After I graduated from school, I got a new account with an ISP in Minneapolis, where I moved that fall. For a while I still used one of my Wellesley addresses, but eventually it just got easier to keep everything in one place, and that became my primary address for the next 12 years.

It was easier to keep it than change it, even after we moved back to New England and we had to pay their overpriced shell account charge. But now they’re not going to offer shell accounts any longer, and so… change. It’s been surprisingly less painful than I expected it to be. I have a final group of people to email about it, but then I should be done.

My main concern is that I’m going to discover an account to which I don’t usually log in (and thus don’t recall the password) which still directs to that account. I fear it’s pretty much inevitable that it’s going to happen, no matter how much I wrack my brains to think of places where I’ve registered.

This time I’ve bought the domain for the address, so even if we have to change ISPs in the future, the address itself should remain live.

I hate it. Hate hate hate it.

Not the concept, exactly, but the implementation leaves much to be desired.

Here is the deal. We live in one of the most densely populated areas in the country. And yet it doesn’t matter: broadband here is just as much of a near monopoly as it is elsewhere. The choice is cable (Comcast), which has hidden quotas and throttles connections randomly if it doesn’t like your downloading patterns, or DSL, which is never as fast as advertised and is administered by a company of imbeciles that thought it could quadruple in size with no problem and is now on the verge of bankruptcy and is being investigated by three states. Fiber is available in other parts of town, but not ours. Satellite wi-fi is a joke.

So the lesser of two evils is the DSL (we really hate Comcast). But it’s spluttery and slow. Stream? Ha ha ha. And here’s where the problem comes in. On some sites, such as YouTube, I can start the video, pause it, and then let the buffer fill with the entire video, allowing me to watch it all without stutters and pauses every one second. On most sites, this does not happen; the amount allowed to be buffered is so miniscule that the video is thus rendered completely unwatchable.

Now, I can see the logic: they don’t want people caching the whole file and then saving it. Except, psst, video people? I don’t WANT your crappy lo-res flash files. I want to watch them and then move on. But you make that impossible for me! So I have to go and find a place where I can download it instead, often in HD archival quality.

So anyway, the latest kerfluffle in the publishing world is the showdown between Macmillan and Amazon.com. As a complete outsider, I understand it as this: Macmillan wants Amazon to charge more for certain e-books, and Amazon wants to keep the price capped at 9.99. Amazon took the unorthodox step of removing the ability to purchase Macmillan material from its site, though they have since supposedly backed down (this is debatable — reports are that some items are still not able to be bought)

I guess my first question is, how is this situation different from Apple’s original effort to force the music industry to cap the price of a song download at .99? I fail to see much of a difference. The music industry howled because, omg, if a song was popular enough, clearly they ought to be charging what the market could bear and no less. They wanted to find the exact balance between volume and price where they maximized profits. Apple thought .99 was a good price point and a psychological barrier, plus -they- wanted to maximize the profits from sales of the portable devices, made by them, tied to their download store.

Sounds pretty much the same to me!

The publishers are on crack if they don’t think this exact situation will happen again if Apple really tries to make an iWords store for book downloads.

I’ve heard a lot of perspectives on the amazon/macmillan showdown, from the side of authors, from the side of retailers, from the side of publishers. But what I haven’t really heard is the side of the consumer. Well, I am neither publisher nor retailer, nor am I an author at this point in my life. What I am is a consumer who has watched the price of books skyrocket over the past 20 years. The rise of the hardcover and the trade paperback have vaulted the price of books that used to be $2 and $3 to $8, $13, $25. I can hardly think of anything else besides college tuition and health insurance that has risen in price at such an astonishing rate.

What does this tell me? Like the health industry, the publishing industry has a model of service that is broken. Their situation isn’t exactly the same as the music industry, though, so I’m not sure the solution can be the same either. In the music industry, most people don’t actually want a whole album. They want the two or three songs that they like and nothing more. Portable music is also a much more flexible format than a physical cd — so in many ways, the downloading consumer is getting a much better product than someone who spends the cash and buys the entire album on cd. (Not including DRM which negates the value of the download completely).

For publishing, this doesn’t work, since no one just wants three chapters out of twenty. You need the whole book or nothing. On the other hand, a physical book is, so far, more flexible than the same book on an ereader. You can write on it. You can share it with a friend. You can resell it. You can donate it to a charity. Taken care of, a book may last for 100 years or more.

You can do none of that with any of the current ebook models. This makes them far less valuable and their price should be lowered accordingly. The accessible lifetime of any current ebook is, by my best estimate, perhaps 5-10 years. And it could be much much shorter. Add onto this that to make an ebook, the distribution cost is pretty much nil. No shipping, no printing, no extra copies that have to be pulped later on. As a consumer, I’m not willing to pay more than $5 for a book in such a limited, crippled format. Which is one reason why I haven’t bought a Kindle and why I have no intention of buying any ereaders until this has been sorted.