This is much simpler for us than if we had to generate all those e-books ourselves, and it gives you a great deal more control over what you get. It’s also cheaper! This page has the details.

This is from amazon.com

Top U.S. newspapers including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post; top magazines including TIME, Atlantic Monthly, and Forbes—all auto-delivered wirelessly.

change daily to monthly and forget the auto delivery

i meant:
> why put a chip in people’s hands, then go and neuter it?

-bowerbird

not currently. and amazon might never turn on that capacity.
(there’s a chip inside, of course, so the possibility of putting
programs on the machine is always there, at least in theory.)

and i agree completely with you that, without some kind of
programmability, e-books will be unnecessarily hobbled…

indeed, i believe that to be an astute observation.

and that’s why i feel that these dumb dedicated devices
will eventually be rejected by the public as too limited…
why put a chip in people’s hands, then so and neuter it?
(the only “good” reason to do that is to enable the d.r.m.,
which is another reason the public will reject that model.)

my only quibble with you is that — in my humble opinion –
you overstated the difficulty and cost of creating that option.

-bowerbird

true. but once you’ve programmed enough e-book apps,
you know what the parameters of variability need to be,
so you’re much smarter when it comes to creating an app
that’s flexible enough to be considered as “programmable”.

> A non-programmable e-book device such as the Kindle
> runs only one program: the one built in to the device by Amazon.
> A programmable e-book device has to accept programs written by
> absolutely anyone, even people who don’t know what they are doing.

the “device” you’re talking about is a computer, obviously, so
the ability to “accept programs written by absolutely anyone”
isn’t all that big of a deal.

but more to the point, above and beyond the programmability of
the _device_, you can create an _app_ that gives a content-creator
enough flexibility that they can create a book that is “programmed”.

the degree to which this resembles a traditional “computer language”
is up in the air, but given today’s scripting languages, it can be broad.

there is also a large degree to which it can be _implicit_. for instance,
the treatment of the items in a table of contents as _links_, or even as
_buttons_ that act as links, is something that doesn’t need to be explicit.

-bowerbird

I should say that a programmer of e-book apps is not the same as a designer of programmable e-book devices.

A non-programmable e-book device such as the Kindle runs only one program: the one built in to the device by Amazon.

A programmable e-book device has to accept programs written by absolutely anyone, even people who don’t know what they are doing.

On the Kindle, there does not need to be any restriction as to what can be loaded or installed on it. On a programmable device, there does: the programs will have bugs that cause them to fail or even cause other programs to fail.

This is acceptable in computers because we know that this is the way that computers behave, but it is not acceptable in appliances. My refrigerator should not suddenly fail to store fish simply because I have bought the wrong brand of milk.

The best example of a device that attempts to be programmable without being like a computer is the mobile phone – and the investment that mobile phone manufacturers are putting into making their devices both programmable and reliable is immense. Whether it’s the iPhone, with a sandboxed environment and rigorous conformity testing, or the Blackberry, relying on Java for security, investments have to be made in both architecture and infrastructure.

In a market where so many e-books can be passive documents, the benefits of programmability may not be enough to justify the additional investment.

as a long-time programmer of various e-book apps,
i can tell you with confidence that that’s not really true.

-bowerbird