61–70 of 297 posts
The discussion is also old. I realized that I end up lending only a small fraction of books to other people, and my kids will probably not care about most of my books. Storage of paper books also costs money, so rebuying the few books I want to pass on or reread may be cheaper than buying and keeping physical copies of books. So I chose ebooks.
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Inconvenience? It's really not that complicated. You download them from a web interface and you drag and drop them into Calibre (with a de-DRM plugin installed). Done, they're now available together with all the ebooks that you got from other sources. Having all the purchased ebooks in one place is more convenient for me, not less. The alternative isn't a different book store, it's pirating. While I do have an apprec…
> Inconvenience? It's really not that complicated. You're joking, right? DRM-stripping is inherently unreliable, by definition. It's a last resort only , and we shouldn't be expected to deal with it.
> we shouldn't be expected to deal with it
Agreed, and with this as for many other things perhaps one day (after the revolution) we won't. But railing against the universe won't make books available for me to read today.
Won't the books remain on the reader device, even if the store closes? The discussion is also old. I realized that I end up lending only a small fraction of books to other people, and my kids will probably not care about most of my books. Storage of paper books also costs money, so rebuying the few books I want to pass on or reread may be cheaper than buying and keeping physical copies of books. So I chose ebooks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Inconvenience? It's really not that complicated. You download them from a web interface and you drag and drop them into Calibre (with a de-DRM plugin installed). Done, they're now available together with all the ebooks that you got from other sources. Having all the purchased ebooks in one place is more convenient for me, not less. The alternative isn't a different book store, it's pirating. While I do have an apprec…
one could argue that you not paid for that kind of usage and basically pirating in the sense that you use it without permission. It has probably even been denied explicitly to you to break the DRM too. In some countries its even illegal by default to circumvent digital protection measurements. Just saying, you probably could directly pirate the books too. Putting your money where your rights are respected and you are…
The worst thing that could happen to me is that I could have my Amazon account terminated. Everything physical on Amazon gets slapped with an additional $60-80 of taxes (even if the item itself is $10-$20), so I really don't use Amazon for anything else but its bookstore.
Books take months or years to write, and I want to award that behavior with whichever percentage of my $10 ends up in the author's pockets. Don't get me wrong, if I see a book I want to read on Humble Bundle on Kobo, I'll click on it first. But if I don't, I'll pick Amazon over Google Play Books, this Microsoft's one, or any other DRM-enabled store. Not because Amazon is in any way better than them, but because I know I can break the DRM effortlessly and reliably, while still pitching in something to the author. If that wasn't the case, I wouldn't look for a different store — I'd still be pirating.
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Maybe. But these are all hypotheticals. The article presents it as I should be morally disgusted by this move. I don't really see it.
You're getting down-voted, but I agree with you on this particular point. The vendor is providing a full refund to customers including an additional $25 credit for customers who used the annotation service. DRM is an annoying customer unfriendly solution to a problem that I'm not convinced exists... but people have been given full access to these books for a while. They've been able to read them from date of purchase…
Won't the books remain on the reader device, even if the store closes? The discussion is also old. I realized that I end up lending only a small fraction of books to other people, and my kids will probably not care about most of my books. Storage of paper books also costs money, so rebuying the few books I want to pass on or reread may be cheaper than buying and keeping physical copies of books. So I chose ebooks.
I assume books are encrypted on the ebook reader and the reader operates by going to Microsoft each time someone tries to open a book and getting an encryption key show the book unencrypted.
There were cases were people's Amazon accounts were cancelled, so they couldn't buy new books from Amazon. The books they already bought remained on their kindles, though.
There were also cases of Amazon deleting books from kindles, when the books became illegal.
Any reason to assume Microsoft operated in a very different way?
They refund them. Why is this an issue?
People bought these ebooks for a reason. Refunding solves nothing if you want the ebook. If someone replaced my bookcase with a check i would be rather pissed too.
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Hypothetical? Every major ebook platform offers annotations (and I just checked — this platform did too). MS apparently recognizes the additional inconvenience to people who have annotated, as they are offering an extra $25 to anyone who has made annotations. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4497396 I agree that this closure is not world-ending, and I think the point of the article is that if MS can do this t…
What do people annotate generally that's worth 25$? I'm genuinely curious.
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Isn't it technically a crime though? That's the kicker: the legislative backing to the schemes. Its a matter of time until this GS are so locked down that circumvention becomes impractical, even if its several years in the future. The 'it doesn't work' argument is temporary unless there is enough pushback (as happened with music, thankfully)
DRM is technically a crime, too. It's infringing upon First Sale Doctrine. You, as someone buying media, actually have rights to what you purchase. The general public has just accepted the industry trampling on those rights and lobbying for laws that conflict with them.
I didn't start buying ebooks from Amazon/Kindle until I realized it was relatively easy to break its DRM. I've never used the files anywhere else but I keep a cracked copy of every purchase just in case. That old story about "1984" being removed gave me too much of a negative impression.