To book publishers and Hollywood
I have something to propose to publishers and film studios: let me “import” my collection of books and movies into my Kindle and Netflix accounts.
In a way, I’m asking them to let me do with my books and movies what Apple let me do with my music. Back in the day (when people actually bought CDs), you would import a CD into your iTunes account, providing you convenient access to your music on your computer and iPod. You only paid for a CD once – you didn’t have to purchase those songs again to listen to them through iTunes.
Why should’t I be able to do the same with my print books and DVD collection? Should I – and other consumers – even expect anything less, especially as media and content hosted in the cloud becomes the norm?
Maybe you could argue that books and movies aren’t consumed quite the same way as music is. For example, you might listen to the same song a hundred times over the course of a month. You’re less likely to do that with a book or movie, so it’s not as important to have immediate access to these media, and why bother letting people import them – right?
But why don’t we have that right regardless?
I have no idea how this would actually work logistically/operationally (provide proof of purchase??), or of any of the potential pitfalls (what’s to stop someone from borrowing my physical book or DVD collection to get free movies?) – but there’s got to be a way.
If any of you guys own a Kindle or have a Netflix account, is this something you’d like to see from these services?
I’ve been thinking for a really long time that it would be great if I could keep my collection of films and books online. Hell I’ve already paid for them, but now I have to go buy digital copies again? Not to mention the fact that so many of my books just don’t have digital copies at all…
One thought I had was that you might be able to ship them in to some local processing centre and pay a (hopefully small) fee to help you digitize all of your items–if it was the first time they had seen such an item, they would scan it themselves; if they already have it, they would just give you a digitally signed copy of what they already scanned, and either:
a) keep/dispose of the physical copy (honestly I don’t want hard copies of half my books and cds anyway)
b) send it back to you, but tag with an unobtrusive RF sticker it so they know that you’ve already “used up” your scan.
In fact, if you ensure that the files cannot subsequently change hands but only be transferred directly back to the original owner, would it be legal for this to be done by a third party with no affiliation to publisher? You’re not re-selling or re-showing or re-distributing the content so…
My feeling is there is definitely a market for the service (already people pay for personal content library software like delicious monster), and if it’s a third party then I think it’d be easy to build support into getting it onto your Kindle or NetFlix.
Being able to take all my books and digitize them would really make my day. I’ve been hesitant to get too attached to my Kindle because I don’t want the waste the money I’ve spent on my book collection. I see Amazon as someone who figures this out because the more they get us loving the Kindle the more future digital copies the old school paperback crowd will buy.