The perks of Analog Books: No DRM, and free at your local public library, or dirt cheap at a used book store.

Why, oh why do people insist on joining the DRM racket?

For any media I buy that I intend to enjoy more than once, I will only ever buy a physical product (preferably DRM-free, although the DRM is okay if it's totally cracked [like in the case of DVDs]), or a totally DRM/hardware-lock-in-free format. For a book that would mean ASCII text, or a PDF that works in xpdf. An MS-word file would even be okay if it opens up in OpenOffice. Basically, if I can operate the download with any "player" I feel like, it makes it on my "Can buy" list. Otherwise, no thanks.

I don't feel all that bad for people getting burned by these devices; it was pretty obvious it was going to happen sooner or later.

amazon screwed up by not immeidtaly having a way to see how many downloads are allowed and the blame also rests on the increasingly annoying and blowhard publisher unions. First they blow up against robot text to speech now they inisist one ase by case download limits of books we're paying full price for.

Ah, good ol' print. You dont find this level of dickery with hard copies!

@diasdiem: Also, you can sell them when you're done with them.

This sounds like a customer service rep that did not know the answer and just made something up. However if that is not the case Amazon really needs to step up to this quickly and have full disclosure.

I really like Amazon and have always had good luck with them but this would be a killer on my plan to buy a kindle.

Steam provides the best of both worlds.

The downsides to print/analog/old-tech books: bulk, single instantiation, fewer methods of interactivity. The problems with the Kindle are good arguments against DRM--especially when it's draconian and foolishly implemented--not good arguments against ebooks in general.

I never understood why the online community seemed so obsessed with Kindle, and stories like this just make it even harder to understand.

If I'm going to go from the tried-and-true book to some digital format, it should be better or at least equal to everything I can get from a paperback; DRM like this merely ensures that I never make the switch.

@diasdiem: analog college textbooks:

perks-
.
.
.
.

cons-
expensive as hell
new editions come out bi-yearly if not yearly so your investment drops in value almost as soon as you buy them.
an entire industry of colleges cut off at the balls by the major publishers of the country.

I don't own a Kindle and I don't recall ever even holding one in my hand, so excuse my ignorance; why would you download a book more than once?

@enthreeoh: and still allows companies to support broken DRM schemes. Steams great but it isn't perfect.

@shepd: a bit of a cold attitude to take, but I must confess i'm with you... the Kindle is about DRM and nothing else. Music, books, whatever else... buying digitally protected content almost ensures you lose access at some point for some reason.

How great if the publishers of college textbooks can limit them to one student?! They can get off that treadmill of changing a few paragraphs/exercises or readings in that math or 1800s literature compilation to kill those awful used bookstores.

Goodbye libraries too... it's the end goal -- pay for everything & much more limited sharing. I don't see libraries disappearing any time soon, but I do see them as in the publishers' sights.

my wife & i got one for Christmas. We sold it on CL.

Submitted to Digg.

[digg.com]

@enthreeoh: You mean the program and service? Steam blows, buddy. Big time. I got fucked over by it and had to resort to an EECB because support couldn't be bothered to respond. Also, Steam doesn't do books for the Kindle.

There's also the fact that Amazon uses EVDO with fallback to 1xRTT whatever that is and probably made a deal with Sprint to pay them something like 5-10 cents for each book that's transferred to a Kindle device using their network.

So it's kind of hard to make a profit out of a $.99 book when a person downloads it 5 times.

Otherwise, DRM is the price they have to accept to get themselves on the market and convince publishers to sell their books through them. Once they reach a certain percent of the market, like Apple did with their iTunes store, they'll probably have the leverage to push for less restrictions.

@El_Fez: But haven't you heard? Print is dead!

Sorry to disappoint the world, but it's alive and well in my house.

Most Kindle books can have the DRM stripped out. I do so as soon as I can get the content to my computer and run the necessary Python scripts, which I keep in a folder on my Kindle. I made sure this was possible before I purchased my device.

@HiPwr: If you own a Kindle and an iPhone, you can download the book to both devices. Amazon keeps track of where you are in the book and updates your bookmarks across both devices, so you can swap back and forth depending on which device you have access to.

That's basically what Dan was doing, except he had two iPhones and one Kindle and wanted the book to appear on all three.

@psyneo: I understand the argument that "you shouldn't have to", but if I can circumvent an unjust practice, I'll do so rather than deny myself on principle.

@El_Fez: If people wanted a printed copy, they would buy a printed copy. Since these people did not buy a printed copy, they must not want a printed copy. Get it?

@Con Seannery's G1: And your problem with steam was?

@enthreeoh: He's right. It allows disk backups.

@Corporate_guy: I'm fine with their choice. If they want print, buy print. If they want digital, buy digital. I simply have no sympathy for them. Buy DRM crippled items (with the caviat that you go into the purchase full well knowing about the DRM), you lose the right to whine when you run headlong into that same DRM.

This strikes me as ironic. You can "buy" the book however only transfer it to the device X amount of times? With the iPhone you could buy the $999 imrich app, delete it, and reinstall it as many times as you'd like. I don't understand the DRM going on here. Usually DRM is used to keep the customer from handing out the content, not keep the customer from getting the content from the source.

@Chris Walters: Yes he wanted it on all three, but he didn't know this would be a problem as Amazon doesn't disclose the limits.

But the more important issue is upgrades. When he upgraded the OS on the first iphone, that meant he had to redownload as if it was a completely different device. But Amazon won't let him redownload. So an iphone upgrade means you lose your books.

You also have the same problem if you get a new phone every year or two. In 2-4 years your books will hit their limit and you won't be able to put them on your newest phone. You are only using one phone at a time, but Amazon clearly doesn't have a way to account for this. And you may say, well big whoop, how many times do you read a single book? Well in the case of reference books and text books you might keep them around for a long while to reference.

Clearly Amazon needs a way to "return" books and set it up so they can time out(in the case of lost device). Such as making it so the device has to check-in online once every two weeks or a month to keep the book accessible. That way you can only have two active copies at once and have the ability to move the books around between devices.

@logicalnoise: I expect at some point within the next few years, Amazon & college textbook publishers will pay some university big $$$ to require incoming students to purchase a Kindle and to get all textbooks that way. They need to get the ball rolling. The publishers likely can cut afford to pay well any university doing this and still come out ahead.

@FreakinSyco: Nice of you to join the party. Here is a reddit link that is two days old. [www.reddit.com]

It's like a waterfall. Reddit->Consumerist->Digg.

@Con Seannery's G1: Obviously they don't do books (they do games), but they do digital distribution with DRM that manages to not fail in every way.

@Corporate_guy:

Amazon could also copy the iTMS "authorized computer" model, where you register and deregister your devices as needed. Upgrade or crossgrade all you want, because you can always change the list of authorized devices.

This would also allow them to make it explicitly clear how many iPhones and Kindles you can have registered to a single account. (Currently it's hard to find that information.)

If it's true that publishers can determine your download limits on a per-title basis, then Amazon needs to make that explicit for each book before it's purchased. If you're going to use DRM, you have to be fair about it and tell the customer exactly what he can expect.

@diasdiem:
No batteries.
No waiting for a download to finish.

I ran into the same problem with magazines on the Kindle. I went to download an issue from a few months ago and found that it wasn't available in the list of downloads. It had been there a week before, and I wrote Amazon customer service to find out why the past issues (that I had received previously) were not available. Here is the response with the magazine name omitted:

Hello Daniel,

Thank you for your patience regarding your Kindle subscription to {The Magazine}.

Generally the last 7 issues of a subscription are available to download to your Kindle, but it appears that the publishers of {The Magazine} have restricted access to our Kindle customers to only provide the last 2 issues.

I apologize for any frustration this may have caused, but thank you for shopping with Amazon.com

Best regards,
{Your Friendly CSR}

@El_Fez: No you have the right to whine when they hide the restrictions. It's called fraud. And making a fuss about these drm schemes is the best way to kill these drm schemes.

This happened to me with iTunes and individual songs. As I upgraded computers etc. over the years, I found I could not transfer music files onto the next device. Ugh.

Amazon has stated that up to six devices on the same account can share the book. If you've downloaded it to six devices, then you have used all the licenses. You can re-download it over and over to one of those licensed devices, though. This story is really rather misleading. Now, if you have deregistered a device and want that license back, you have to contact CS to do that. It won't free it up automatically.

@Chris Walters: I pretty much stopped demanding "interactivity" from my books around the same time bits of them stopped popping up when I turned the page...

@ElizabethD: Senuti. [www.fadingred.com]

@FigNinja:

It doesn't say how many devices he download too.

I'm not sure you're understanding the story, but I could be wrong. Maybe I'm confused.

@ophmarketing: And I still buy and marvel at pop-up books.

In this case, however, I mean accessing the content and doing stuff with it, including indexing, searching, compiling, mashing-up with other stuff, and so on. It could be as simple as curating a large library of content for a research project or a novel, or as weird as using bits of content from printed works to create/augment a new work, possibly in another medium entirely.

The physical book is just an object that happens to contain the intellectual content. I say that digital versions of books provide more flexibility when it comes to getting at the good stuff.

What is wrong with reading actual books. I can buy dozens of books for the price of one of these stupid things.

@Chris Walters: I just got a Kindle a few weeks ago. The site is very clear that six Kindles/iPhones can be registered to one account.

I didn't notice anything about download limits, though. In fact, a big selling point is that you can remove the book from a device, and it will always be there in your archive for when you want to download it again.

The Kindle makes me feel like a luddite. (also, I get all of my books for free at the library. Why buy something if its free?)

"You see, I was thinking about writing my story, so I bought this one on how to do it."

"Why do you need 25 copies?"

"......in case I want to read it more than once."

@twophrasebark:

I understood the article just fine. I don't think the author understands the difference between downloads and licenses. I don't think Amazon makes it abundantly clear, either, so I'm not surprised.

@doctor_cos: Being able to write in the margins.
Being able to quickly flip to a page.
Color.

If you can't find it mentioned anywhere, then maybe the CSR was wrong/high/new/trying to get fired and maybe the OP was having some other tech problem with his file folder. I wouldn't take it as truth from one letter and one CSR.

@doctor_cos: Pros: Being able to buy a book anywhere, anytime without having to search for a bookstore and hoping that they have th e book you want;

Not paying the ridiculous prices charged for a new best-seller;

Being able to have daily newspapers and magazines downloaded to the Kindle to read immediately;

Not being a luddite about new technology

What a complete disappointment from the company that had one of the first high-profile DRM-free MP3 stores. I believe they were part of the pressure that forced Apple and iTunes to relent. Why would they forget that philosophy when it comes to their own device.

This makes me convinced that I'll never buy a Kindle as long as it would mean I'd have to agree to the draconian, ever-changing, never-good-for-me DRM restrictions inherent in the media I could purchase for the device. It's too bad, really. And Amazon, I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that way.

Amazon's MP3 download policy is even worse: you get 1 download, and if you don't make backups, you are screwed.