I think something that's maybe being exposed here is that it isn't clear how to make digital products work together and that the incentives are to keep it that way. Walled gardens are being built inside basically every major tech company. Most aren't even illegal.
Here's a simple example I ran into recently:
I last weekend I created a hackathon project that can find the location in an audio book of a photo of a page from an physical book. The idea is it lets you switch back and forth between your physical reading experience and an audio book. It wasn't even all that hard and worked way better than I'd ever expected. I could probably get it polished and pretty usable within a couple of weeks of full time work, but without access to the audio and ebook files it's impossible. With DRM the default that access is basically impossible.
I'm hoping to get Overdrive to implement it. I don't really care about any small potential profit it might generate and I know someone from there and they have the licensing and relationships to maybe make it work, but I feel like the world would be a better place if any company with an idea like that could just go out and do it.
Yes google is trying to make search more of a wall around their garden, but everyone else is just building there's higher and we have laws to enforce their right to do so.
Yep. Almost mentioned that here. My original plan was just to do that in a more open way, but I realized it had a bad combination of being hard and not that cool.
Besides I and plenty of other people prefer real books.
Here's a simple example I ran into recently:
I last weekend I created a hackathon project that can find the location in an audio book of a photo of a page from an physical book. The idea is it lets you switch back and forth between your physical reading experience and an audio book. It wasn't even all that hard and worked way better than I'd ever expected. I could probably get it polished and pretty usable within a couple of weeks of full time work, but without access to the audio and ebook files it's impossible. With DRM the default that access is basically impossible.
I'm hoping to get Overdrive to implement it. I don't really care about any small potential profit it might generate and I know someone from there and they have the licensing and relationships to maybe make it work, but I feel like the world would be a better place if any company with an idea like that could just go out and do it.
Yes google is trying to make search more of a wall around their garden, but everyone else is just building there's higher and we have laws to enforce their right to do so.