Color Nook

[Kent Borg]

Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
>> From: discuss-bounces-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org [mailto:discuss-bounces-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org] On Behalf
>> Of Kent Borg
>>
>> I don't have a Kindle and I am badly annoyed by the "rental" aspect of
>> DRMed books which is why I don't have one now 
>>     
>
> What do you mean by that?  You think your books are no longer yours after
> some period of time, or something like that?
>   

Just the fact of DRM in general. ("Digital Rights Management", it sounds 
so gentle.)

Buy a DRMed e-book and it will eventually evaporate. It make take some 
time, but with nearly 100% certainty, eventually it *will* go <poof!>. 
In contrast, there are a lot of old paper books in the world that have 
no provenance, yet default into a quite readable state, and those that 
are old enough have even fallen into the public domain. (How does a 
Kindle e-book do that?) For DRMed books to be readable, a lot of things 
have to work right. Even my non-DRMed O'Reilly books are rather fragile 
because they have no durable physical existence, formats become 
obsolete, etc.

There are some nice used books stores out there, but the very idea of a 
used e-book ranges from strange to illegal.

I have to admit I don't know the details of Amazon's rules, but there 
was that story of the e-book that vanished from some student's Kindle 
because Amazon remote wiped it (I know, the original offering for sale 
was not legal). I think the policy is now different, but it demonstrates 
the fact that one's shelf of e-books is at the mercy of a corporate 
policy and the typos that implement it.


-kb, the Kent not only hates DRM, but who also doesn't make copies of 
his CDs for friends or relatives, who respects the copyright of the 
O'Reilly e-books he has, etc.