see, this is why i don't own a kindle

[piranha]

and will never do so, no matter how spiffy they make them.

i don't want amazon deleting my copies because they've decided "there is a problem". that business model reeks to high heaven.

the whole idea that ebooks are licensed displeases me to begin with, but the big-brother approach amazon takes scared me off their product from the very start.

Comments

[afuna]

Wow, that is *messed up*.

[explorer0713]

I never got the appeal of a kindle in the first place. I guess that is because my library system has free downloadable books (and music cds and videos). Sure you have to use their special player and the downloads expire and become unplayable after a week - but the player is free, too, and you can turn around and check the book out again if you still need to finish it. All you need is a valid library card - and that's free too.

[piranha]

libraries are great, and i use them a lot (though mine doesn't offer those features yet). but while i love them, i still prefer to have my own books, for lots of reasons, such as:

- i can read whatever, whenever, however the mood strikes me. no special player, no need to be online, no time limit.
- libraries don't necessarily carry what i am interested in reading (certainly not my favourite erotica, nor foreign language material).
- i can search, annotate, and hyperlink my own books.
- nobody can track easily what i read.

having my own reader and my own books that can't be touched by anyone without my explicit permission are important to me. now, that reader isn't gonna be a kindle, but there are plenty that come without those sorts of drawbacks.

[matthewdaly]

I don't think people have talked enough about that particular peril of DRM. You can have faith that your content provider isn't "evil", but if they retain the power to modify your library without your consent then they can be compelled to do so by a court order. What happens when someday someone files a libel lawsuit and follows it up with a demand that the offending writing be expunged from the public record? Darn it, it's really hard to even talk about this story without ironically calling it "Orwellian", y'know?

orwellian, ha ha

[piranha]

i think it's not been talked about much because it's not inherent to DRM, it's just how amazon has decided to do their distribution. i don't think this possibility was obvous to most people before; they just saw the spiffy "get yer books here any time a day from anywhere" aspect of it.

and now that they have shown how the system can be abused, i bet a lot more people will talk about it. and especially so because the orwellian part couldn't be more clear; that part is almost too good to be true.

Re: orwellian, ha ha

[flarenut]

Amazon's version is actually much less malignant than a lot of others. Many DRM'd music download merchants set things up so that their players would have to phone home on a regular basis to get unlock keys. Then the companies went out of business, or simply decided to stop selling DRM'd music, and poof went the servers. And everyone's purchases with them.

Pretty much everywhere I've commented on this, I've been pushing the idea that this is an enormous security target for Amazon. Somewhere they have the code that will send out a signal to wipe whatever SKU is specified from everyone's Kindles, and unless there's a physically separated private key required to make that happen, this is just a bad capability to have sitting there.

[trulybloom]

On the plus side, they did REFUND the money people had spent. But that is the ONLY thing that wasn't WRONG about what they did.

I've never liked this whole licensing business - whether it's software, music, or books.

OTOH, at least with software, I've never liked the alternative either - that they must come out with new, somehow-updated versions to continue their revenue stream. I feel like, more often than not, it encourages them to put out less-than-perfect products - always figuring that they'll fix it in the next version, which they then use as a selling-point to encourage people to purchase that next version. There just isn't enough emphasis on bug testing in the programming community, imo.

DRM certainly discourages me from purchasing electronic copies of music, though I will still purchase the odd single here and there. For books, though, I like the option of being able to loan a book to a friend, or donate it to the library, or sell it back to the bookstore. E-books, at least at the moment, eliminate all those things and that's a pretty big negative for me.

AND there's still something to be said for the feel of paper beneath one's fingertips.

[green_knight]

This one is a genuine problem - someone sold the book illegally (eg, they assumed it was out of copyright in the US and it wasn't), but physical books would, of course, not have been recalled. Instead, I feel, the full purchase price ought to have gone to the copyright holder. (Yes, that would mean that the selling company was out of pocket... serve them right.)

What alarmed me much more is the story that I cannot, at this moment, verify, about the Kindle owner who had enough problems with his device that he tried to download a file a number of times... to be told that he'd exceeded a limit and would to pay again to get his books. Even just the possibility of that turns me right off the idea. If I pay good money for a book - particularly if I pay the equivalent of a paperback book for an e-book - I want to ensure that it will stay around.

Experience says, what with migrating computers and crashes and just losing track of files, things don't last anyway, but I want to at least have the choice.

[crantz]

Not that they're likely to come to Canada anytime soon. >:|

[piranha]

yeah, both electronic distribution rights and digital publishing rights take a long time to be negotiated. but it obviously can be done, so sooner or later the thing is gonna arrive here and be hyped to the moon.