Excellent speech

Adam Savage speaks to Harvard humanists
Apparently Jamie spoke too, I'd like to read that one as well.

Amazon tried to kill publishers and/or hardcovers?

According to this article, Amazon wanted to supplant publishers by first making ebooks so cheap that people would no longer buy hardcovers. (they claim that Apple is the one to thwart that - a claim that makes the assumption that Apple's eBook store is predestined to be to eBooks as iTunes is to music).

Now, I've never been a hardcover buyer. ISTM that people buy hardcovers for two reasons (neither of which apply to me)

1. they want the book NOW and the publishers take advantage of impatient people by only selling the overpriced hardcovers for a few months
   
2. they actually want a durable copy of the book to keep, get signed, cherish, pass down through the generations, whatever.

I can see that ebooks could easily supplant type 1 buyers; with ebooks (particularly with a Kindle) you can buy a copy of the book at 12:01 AM on release day from your living room or while on vacation; you'd have to camp at a bookstore to get it nearly as fast.

Type 2 buyers though, it seems like ebooks are the antithesis of what they want. Yes, they're potentially even more durable than hardcovers, but they are subject to loss, you can't get them signed (suppose I could get Bruce S to PGP fingerprint the title page of one of his books to me?), and as far as passing them down through the generations, or even being able to sell them, give them away, or donate them to libraries, Amazon and the publishers have built DRM in so that it actively thwarts all that stuff.

If Amazon really wanted to kill hardcovers, they'd have to really try hard to eliminate DRM. However, I guess eliminating DRM would make Kindle format convertable to Sony, ePub, Mobi and other formats, which would run counter to their obvious plans to corner the market. And I think the publishers were the big holdup on DRM, or at least, Amazon would have us believe so.

NOW it's spring

I took the main front light off the bike and am down to the backup light. It's a lot smaller and easier to deal with (it's just a smallish flashlight on a mount, rather than a light with cables and a separate battery pack). It's nearly as bright as the primary, but I don't use it in the winter because I only get about 45 minutes of runtime on high. I don't need high mode now, and also my commute is now solidly under 45 minutes, many times under 40 minutes.

Surprisingly enough, I never did have to put the studded tires back on after removing them in early March. It's still not impossible that I'll need them again, but for one day I'm more likely to just drive.