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Outlawed by Amazon DRM

bekkelund.net

31–40 of 494 posts

Re: Outlawed by Amazon DRM

#31
post #22

The worst part is the blatant arrogance of Mr. Michael Murphy, who does not at all consider the possibility of it all being a misunderstanding or some error on Amazon's behalf, and giving the customer no option to rectify the issue. These are two options for who Michael Murphy is: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/michael-murphy/17/b72/231 http://www.linkedin.com/pub/michael-murphy/0/b84/9b5

I don't think posting his personal details on the Internet is a very good idea.

Funny, since it is a link to linkedin... :-)

Re: Outlawed by Amazon DRM

#32
post #14

I wonder whether this is related to Linn living in Norway, purchasing from Amazon.com and somehow Amazon.co.uk are getting in the middle, perhaps because they run Europe from there. It's the game that many people play - trying to find the best Amazon (or Apple) store when they live and travel between countries. This means a constant struggle to find a combination of credit card, store with enough content (The US is b…

Why would Amazon.co.uk run "europe"? The europeans outside UK, FR or DE are forced to buy the international kindle from the US.

I assume for tax and logistics reasons. A search for "Amazon Europe" delivers an http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/gateway-eu. I'm making assumptions after that.

Re: Outlawed by Amazon DRM

#33
Surely this is what a small claims court could be used for?

I haven't read the Amazon TOS but is it really as simple as "you rent this book for as long as we feel like and we can revoke it for no reason"?

In which case I would be somewhat surprised if this really held up in a court, for example what happens if you buy a book and they immediately decide to revoke the license 1 second after purchase?

Re: Outlawed by Amazon DRM

#34
I was recently interested in purchasing eBooks from Morgan Kaufmann. "The UX Book: Process and Guidelines for Ensuring a Quality User Experience" costs $89.95 USD; surely for that insane price your eBook would be DRM-free, right? Wrong. Both ePub and PDF use Adobe Adept (Inept) DRM.

You can try to find the Kindle/iBook version, but as this article points out "its a license to read" ... and very often, the quality of the digital conversion is very poor, especially for literature with illustrations.

DRM-free PDF is the only way for me.

Re: Outlawed by Amazon DRM

#35
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think posting his personal details on the Internet is a very good idea.

Michael Murphy posted his personal details on the Internet. asgeirn posted links.

Fair point. However, it doesn't bring anything to the discussion, other than giving the temptation to 4chan fans to start a harassment campaign, so what the hell is it doing here?

Re: Outlawed by Amazon DRM

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with a drm removal tool and iBooks?

Replacing Amazon as gatekeeper with Apple is something of a frying-pan-to-fire move. Amazon's device really only does e-books; most people depend on Apple devices for an awful lot more, and consequently losing access to your Apple device would be vastly more painful.

Where is Apple the gatekeeper? I couldn't care less about the iBookstore, but I love iBooks - I can drop any PDF or epub from the internet on iTunes and it'll be on my iPad after the next sync. If anything, Apple has the advantage that an iTunes library is dead-easy to back up.

Android tablet, iPad, PlayBook- they'll all do the trick.

Re: Outlawed by Amazon DRM

#38
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very much so. Just use Calibre to load books and your fine.

I'm not sure how it works now, but older Kindles were just mass storage devices so you could put books there by hand.

You still can, but calibre lets you do format-conversion (since mobi is the only real format you can push to it while retaining readbility).

It also allows you to tidy up meta-data and stuff to make things look better.

It's definitely a "required" component as far as my Kindle is concerned.

Re: Outlawed by Amazon DRM

#39
post #5

I treat all E-books purchased with DRM as rentals. When making a decision whether to buy or not, I look at the price and consider whether I'm willing to pay this much to rent the book for an indeterminate amount of time, possibly as little as 3 months. Quite often it turns out that the price is too high. But I never delude myself that I actually "own" any of the DRM-restricted content that I paid for.

I treat all digital (-ly distributed) content as "rental."

Most of the people I know do too... more or less. I treat all digital (-ly distributed) content as "rental." The reality is that "ownership" of digital property is different from ownership of physical property emotionally, legally and practically.

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