On Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:01:32 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> 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).
> 
> Technologically, yes, you are. But it's not something they're going to
> do, or at least so they say.  In the case of 1984, it was because they
> weren't authorized to actually sell that copy. I.e., they were violating
> copyrights by selling you the book that way.

Yeah, but if they'd done that with a paper book, they'd not have come 
into my home, taken it and left me the money.  That's vaguely what they 
did, though, with the eBook.  They needed (IMHO) to make it right in a 
similar fashion rather than taking advantage of the fact that they 
*could* just "unsell" it electronically.  Just because you can do 
something, doesn't mean you should.  It created a lot of uncertainty 
about eBooks.

>> 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...
> 
> Ehn. You have to balance it out. I have lots of worries in my life.
> Amazon pulling a book off my kindle and giving me the money back so I
> can go buy it on paper is low on my list of worries.

It's nonexistent on my list of worries.  Yes, it's a balancing act, but I 
generally don't give money to people who do things I don't agree with, 
even if they correct it.  I also don't give money to Best Buy because 
they treated a return I wanted to make with suspicion and called me a 
thief - just because I wanted a DVD that actually *worked*.  But I've 
been over that story.

> I was reluctant for a long time to buy DRMed books, until I realized
> I'll likely always have the non-DRMed version available if I really want
> it. I can pick which books I'll buy cheaper with less access and which
> books I'll spend more on to be able to keep for 20+ years.

Yes, that's one of the things I've considered as well.  Still, right now, 
most of what I'm reading on my Nook is from Project Gutenberg.

> That book on C# 4.0?  The likelihood of me having to refer to that in 3
> years is really, really low.  :-)
> 
>> 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.
> 
> True, and he acknowledged that *and* gave people back the book as well.
> Not sure what more you could ask for.

Not doing it in the first place.  Yes, he can't undo what's been done, 
the best he can do is correct it, and the best we can do is hope that he 
has learned from it.  But it troubles me that businesses make decisions 
that really on the surface should be clearly the wrong way to approach 
things and then deal with it as a PR issue, when clearly it's not a PR 
issue, but a decision-making process issue.

I mean really - who would think that you could take something away from 
someone that they had paid for, annotated, and used and NOT have 
consumers complain about it?  Someone *really* didn't put their thinking 
cap on - or did and said "if we generate some bad publicity, we can 
follow it with a PR campaign that ends us up ahead?" - which I think is 
even more slimy if it was actually *planned* that way.  I'm not a fan of 
manufactured "ooops, we're sorry" situations that are used for the 
purpose of generating "buzz" and "positive PR".

> Amazon's licensing at least isn't obnoxious. You can put it on up to
> five or six devices simultaneously, and if you delete it off your
> kindle, it frees up a license for use somewhere else. (Assuming you
> eventually turn on the radio, of course.) 

That's actually pretty nice, I didn't know that.

> And there's readers for pretty
> much every popular electronic device except the direct competition.

Honestly, I think it would be in the best interests of eReader 
manufacturers not to lock consumers in.  You see this with gaming 
consoles as well - someone wants a particular game, they've got to 
purchase a particular game console if there's an exclusivity clause in 
their contracts.  DRM?  Not a fan of it, but if it's not an encumberance 
to me as a consumer, I'll live with it or I'll find a way to strip it off 
what I've purchased.  But vendor lock-in is something I'm really not a 
fan of - it says "we know we're not as good as the competition, so we'll 
make it impossible for you to leave us".  With eBook readers, once you 
commit to one and start buying from that store, you're pretty much stuck 
for life unless you want to *buy it again*.  That's also a reason why I'm 
not a fan of the music industry - RIAA wants consumers to purchase the 
same content multiple times if they want multiple formats.  I'm not 
paying for the format, I'm paying for the content.  If I want to rip a CD 
to an MP3 to listen on my iPod, that's up to me - I shouldn't be required 
to purchase another copy in MP3 format.

Jim

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