisions.
The key in any of this is don't get swept up in the short term undercurrents. Step back and look at bigger pictures. I've been using APIs for 10 years. Cloud computing for 5.
I feel like we are just getting going. Lots to figure out.
If you read the headline, you will notice that this comment thread is about Amazon screwing over their API users. Twitter was just brought up for context. So bringing up Amazon as somebody "innovating and sharing their stories" without addressing how they treated Lendle users is more than a little bit silly.
It amazes me that the e-book providers think they can head down the same road as the music industry and not end up in the same spot.
I'm a serious Kindle user -- I have dozens of books. I've thought about using DRM-cracking software to free up my books, not because of any desire to share or lend but just because it's not right having a book in my possession locked away under a secret key some other bunch of people control.
This announcement doesn't bode well for Amazon. Technology can help you find markets, technology can enable markets, but using technology to force a market to appear where none did before doesn't have such a great track record. Everybody understands that you read a book, you share it (or give it away). There is no further sale. Lendle was simply trying to help Amazon work in a natural way that people commonly understand.
DRM isn't black and white though. Blu-Ray DRM is (last I checked) pretty good; thus I don't buy Blu-Ray. DVD-CSS is such a joke that it might as well not exist, so I buy DVDs without any problem, and I keep my DVD collection on my file server for easy access through Boxee. Kindle's DRM is in the joke category of DRM. It supposedly exists, but I have a tiny python program that strips the DRM off my kindle purchases, so I can keep backups on my file server in case Amazon decides to pull a PlaysForSure. DRM is definitely evil, but when it's trivially circumvented it doesn't bother me so much.
I crack the hell out of my Kindle purchases. Not for piracy, but so I can read them on Apple's superior iBooks app. It's pretty simple to do. Funny part is, I didn't start buying Amazon eBooks until I was certain I could defeat their DRM.
When I tried it awhile ago, the Kindle app had a page turning experience that can only be described as maddening. Tap in the wrong spot, boom, page has turned. The iBooks app, for all its over-done skeuomorphism, makes interacting with the book pretty easy. Simple things like page edges make clear what will happen when you tap in a particular place. iBooks just feels really nice.
More than that, the Kindle app is just ugly. It has this janky animation when you jump to another section of the book that's painful to watch. It's a shame – the Kindle v3 hardware is a pretty badass product. The Kindle iPad app feels barebones, insipid and unpolished. Does a disservice to the brand.
That's interesting. The initial feedback I read on iBooks vs Kindle back when both apps were first available was very heavily skewed the other way: people seemed to prefer the Kindle app.
Perhaps it was just a case of familiarity and the majority of the reports at that time being by existing Kindle users. Apple has also pushed out a few good updates since (including proper hyphenation!) so that has probably helped too.
I also crack my Kindle books, again not for piracy, but as an insurance policy against the sort of behaviour that people are worried that Amazon could indulge in.
I'm happy to play fair so long as they do...
That said, if I think a book is something I'm likely to want to keep long term, I still tend to buy the paper version. My Kindle is for convenience.
"Heading down the same road as the music industry" seems a bit strong. They haven't sent out armies of lawyers to extort kids in project downloading picture books, or asked Homeland Security to seize URLs
They've simply decided that a site probably shouldn't be using Amazon's own resources via the API to make it easy to find a particular Kindle title they might have been considering buying for free. If Amazon perceive it as damaging to sales they'd be insane not to. Noticeably there's a similar site that hasn't been shut down; maybe that one generates decent revenue via links to purchase books they don't have available.
1) Heading down the same road ≠ already at the same destination (pedantry, sorry).
2) I would argue they are in the same boat as entertainment industries (and newspaper industries) in that they are selling artificially (via laws & DRM) scarce “goods.”
Time to trot out the Jeff Bezos quote again, from when authors were complaining about Amazon allowing used book sales:
"When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this."
It's pretty clear that he was talking about physical books. E-books that have no limits on distribution are affected by different economic forces. In this situation, what rights the purchaser has or should have are far less clear.
I completely agree, the 'old' model doesn't apply 100% but I don't think that publishers are trying for a new model that's fair. I can give thousands copies for free, yes... But they can SELL thousands at almost no cost. So the whole "You can't just GIVE it away" argument gets significantly weaker.
I think, however, that the end result will be to ignore the pirates. It makes the most sense. People will always want to get their book "NOW", at launch, from the store, not from hunting around for it.
It's a shame but they kind of had this coming. Amazon's book-lending feature only really works with their business model as long it is just small groups of people lending to each other. They were never going to stand for people circumventing the whole model of individual payment by sharing books with random strangers over the internet.
I'm not saying Amazon (and the whole e-book industry) is morally right in restricting sharing like this, but you can't expect them not to stand up for their own interests.
In the long term, I'm sure we'll end up with freely distributable e-books. But that won't happen via Amazon's or Apple's online stores, which are quite clearly on the side of restricting distribution in order to charge for it.
Quote: Our initial reaction was one of pure surprise.
Me, not so much:
Lending ebooks is a feature demanded mostly by people who don't pay money for ebooks (and don't pay money for movies, music, or videogames if they can possibly avoid it) and will not be induced to pay money by the feature.
The only use of the service is to turn one purchase of any popular book into the ability to read as many as 26 books per year free. Its essentially the classic music startup model: you don't want to pay money for music, we want to make that happen. Of course it got negative attention.
Amazon must be counting their blessings there wasn't a way for people to borrow & lend physical books or else there's no way they could have built a business around selling them!
I didn't know there was a website where I could borrow and lend physical books to random people across the world with the click of a button, absolutely no shipping fees, and a rock-solid 14 day return policy.
Does that site exist, or are you exploiting the (obviously false) "ebooks are books" train of thought for a pithy comment?
World-wide you might be right. But in the US for about the last 30 years you can borrow any book you want 100% free straight from your computer (albeit usually with a 2-3 day wait) thanks to the magic of inter-library loan.
Amazon's always played hardball with their API (see also Delicious Library mobile). They're like the Oracle of the generally-cuddly API world, but at least they've always been clear and upfront about it. Don't help them to sell things? Bam.
By contrast, Twitter's now suffering as it tries to retro-fit a hard-ass approach (though of course with a similar stance from the beginning it's hard to see them getting where they are now).
They should do lending/selling via USB or wifi, that'd add some of the 'physical proximity' aspect back in, in that you couldn't lend to everyone all over the internet, just people you live with or work with.
If people wanted to pirate books they would just go to bittorrent or irc rather than trying to mess around with kindle hackery, I mean what would the point be?
Determined hackers will probably find a way to outwit pretty much anything. What they need to be doing is making it so that the path of least resistance is the 'legal' one for the 95% of people who generally don't want to fiddle with things.
It's a shame that they did this. I think Neil Gaiman summarized the wonderful benefits of using the web as a lending tool for books. He has a fantastic interview clip regarding his outlooks on piracy of his books that you can view here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qkyt1wXNlI
Here's the transcript, emphasis mine:
When the web started I used to get really grumpy with people, because they put my poems up. They put my stories up. They put my stuff up on the web. I had this A.) a belief, which was completely erronious, that if people put your stuff up on the web and you didn't tell them to take it down you would lose your copyright - which actually, is simply not true. And I also got very grumpy because I felt like they were pirating my stuff, that it was bad. And then I started to notice that two things seemed much more significant. One of which was [that] places where I was being pirated, particularly Russa where people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading around into the world, I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated. Then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in Russia it would sell more and more copies. I thought this was facinating, and I tried a few experiments. Some of them are quite hard, you know, persuading my publisher for example to take one of my books and put it out for free. We took American Gods, a book that was still selling and selling very well, and for a month they put it up completely free on their website. You could read it, and download it. What happened was sales of my books, through independant bookstores because that's all we were measuring it through, went up the following month three hundred percent.
I started to realize that actually, you're not losing books. You're not losing sales by having stuff out there. When I give a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people say, "Well what about the sales that I'm losing through having stuff copied, through having stuff floating out there?" I started asking audiences to just raise their hands for one question. Which is, I'd say, "Do you have a favorite author?" They'd say, "Yes." and I'd say, "Good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book, put up your hands." And then, "Anybody who discovered their favorite author by walking into a bookstore and buying a book raise your hands," and it's probably about five, ten percent. If that, of the people who actually discovered their favorite author, who is the person who they buy everything of. They buy the hardbacks and treasure the fact that they got this author.
Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it, and that's how they found their favorite author. I thought, "You know, that's really all this is. It's people lending books. You can't look on that as a loss of sale. It's not a lost sale, nobody who would have bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free." What you're actually doing is advertising. You're reaching more people, raising awareness. Understanding that gave me a whole new idiea of the shape of copyright and what the web was doing. The biggest thing the web is doing is allowing people to hear things. Allowing people to read things. Allowing people to see things that they otherwise wouldn't have seen. Basically that's an incredibly good thing.
So far as my personal experience can be extrapolated, it's not just advertising. Sometimes it is lost sales. That said, so far as my personal experience can be extrapolated, the lost sales are an almost insignificant slice of the new sales.
The lesson in this is that building projects that depend on third-party data is dangerous; there needs to be some sort of guarantee of access to the data before you commit to the project. Building the project and then pointing fingers at the data provider after your api access is revoked does nothing to relieve the frustration of your users.
Sometimes you just build a project because it's fun, you can and you're able to launch it quickly. It's also an opportunity to pick up some skills and experience and build up a reputation.
I don't think Lendle set out to be a long term, full time, paying gig.
I guess that's what I'm getting at... they weren't serious (enough) about it and their users suffer the consequences. Nowhere on their website does it say "beta" or "just for fun" or "this could go away at any time".
The reason is certainly that Amazon intended the lending feature to be used between a person's small network of acquaintances. This means that the likelihood of being able to borrow every book you want should be pretty low. Lendle gamed this by expanding the set of people with which you share / borrow. At that scale, the feature probably reduced Amazon's sales more significantly than the intended usage.
Lesson: Don't get into conflict of interest with a monopoly that you rely on. If you are strategically threatening or simply unprofitable for them, they will kill you off.
if we go 2 levels down the stack, to me that situation with private APIs [more precisely - "API services" ] provides a glimpse into the future what would happen with Internet without net-neutrality (as the service of carrying your network packets is just a "network API service" which owner of the service would be able to decline/limit access to to anybody he feels like to).
One thing to keep in mind here: The Kindle only let's you lend each book you own once, mitigating the potential damage done. The site also prominently featured the option to buy the book before and after the lend.
It is the first time that I hear about Lendle, and as I read from their site it is a very interesting service. I think it is the online version of http://www.bookcrossing.com/ in a way. You are "leaving" your online book in Lendle and everyone can pick it in order to read it.
Very, very bad style. 2 weeks is mostly not enough time between work and life to finish the thicker books. So one ends up buying loaned books you otherwise wouldn't have considered.
This is a really stupid move and I implore others to make it known via the Helpdesk.
Call me naive...and quotes aside...This may be due to Amazon possibly wanting to provide a similar service themselves? Possibly working in some sort of fee/etc?
Basically, the idea seems to be that once you've used your API ecosystem to grow to a certain size, you can fuck over the developers that allowed you to get to that point by building on top of your platform and by attracting users to it or keeping them engaged. The only way to get around this is to become so big that the platform can't shut you down (Zynga, Twitpic).
Twitter says, stop building clients, build in these verticals. Who is going to stop them from going after the most profitable verticals tomorrow once developers have proved that there's money to be made there? As a developer, why the hell would I want to deal with this?
Open API's seem to be the antithesis of the profit motive, or atleast, that's how it seems to be. Sad.