The Drawbacks of 'Owning' Digital Books
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124830307703373747.html
It says that those who own kindle books have fewer powers than do people who own, y'know, books. Worse yet, they are surprised. At least the few thousand that had bought 1984 were when they woke up and discovered it was no longer on their machine one morning. Amazon had agreed with the publisher to take it down and remove it from the machines.
You can tell just how much sympathy I have. You own a proprietary format work on a proprietary machine. You therefore don't control anything. Think of it like Tivo. You buy the unit but they retain a lot of lattitude. You are ok with that because of the convenience of the service. Sure it's annoying if the company takes something back or changes the terms on you, but that was always the deal and you knew that.
If you wanted an ebook to keep, buy a sony reader ir similar product that requires that you download a full version of the book and sync it. Or buy a paperback. What did you think was happening when Amazon was selling you whole books at 30% the price? Seriously. The pissing and moaning you hear is just that.
2 comments:
Someday when iTunes goes under people are going to be very angry anyway...
I agree with your lack of sympathy. But just because that is the way it is, doesn't mean that is the way it should be. Lessig makes the argument that it is a serious problem that software gives copyright holders more control than they have under copyright law.
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