51–60 of 66 posts
I have recently observed that buying and using ebooks is like being put into a time machine and being forced to re-live the early days of digital music downloads. Do we seriously have to re-learn all those lessons in every single industry that starts to shift to digital content?
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I think the answer is yes -- because people who grew up with one business model find it very, very hard to give it up, logic be damned. I'm at the point now where I have a lot of money invested in my kindle e-books. E-books that Amazon says that they really own and won't let me share with folks (until now) Wonder how much abuse the average user is going to take before they decide that a book is a book. You buy a book…
Daniel, while I agree with what you said, I must in the interest of fairness say that I still see a flaw in the argument. people who grew up with one business model find it very, very hard to give it up, logic be damned ... Wonder how much abuse the average user is going to take before they decide that a book is a book You're assuming (as am I) that e-books are the same as dead trees, and it's the publishers holding…
There's an entire democratic process to change what people expect out of their relationship to government. It involves political parties, speeches, elections, debates, making compromises with the opposing party, and finally resolution.
What we find over and over again is that when folks try to just use the courts and the legal system to implement change, it always results in a lot of friction. There are still people mad in the States about Roe v. Wade, and that was many decades ago.
So the way things change makes a difference. Perhaps the lawyers can browbeat the society into changing. I kind of doubt it -- especially for something this big.
Theoretically yes, anything is possible. We could easily live in a world where publishers charge many times for the same material based on all sorts of random factors like format, time of use, etc. But in reality I just don't see a change of the magnitude taking place without all of the political paraphernalia associated with such changes, no matter how many people they stick in jail or sue.
It's a shame, because just like in the net neutrality issue, the companies could have avoided this by using common sense in their licensing and distribution policies, instead of fixating on the letter of the law (which nobody cared about anyway until mp3s came along)
The minute my grandma can't treat an ebook like she did her old paperbacks the publishers have lost the game. It might be another hundred years (so it wouldn't matter to the publishers and probably be considered by them a "win"), but the laws will eventually catch up to where the people are.
I imagine this will play out like pot legalization -- long and difficult, with a generation of politicians having to pass from the scene before the posturing stops and common sense takes hold.
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Anyone know why it takes so long? Shouldn't it be possible to crack the DRM on Kindle (or other) ebooks and pirate them? I thought the reason it was so hard to pirate books in the past was because they had to be scanned (and preferably OCRed).
Kindle was cracked at least a year ago. I haven't actually used it, but from what I read it's not a crypto flaw allowing the data to be extracted, but more analogous to the "analog hole". The existence of on-screen readers allows software to be written that walks through the book a page at a time, and rips the content in that way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the answer is yes -- because people who grew up with one business model find it very, very hard to give it up, logic be damned. I'm at the point now where I have a lot of money invested in my kindle e-books. E-books that Amazon says that they really own and won't let me share with folks (until now) Wonder how much abuse the average user is going to take before they decide that a book is a book. You buy a book…
Daniel, while I agree with what you said, I must in the interest of fairness say that I still see a flaw in the argument. people who grew up with one business model find it very, very hard to give it up, logic be damned ... Wonder how much abuse the average user is going to take before they decide that a book is a book You're assuming (as am I) that e-books are the same as dead trees, and it's the publishers holding…
I think that it's ridiculous that the lent book is unavailable to the original purchaser while it's loaned out. That completely defeats the purpose of an e-book. Edit: Do the downvoters disagree on the benefits of having a book in electronic form? Or do they think that the restrictions are not unreasonable/ridiculous?
I don't buy or use ebooks because of how convenient it is to copy them and give the copies to other people. I use them because they're more convenient for me.
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How would you suggest that book sellers handle lending. Note the word "sellers" - they don't make any money from lending, just from selling. They're really scared that they'll sell one copy and everyone will read that copy (or copies of it). Note - "they should make less money" isn't an answer.
> Note - "they should make less money" isn't an answer. They should make more money isn't a very good answer, either. eBooks are massively cheaper to distribute, yet we see a minimal discount. Add in the fact that they're limiting lending to once per book when I can lend a physical book infinitely many times and you're looking at higher profits for eBooks than normal books.
Because distribution is a small amount of the cost of production.
Some of us write books and do expect to be remunerated for them. If you do not like the system, or the price, then do not purchase them. If you want to read something, then give a little back to the author. What makes you think that your work deserves pay and someone else's doesn't?
It reminds me of StarCraft 2's Guest Passes that let players have StarCraft 2 for x amount of days or play it y amount of hours, whichever is exhausted first. Except that there is a finite number of people you can give the passes.
They should really reframe the feature so it doesn't become a parody of lending. Think of all the jokes that are bound to follow from this.
Lending is one of the biggest advantages of owning physical media. This obviously does not solve that problem. Come to think of it, it almost exacerbates it. I had sort of forgot about the problem, but now it's out there, and I know Amazon is likely to be a bad place to get books from if I want to hang on to a sliver of hope that lending will be possible.
In my mind, they should have put the "lending" feature on ice and see if anything better came along; it makes them look bad and their competitors better by comparison. iBooks already supports highlighting and highlight sync, which is one of my most important features, believe it or not.
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Added: I was just reminded of the time we had to use Adobe Flash in college. The university couldn't care less about the students, so we were just told to get it. This, to the righteous paragon that is yours truly, meant getting the trial. Unfortunately for my like-minded friends and I, the trial period barely lasted the entire duration of the course, and woe unto the good student who installed it early to test it out and play around with it. At the very least, it was going to expire before the oral exams.
In Amazon's case, this means that textbooks will be rendered completely useless in terms of lending. It would have been an interesting market, but I'm sure the textbook mafia doesn't mind. Used books is supposedly its biggest threat according to another Hacker News thread.
Should Apple manage to twist the arm of the publishers, I wonder how the synced highlighting would work, seeing that your copy is removed after the lending duration, should they use the same model. They obviously can't prevent you from lending textbooks and allow other book categories, so the road is fraught with challenges. None of these have been solved very well by Amazon, though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anyone know why it takes so long? Shouldn't it be possible to crack the DRM on Kindle (or other) ebooks and pirate them? I thought the reason it was so hard to pirate books in the past was because they had to be scanned (and preferably OCRed).
Kindle was cracked at least a year ago. I haven't actually used it, but from what I read it's not a crypto flaw allowing the data to be extracted, but more analogous to the "analog hole". The existence of on-screen readers allows software to be written that walks through the book a page at a time, and rips the content in that way.