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Perhaps the reason I’m so excited about this is that I was already planning on purchasing a TiVo TCD648250B Series3 HD Digital Media Recorder within the next several months (please, please let the price keep coming down) and these features just increase the value proposition of that purchase, but I also think the slickness of this end-to-end implementation is seriously enticing and poses a distinct challenge for Apple and their new Apple tv - especially since Apple’s only major movie studio partnership to date is with Disney and relies on the hardware constraint of the space on your hard drive.

• While the Amazon Unbox Store does not yet support Macintosh (grrr, what is it with everyone and the single DRM’d Windows solution?), bypassing all of that and going straight to my living room is fine.
• My digital library can sit on Amazon’s Media Library, I won’t need to buy physical DVDs (my collection is pretty huge already), and I won’t need to invest in new hardware (e.g. hard drives) to hold Gigabytes/terabytes of information. This appeals to my greener sensibilities. Amazon and Tivo should drum that angle up in the marketing.
• If I were to idly speculate (which I love), this solution gives Amazon/Tivo the option of upgrading the quality of the movies fairly seemlessly to the end-user. After all, users won’t have to have the movie on their own hard drive. Amaozn/Tivo could detect when I want to reload a movie out of my digital library and give me the option as to the quality I prefer (so I can match it to my setup). Even better, I’d probably just set a preference for the highest quality possible at any given time.

Amazon/Tivo, if you give me a rental option before the rest of the market can get there (something akin to Netflix without the mailing), I’ll be yours forever!

Disclaimer: I am a current employee at Amazon.com but I had no prior knowledge of this implementation. I do not currently possess any future knowledge about this which is not public. Cheers!

Word from the New York Times is that Wal-Mart has introduced a new video download store today, the big news here being that they’ve inked deals with all six major Hollywood studios. Clicking a link from the New York Times article, this is the site I saw:

Yowzah. I know it’s beta but shouldn’t it look a bit better than that?

Luckily, I’m a savvy websurfer and know that I need to click ctrl+F5 to refresh all the css. What percentage of users know that? Doing that did at least yield the following:

Notice that the name error is still all screwed up.

I wonder of it’s going to support Macintosh? Not holding my breath. Will somebody please create an alternative to the iTunes downloadable movie solution that works on Macs?

For you writers out there, I wanted to post a brief review of a free new web application called, oddly enough, “Writer.” Writer is a web-based text editor designed to simplify the act of writing by focusing you on the task at hand. It’s pretty much a blank black square that you fill with words. If you’re like me, the day has enough distractions; there shouldn’t be a need to add to them hunting for formatting options within your “mondo-lithic” word processor.

Writer strips away all the cruft and gets you focused on the content. It has two “keyboard shortcuts” for you emacs fans: (ctrl+s) for save and (ctrl+n) for new. Think you can handle that, genius? If you can’t, there are some smallish, subdued links at the bottom of the browser window to help you do the same thing.

My favorite feature of the processor is the subtle way in which it focuses your eye on the text. As you type, the words in the area you are working are slightly more bold than the words you wrote a bit further up the page. As somebody who is a horrible typist, hunting and pecking along the keyboard at all times, every time I snap my head up to the screen, I see exactly where I am at, sharply delineated.

The other thing I just love about this little application is the “blog it” feature. I’ve been experimenting with many free options for writing content and exporting it to my blog (a custom-hosted wordpress blog). Due to its simplicity, this app is now the de facto standard for writing posts. When I am done writing the content of my post, I click “blog it,” enter the admin details for my wordpress account, and the content gets uploaded as a draft post to my dashboard. Nice! I love how even this is not over-complicated. The author of the app, a “developer for hire” by the name of John Watson has realized that his app is not a “fully integrated blog-posting solution” and instead just focused on helping you move the content to a place where you can add those last-minute html flourishes.

Signing up for an account is optional and only necessary if you intend to “save” files and access them from multiple computers. It’s about as easy as it gets, you just supply a unique username and password.

If you’re a blogger, student, or someone who writes fairly short snippets of text, anything other than a novel really, I’d recommend giving writer a try. There’s really no reason not to, considering the insanely low switching cost.

There is an absolutely fascinating article in the New Yorker related to Google’s Book Scanning/Search project and the pending furor over the copyright issues that this project is bringing to light. The results of this debate will have an impact on how you and I, dear readers, can expect to be able to find and access information in the future.

In this debate, we find authors and publishers pitted against search giants such as Google. Authors and publishers are frightened that they may be carved out of a potentially lucrative business and are insisting on a model which will allow them to receive royalties for their works. They’re also really scared that Google is scanning entire books (which makes sense given that they’re creating a searchable index of all the world’s knowledge) as opposed to the excerpts an academic might use in a research paper which are covered by “fair use”.

For their part, Google states that their use of these works is “transformative” and therefore not covered by copyright. Even in a search, Google only shows the pages surrounding the resultant selections. In their eyes, it’s the equivalent of a really detailed card catalog with the ability to search a selection and see if it meets your criteria before wlaking over to the shelf and picking up the book. You certainly cannot read the whole book through. Google also places restrictions on the number of pages that can be viewed/read by any one person out of any one work. Certainly these restrictions make it too much work to try and subvert them.

So where do I come down on this? I happen to think that creating digital copies of these books is incredibly important - books are ultimately temporary after all. History has taught us not to rely solely on one copy. Alexandria anyone? Have you ever lost a work on the computer while working on it? In my opinion, any enterprise taking on the task of scanning media and making it available more broadly is worthy of our admiration and support. It’s the potential monetization that puts everyone into a tizzy.

I am extremely concerned with what happens if Google manages to settle this lawsuit with the other parties. What will that mean for the other entities who are busy trying to make the same thing happen? Where will this leave competitors like Amazon in the discussion? Will smaller efforts be able to succeed or will they be priced out of the market by the precedent that this judgment would set? Must we accede all content to the mighty Google index?

Notice that nowhere in this debate have we yet spoken about what users/readers actually want and deserve. According to the New Yorker article, about 20% of all the books in existence are in the public domain. Let’s dismiss how ludicrously small this is for a moment and focus on what these constitute. These are generally older titles where the rights have lapsed or twhere there was never a copyright in the first place. Nobody fights over these and there are numerous efforts to bring this group of books into ready availability online. Another 10% of books are covered by copyright and currently in print. Nobody debates these much either since they typically constitute newer titles and represent precisely what copyright is intended to protect - the right of artists to make money off their works. It’s the other 70% that are the real buggers. The large majority of books are covered by copyright and not currently in-print. This leaves booklovers like myself in a position of having to track down a physical copy of an asset which is no longer produced. Thankfully, this has become easier in the age of the internet, but it has also built unassailable marketplaces around the truly rare and hard to find items. Why should we all not be able to benefit from knowledge which is failing to produce commercial value any further for the artists and publishers?

And so, the solution seems to me to be quite simple. We should enforce a “use it or lose it” policy on copyright holders. If, for instance, a book is no longer in-print and new copies fail to be circulated or made available to the market for some period of time at a reasonable cost, the copyright would be removed and the item would pass into the public domain, made freely available to the world - everyone with equal opportunity to profit off the work if they so desire. Why not? How many people still sell copies of “Moby Dick”, even though it is freely available in digital form in the public domain

The appeal of a “universal library” of all the world’s information is almost too much for me to bear. I want, I want, I want. It hurts me to think the reason we won’t such a thing is a relatively small cadre of people who wish to reserve the right to profit off their copyrighted material at some point in the future. Either you accept the business risk of making knowledge available or someone will do it for you, that should be our motto. It’s what the world deserves.

Go see what all the hubbub is about, check out Google Book Search.

Other takes on this story:

• Techdirt: If Google Gives In On Library Scanning — Will It Hurt Everyone?
• The Last Podcast: Google’s Book Search

While not generally within the theme of this blog (get used to it), today is the public launch of Blue Dot, a little startup enterprise I work at with a bunch of cool friends. We’re pretty excited to take the covers off and show it to the world, starting today with a little bit of a PR blitz.

You should try it out. Blue Dot is a great way to stay in touch with the the people that matter to you. As you browse the web, you can share anything that you find with a very simple click of a link that we put in your bookmarks toolbar. Over time, sharing all of the interesting things you’ve found builds out a really interesting representation of yourself. The site is really beautiful (if I do say so myself) and will hopefully crack the mainstream. If you try it out, I think you’ll find that it’s surprisingly social and fun to share things you discover online.

A couple of the Blue Dot folks (Kabir and Mohit) met with a local technology business writer earlier in the week. Lo and behold, we showed up prominently in today’s Seattle P-I. Booyaa!! Hello, world!

Later in the day, sometime post-5PM, Kabir will be presenting our launch announcement to the crowd of notable folks at Gnomedex 6.0, right down the street from us here in Seattle. We’re going to try and get someone to videotape that announcement. We’ll see if we can get it posted.

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