Amazon must be counting their blessings there wasn't a way for people to borrow & lend physical books or else there's no way they could have built a business around selling them!
Amazon shuts down Lendle
11–20 of 64 posts
Re: Amazon shuts down Lendle
#12The lesson in this is that building projects that depend on third-party data is dangerous; there needs to be some sort of guarantee of access to the data before you commit to the project. Building the project and then pointing fingers at the data provider after your api access is revoked does nothing to relieve the frustration of your users.
Re: Amazon shuts down Lendle
#13It amazes me that the e-book providers think they can head down the same road as the music industry and not end up in the same spot. I'm a serious Kindle user -- I have dozens of books. I've thought about using DRM-cracking software to free up my books, not because of any desire to share or lend but just because it's not right having a book in my possession locked away under a secret key some other bunch of people co…
I crack the hell out of my Kindle purchases. Not for piracy, but so I can read them on Apple's superior iBooks app. It's pretty simple to do. Funny part is, I didn't start buying Amazon eBooks until I was certain I could defeat their DRM. The Kindle iPad app is anus.
[deleted]
Re: Amazon shuts down Lendle
#14They should do lending/selling via USB or wifi, that'd add some of the 'physical proximity' aspect back in, in that you couldn't lend to everyone all over the internet, just people you live with or work with.
That sounds like it would be trivial to overcome with a little bit of hackery.
Re: Amazon shuts down Lendle
#15This seems to be happening over and over again. Two years ago, everyone wanted to be a platform, now all that embracing open API stuff has turned to shit.
Basically, the idea seems to be that once you've used your API ecosystem to grow to a certain size, you can fuck over the developers that allowed you to get to that point by building on top of your platform and by attracting users to it or keeping them engaged. The only way to get around this is to become so big that the platform can't shut you down (Zynga, Twitpic).
Twitter says, stop building clients, build in these verticals. Who is going to stop them from going after the most profitable verticals tomorrow once developers have proved that there's money to be made there? As a developer, why the hell would I want to deal with this?
Open API's seem to be the antithesis of the profit motive, or atleast, that's how it seems to be. Sad.
Re: Amazon shuts down Lendle
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
I crack the hell out of my Kindle purchases. Not for piracy, but so I can read them on Apple's superior iBooks app. It's pretty simple to do. Funny part is, I didn't start buying Amazon eBooks until I was certain I could defeat their DRM. The Kindle iPad app is anus.
[deleted]
[deleted]
Re: Amazon shuts down Lendle
#17They should do lending/selling via USB or wifi, that'd add some of the 'physical proximity' aspect back in, in that you couldn't lend to everyone all over the internet, just people you live with or work with.
That sounds like it would be trivial to overcome with a little bit of hackery.
Determined hackers will probably find a way to outwit pretty much anything. What they need to be doing is making it so that the path of least resistance is the 'legal' one for the 95% of people who generally don't want to fiddle with things.
Re: Amazon shuts down Lendle
#18They should do lending/selling via USB or wifi, that'd add some of the 'physical proximity' aspect back in, in that you couldn't lend to everyone all over the internet, just people you live with or work with.
That sounds like it would be trivial to overcome with a little bit of hackery.
What isn't?
Re: Amazon shuts down Lendle
#19Of the 30 or so books I have in my kindle only 1 was even lendable anyway.
but still no excuse for Amazon
Re: Amazon shuts down Lendle
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
I crack the hell out of my Kindle purchases. Not for piracy, but so I can read them on Apple's superior iBooks app. It's pretty simple to do. Funny part is, I didn't start buying Amazon eBooks until I was certain I could defeat their DRM. The Kindle iPad app is anus.
Why is it superior to the Kindle app?
When I tried it awhile ago, the Kindle app had a page turning experience that can only be described as maddening. Tap in the wrong spot, boom, page has turned. The iBooks app, for all its over-done skeuomorphism, makes interacting with the book pretty easy. Simple things like page edges make clear what will happen when you tap in a particular place. iBooks just feels really nice.
More than that, the Kindle app is just ugly. It has this janky animation when you jump to another section of the book that's painful to watch. It's a shame – the Kindle v3 hardware is a pretty badass product. The Kindle iPad app feels barebones, insipid and unpolished. Does a disservice to the brand.