Kindle Unlimited

Post by drumdance » Sat, Jul 19, 2014, 5:47 AM UTC

Patrick_Devine wrote: post #131

yan wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can fully understand your sentiment, and to some degree emotionally connect with it, but rationally: my entire bookshelf of computer science and literary classics has gone untouched since my initial read through the vast majority of books. I keep looking around and I'm not sure that I'm happy with the "ownership" aspect of books, or a lot of stuff in general. (Having moved three times during the last six years, mov…

This may sound weird, but I actually love staring at my bookshelf. I often will go, pick up a book I haven't thought about in a while, and read it again. I've filled it with (mostly) timeless technical manuals, plate picture books (like pictures of the cosmos, airplanes and things like that), plenty of sci-fi, flight instruction manuals, foreign language dictionaries and other odds and ends. There are plenty of books…

Post by baddox » Sat, Jul 19, 2014, 8:54 AM UTC

otakucode wrote: post #128

smacktoward wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear you on this, and am in sympathy with your point. But this bothers me less than Amazon selling Kindle books does, because at least this is clearly marked as rental. All your points are just as true about the Kindle books that Amazon sells to people -- you lose the right of first sale( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine ), so you can't re-sell or lend your books; they're tied to a specific DRM sche…

Well, Amazon TELLS you that you lose the right of first sale. That has yet to be tested in court. EVERY industry (seriously, try to find one this isn't true for) has tried to kill the secondhand market in their particular corner of the economy. And every. single. one. of them failed utterly. Digital goods purveyors are going to fail just as spectacularly. It will require lawsuits, of course, but eventually digital pr…

Post by chrisblackwell » Sat, Jul 19, 2014, 11:27 AM UTC

jwr wrote: post #73

"We're sorry. Kindle Unlimited is currently only available for US customers. Please visit us again when it is available in your country" Again. Companies just don't learn. This is the Internet. If you sell digital content online, there is no "US customers". There are exactly two groups of customers: those with credit cards that are willing to pay you and all the rest. This whole idea of segmenting by country is not o…

Post by listic » Sat, Jul 19, 2014, 6:27 PM UTC

rdl wrote: post #130

listic wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pity, too, from the writer's point of view.

$7 to the writer for a fiction work is pretty good, IMO. There's probably no way you're going to achieve that otherwise. (I'm part of the "fuck the legacy publishers" camp; I do care about compensating writers and some editors, but in general, I'd rather pay less, read a lot more books, and have writers paid more, and fewer useless NYC publishing house employees playing games and acting as gatekeepers.)

Post by chmars » Sun, Jul 20, 2014, 11:35 AM UTC

jaysonelliot wrote: post #74

I'm very disturbed by the steady erosion of ownership that has been happening for the past few years. Subscription models are an attractive way to get some digital content for a low price, whether it's music, software, movies, or books—but the internet has a notoriously short memory, and I fear that we're condemning ourselves to becoming cultural goldfish. I have books and records from my youth that sit on my shelf a…