On Wed, 25 Aug 2010 08:39:43 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> Well, that's the reason I didn't get a Kindle, honestly - with the
>> whole fiasco Amazon had over 1984, I prefer something where I can back
>> up my books manually (which I can do with the Nook).
> 
> You can back up your Kindle books. I think most of the new ones have
> DRM, but the classics (that Amazon gives you for free) have bunches of
> readable words in them (like, Arabian Nights has Knight and Dog and Sand
> and stuff like that amongst the gibberish) so I'm assuming that one
> isn't encrypted.
> 
> But you can trivially copy everything off the kindle, reset it back to
> factory defaults, and copy the files back on and everything works fine.
> 
> Altho I admit I haven't bought a DRMed book yet, so I couldn't guarantee
> anything there until I do.

That's interesting, I had been led to believe that with Kindle, you were 
more or less at the mercy of Amazon (probably because of the whole 1984 
thing).  The idea of the retailer being able to 'unsell' something to me 
really turned me off of buying one of their devices - in fact, if I had 
won one in a drawing, I'd have sold it because of that...

Not that I think Bezos didn't ultimately do the right thing, but really, 
something like that should've never happened in the first place.

Jim

Post a reply to this message