Borrowing a Kindle Book from the Library

I finally got around to trying this myself, and it works pretty good.

The library site is nowhere near as good as Amazon’s for searching, browsing, or choosing books. But it works.

In fact you get thrown to Amazon’s site at least once during the “checkout” process (which requires no money of course).

But I can say I’ve tried it, and I can show others how to use it now.

I’d like to think I could buy less e-books, because I can get books from the library now on my Kindle, and I’m not particularly interested in reading things twice. But the website has to get better first, and I have some concerns around availability – from the little I could tell it looked like a lot of the books were out – supply exceeding demand at least during the honeymoon period here. Time will tell.

I *WAS* a 3 dvd account on Netflix

They were getting me for roughly $20/mo with the tax. That seems like a lot, but when we moved outside the town lines we found we had a hard time getting the dvds back to the rental place, and many months it cost us more than that for late charges, so the roughly $16 Netflix was charging at the time actually saved us money.

The costs rose a couple of time, including at the beginning of 2011 for 3 or 4 dollars. Now they want to raise it another 6 or 8. I cancelled the dvd portion of our contract the same day! I can't encourage that kind of mis-management.

I figured it out. I would be paying about $17 for the 3 dvds (meaning I can have 3 dvds out at any one time). Now interestingly that's about what I was paying when I signed up, why should that cause me heartburn? Because I would also have to pay an additional amount for the streaming service, $8 I think it was. I'll hang on to the streaming service for now, as it's cheap and we are still finding things to watch on there. But with the money I am saving on the dvds, I can rent 4 or 5 movies a month from Amazon or iTunes (at $3-4 per movie), and avoid dvds altogether. As there were many nights the Netflix dvds just sat, this will probably work out in my favor. I'll also check out Hulu again, as I have been ignoring them since they put out their premium subscription with ads deal.

Here's the bottom line. There are thousands (tens of thousands?) of great TV episodes and movies out there. Costs completely amortized by first run and syndication. They are making no money while they are being sat on and hid away. It's a gold mine. Netflix has demonstrated that digital streaming is scalable and cost-efficient.  People have shown their willingness to pay. Why, oh why do these media companies continue to lock the stuff away! The last 3 episodes? I'm not going to pay for that. Now give me the first 6 seasons, that's something I'll pay for.

Netflix, this was a stumble. You lost my dvd charges, and I’m going to carefully consider if the streaming is really worth it. I could trade that cost for 2 more of newer movies as well.

Zune hijacking Win7 libraries now optional

At some point in the past the excellent and free  Zune media player for Windows 7 changed from having it’s own configurable watched folders to tying into Windows “Libraries” for music, videos, and pictures, which was highly annoying if the media in your libraries was any way a sub- or super-set of the media you wanted in Zune. Obviously somebody heard my cries of annoyance, because today I noticed that something had changed with my watched folders, and while checking on them in Zune settings, I found a new option to divorce Zune and libraries, which I quickly utilized. Thank you Microsoft.

We dropped the ball again – Internet TV is dead

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_12/b4171038593210.htm

I was wondering why TV shows and whole channels were quickly disappearing from Hulu, why network websites were forcing me to watch shows soon after airtime as the number of episodes online dropped from all to one season to 7 to 3.

I had been waiting with glee to see Internet TV take off, reach the tipping point where online advertising provided the same amount of revenue, and then more revenue, than the cable company middlemen brought in, so that we could cut them out and hit the golden age of ala carte TV shows.

I was so frustrated when we lost the battle with the music companies, and then the movie companies. And let me be clear here about what I mean by the battle. The battle, the war, is to destroy the big media companies that have had a chokehold on what we watch and listen to for decades, and how much it costs. The internet was supposed to be the great leveler, the free shortcut that would allow content producers to save billions, passing the savings on to us, and give us back the right to choose what we like and don’t like, finally providing content producers a way to let the art get judged on it’s own merits, not on the looks of the artist or how much creative control they would sign away.

So don’t think we won either of those battles. The music and movie industries may have had some shocks, some lost business. The model may have shifted slightly. But the big 5 or so companies in charge of everything are right where they were, with all the money still flowing through their hands, and all the decisions still coming from the suits and bean counters. They bungled it for sure, fumbled the ball, but it doesn’t matter, because they picked it right back up and carried on to a touchdown.

And now we hear that the TV game is lost as well. The big cable companies have arrived at a workable model to keep control. I was hoping to see them become “dumb pipes”, just providers of internet bandwidth, with content creators free to be judged on their merits, with billions and billions of middleman cost dollars taken right out of the model such that internet advertising would more than cover the bill. But no. They fought back with bandwidth caps, hobbling Internet TV before it had a chance to fight. Network neutrality was also a gambit in this chess game. And the plan outlined in the article linked above is the KO punch, using their heavyweight muscle to force the key content channels to take their content offline and put it behind the cable paywall.

Oh I’m just sick about this.

Thanks Dwight Silverman http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/houstonchronicle/techblog/~3/s-_O3WnHeJ8/linkpost_3122010_1.html for finding this.

Mac Mini to HDMI with HDCP and digital audio

http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=104&cp_id=10428&cs_id=1042802&p_id=6331&seq=1&format=2

This is great, a solution for connecting your newer Macs, including the Mini, to your TV, without losing the HD video and surround sound audio.

There have been other solutions for connecting Mini DisplayPort, which is the video port connector for newer Macs, to your TV. You could convert to VGA, DVI, or even HDMI. However most of the adapters available cost you HDCP, the content protection mechanism required to pass true HD video to your TV. Even if they did support HDCP, Mini DisplayPort does not pass analog or digital audio, so no audio was passed over the HDMI connection. You were stuck with PC sound, or certain adapters might pass in analog (stereo) audio via USB audio. But this adapter actually uses the TosLink connector (same as the analog stereo connector but a digital connection) to get the surround sound audio and patch it into the HDMI connection to your TV. Wild! And if you know monoprice, you know that this is rock-bottom cheap to boot!

Paul's digital media series

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/#dm
(look for the ones that say "core")

Video:
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/dm_core_video.asp
Music :
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/dm_core_music.asp
Music Ripping:
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/dm_core_music_rip.asp
Music Mgt:
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/dm_core_music_mgmt.asp

Good stuff!