Open Letter to Amazon

Dear Amazon,

Here are some serious issues needing your attention:

1) ePub support: This is the mp3 of the book industry. It’s pure corporate selfishness not to allow me to read this format on my device. Don’t be Apple and tell me how, and under what conditions, I can use your hardware. How about building a machine that unabashedly “just works”?

2) Better PDF support:

• I want to be able to read most PDFs in portrait mode without needing a magnifying glass
• To do this, you need better zoom tools. 120% would work nice.
• Being able to highlight text while zoomed in would be nice.
• Actually zooming in on the area I selected would be very helpful. Why provide me the option then not perform the function?
• Even better, build a script that zooms in to the text margins automatically.
• And why, exactly, do PDF’s I email my Kindle never arrive?

3) Decripple the browser: Why, exactly, won’t you let me open PDFs from Dropbox or anywhere else on the web? This is not a hardware or software limitation, this is intentional crippling. Flagging it as “experimental” is not an excuse.

4) Decripple WiFi: I know you want to sell more 3G units, but it’s unbelievable that I can neither connect to my work WiFi network nor ad-hoc WiFi from my phone or computer. This is not a hardware or software limitation, this is intentional crippling.

5) I know this one is crazy – but how about controls for the music player? Like choosing an album. Or going back. Flagging it as “experimental” is not an excuse.

6) Open your code and let people fix these mistakes in a timely manner or let them build a better OS than what you have now. There’s nothing innovative in this code worth protecting. Learn from Nokia – open weak code to save the platform.

Regards,
– Trey

Discourse and the iPhone

Discourse is the framework in which we speak and by its nature pulls on how we think about a subject. It’s the lie that’s not a lie, the cheap “spin” of politicians but also that which defines how we define our world, illuminating certain facts at the expense of the greater whole. Foucault argued that it made modern societies nearly totalitarian in that we policed ourselves in what what we spoke and how we thought. In other words, work in the social sciences like the DSMV – the Diagnosis and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – are shackles on whole our being not because it’s being enforced on us from the outside, but because internalize these sorts of codified standards of thinking and behaving and often willingly commit ourselves to mental institutions if we fall outside it’s norms. A curious facet of Foucault’s thinking was that he thought it inescapable. You can never destroy discourse, only replace it with a new one. We are, in essence, as blind about the problems of our day as my ancestors were about slavery in theirs.

Take that idea and look at this New York Time’s article about the iPhone supply chain. It’s a discourse that reinforces, uncritically, the global capitalism discourse. The title, alone, is striking: “Supply Chain for iPhone Highlights Costs in China“. We’re told that the bill of materials, the cost of all the parts that goes into an iPhone, is $187.50. The phone retails for $600, “though the cost to consumers is less, subsidized by AT&T in exchange for service contracts.” The total cost of labor at assembly is thought to be about 7%, but everyone depends “on Chinese factories to hold down prices. And those factories now seem likely to pass along their cost increases.” So now companies like Foxconn are planning to abandon Shenzhen for poorer provinces where they can pay even less to worker.