Amazon Kindle book lending quietly goes live • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon Kindle book lending quietly goes live

#61

Post by w1ntermute » Fri, Dec 31, 2010, 12:45 AM UTC

pangram wrote: post #60

CWuestefeld wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a bit cleaner than that -- it gets the decryption key from the reader with the Windows debugging APIs, and then removes the DRM. You're left with the original ebook.

Ah, that's good to hear. Using the analog hole leaves you with a pretty poor copy of most digital files.

Re: Amazon Kindle book lending quietly goes live

#62

Post by parfe » Fri, Dec 31, 2010, 1:33 AM UTC

I think the concept of lending someone an ebook is ridiculous and is a serious detriment to an increasingly digital society.

I want to be able to give my books away. Same as I can with a physical book. But the idiotic idea that I'm somehow licensing the digital version prevents that. When I'm done with an ebook it has zero value to me. These publishers are saving money selling ebooks and then taking away what rights consumers used to have.

If I license content for my kindle I am not a book owner.

Re: Amazon Kindle book lending quietly goes live

#63

Post by phamilton » Fri, Dec 31, 2010, 3:41 AM UTC

rmc wrote: post #43

Piracy is good for the customer. A pirated ebook has none of this restrictions. It's simply a better product.

Restrictions like requiring payment?

Re: Amazon Kindle book lending quietly goes live

#64

Post by davidw » Fri, Dec 31, 2010, 6:52 AM UTC

BBonifield wrote: post #3

It's really too bad that Amazon dropped the ball on this. You get to loan a book once, and the recipient only gets two weeks to read it. What a ridiculous implementation of such a great concept. One of the major things that's kept me away from eBooks is that I can't share them with friends. In the office, we often pass a book around from person to person when we like it, and online lending should be just as simple an…

> I can't share them with friends

Friends? I still don't see a good way of sharing them with my wife without either physically giving her the Kindle or registering her with my Amazon credentials.

That's more than a minor annoyance. I like the device a lot, but mostly because I live in Italy and getting English language books is a Major Hassle and not that cheap, either. With the Kindle, it's both instantaneous, and cheap to boot. If I lived somewhere with a decent used books store, though, I don't think I would have bothered.

Re: Amazon Kindle book lending quietly goes live

#65

Post by davidw » Fri, Dec 31, 2010, 6:57 AM UTC

allwein wrote: post #18

rit wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Otherwise it's piracy. I can't read my copy of the physical book while my friend is borrowing it. It is a reasonable compromise between amazon and the publishers that will hopefully become better as time goes by. As the publishers become more and more comfortable with it and less concerned that it will destroy their business (e.g. they'll need to adapt) the restrictions will get lighter, much like they did with…

How is it piracy? They would still have the restriction of a single lending for a single 14-day period. Right now, my girlfriend and I are reading the same physical book. I read it at work over my lunch break and she reads it at night before going to bed. Is this piracy too?

> Right now, my girlfriend and I are reading the same physical book. I read it at work over my lunch break and she reads it at night before going to bed. Is this piracy too?

The key concept here is 'excludability'. Only one person (maybe two) can be physically reading it at once. Digital goods, sans DRM, could in theory be shared with pretty much the entire world without depriving anyone of their experience.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excludability

This difference between ebooks and 'real' books is the heart of the problem, and why people want to introduce artificial excludability. Actually, I'm fine with that: treat it like a real book in terms of only letting one person at a time have it, but let me freely choose who has it when and for how long.

Re: Amazon Kindle book lending quietly goes live

#66

Post by InclinedPlane » Fri, Dec 31, 2010, 7:08 AM UTC

JunkDNA wrote: post #17

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?

Yes.

You do not realize how arrogant and powerful the corporations that have been in control of these industries are. Historically they have had their way and raked in enormous profits for so little effort to such a degree that the idea that they have to bend to the will of customers or to technological innovation is completely foreign to them.