Why I only buy e-books from indie publishers

Nikodemus Siivola blogged about the $2 surcharge Amazon extracts from Kindle customers outside the US. I use my Kindle every day, and I buy e-books to read on a regular basis, spending around $10-30 a month (depending on how much time I have for reading). I have owned a Kindle for almost a year now, but I didn't know about this surcharge: I guess the reason for this is that none of the money I spent on e-books went to Amazon.

There are two reasons for this: their non-competitive pricing and DRM. First, I am reluctant to pay more for an e-book than I would for a paperback, yet I frequently saw e-books on Amazon that cost more than their paperback versions. I understand that Amazon is trying to extract economic rents using its strong position in this market, but I would feel like an idiot if I participated in this scheme.

Regarding DRM: I like my Kindle very much, but I think that in the long run e-book readers will become even more of a commodity (like laptops or cell phones), and I don't wish my e-book collection to be tied to Amazon. Call me old-fashioned, but I do want to own the content I pay for, especially if I paid almost as much as I would pay for a hardcopy. So I only buy DRM-free books.

I mostly read literature on my Kindle. I buy quite a bit of sci-fi from Baen books — they also have a lot of books available for free, knowing full well that good sci-fi is addictive for some people anyway, but they don't exploit this: most of their books sell for $5-6. I haven't head a chance to check out Calibre's DRM-free book store, but it looks very promising.

I think that unless Amazon changes its pricing policy and considers offering DRM-free content, there is very little chance that I will buy anything from them. If you know some indie authors or publishers who sell reasonably priced DRM-free e-books, I would be interested in hearing about them.

LinkedIn: an obnoxious spam engine

I have to admit that I don't see the point of so-called social networking sites, but I recognize the possibility that some people may find them useful, and I am just not one of them. Nevertheless, I still fail to see why random people I have never met want to add me as a contact. I get invitations from these people on LinkedIn almost daily, and to make it worse, LinkedIn then sends me reminders about them. Note that I am not even registered on their damn site. I don't have a profile, and I have no intention of creating one.

Which presents another problem: I couldn't find a way of opting out from these invitations without creating a profile. Clever, isn't it? They send you spam, and then they are trying to sucker people into registering to stop spam. I could just start marking these messages spam, but I think that my spam filter would take a while to learn this, and in any case, I don't want to add noise to the Bayesian model just to create false positives for relevant e-mail. The cleanest solution I found is putting the whole linkedin.com domain on my blacklist.

I want to emphasize that this is a rare distinction: with spam filters getting so clever (thank you, Gmail!), I haven't had to manually blacklist a sender in years. Congratulations are in order: dear LinkedIn, you are a really obnoxious engine for spam! I sincerely hope that you vanish to oblivion soon.

Goodbye Ubuntu, hello Debian

My road to Ubuntu

I have started using Linux around 1998. I remember that I wanted to try out several distributions before settling on the one the "best" one, but I had a dial-up connection (28kbps, if I remember correctly) and downloading all of them seemed infeasible, so I mail-ordered a set of CDs that contained Red Hat, Slackware and Debian. I think I decided on Debian because I liked the clean and transparent package management system, especially APT which seemed way ahead of other distributions at that time. Linux became my primary OS within a few months: even though it didn't have a fraction of the tools that are available today, it had everything I needed.

A lot happened in the Linux world since then. I don't know when (if?) Linux "conquered" the desktop, but in 2003 it became mature enough that I installed Linux (Debian, of course) on my parent's desktop. Neither of my parents are very computer-savvy, but they also found Linux much nicer than Windows. I think what mattered the most to them is its stability: I would update the software once in a while, test that everything was working (and fix it when it didn't), but in the meantime, the system was rock-solid. This was important as I no longer lived in the same city, so I couldn't just drop by to fix computer problems on a short notice, which I had to do with Windows.

When they got another computer (I think it was around 2005), I replaced Debian with Ubuntu, figuring that it would provide a more polished user experience, and I was pleased with the result. I installed Ubuntu on all computers that family members asked me to help with, and in 2009, I installed Ubuntu on a new laptop I got. It was a bit more polished than Debian, especially when it came to setup things like printers and network drives. I knew how to do those things via the relevant config files, but I appreciated the GUI.

Why I moved back to Debian

I think that I like Linux because it allows me to concentrate on my work: I came to accept that sometimes setting things up required a bit of tweaking, but once I configured something, it would work exactly the way I liked it. I welcome changes if they make sense (eg a feature extension), but I don't see the point of gratuitous ones. In retrospect, I should have considered the moving of window buttons a warning sign, especially when Mark Shuttleworth refused to move them back despite popular demand. The fix was easy, but the whole move was totally unnecessary and resulted in a lot of confusion: until I fixed it (I really did give it a try for a few days), my desktop just felt like a car with the gas and brake pedals interchanged.

The controversy surrounding Unity was the real eye-opener for me. I dist-upgraded Ubuntu on my parents current computer (a perfectly good desktop for office work, around 2 years old) and was informed that the system doesn't have the resources to run the damn thing. I tried it out on my laptop briefly, and realized that all that glitz and glitter is unnecessary and a waste of resources (most importantly battery power), and Ubuntu was trying to force yet another gratuitous UI change on its users. I backed up my data, wiped my HD, and within an hour, I was back to good old Debian. Which still rocks.

Why Debian is perfect for me

In order to answer that question, here is a sample of the desktop software that I use (of course I use a lot of other programs, eg Git or SBCL, but there is no purpose in enumerating all of them):

desktop environment

XFCE (with some Gnome applets in the panel)

e-mail

mutt, offlineimap, msmtp

shell

zsh, running under screen in yakuake (with the Tango color scheme — I got used to that from Gnome)

editing

emacs, TeX Live, AUCTeX, org-mode, …

browser

chrome

password manager

Revelation

newsfeeds

Liferea

This is a pretty eclectic mix with no overall GUI concept — for example, it has programs from Gnome and KDE — but I have come to like each of these programs and they work very well for me. Debian testing has pretty recent releases for all of them, and more importantly, the idea of Debian developers forcing any particular choice on how I set up my desktop never even comes up at any point. They provide excellent software, take care of packaging new releases and fixing bugs, but I doubt that any of them would even entertain the idea of pushing some wacky desktop du jour concept on their users. I think that they have better things to do with their time, including maintaining the best Linux distro out there, and that's the way I like it.

The icing on the cake

Compared to my previous desktop (which was plain vanilla Gnome, Ubuntu/Maverick), the above setup appears to be much less resource intensive. I have plenty of RAM and CPU power, but I noticed that my laptop gives me about 20% more battery time than it used to. I cannot help but love Debian. It is good to be back!