I have recently observed that buying and using ebooks is like being put into a time machine and being forced to re-live the early days of digital music downloads. Do we seriously have to re-learn all those lessons in every single industry that starts to shift to digital content?
I have found pirating and using ebooks to be perfectly reasonable as there are no hurdles to jump over and there is no possibility that your books will disappear from your Kindle without your permission. In fact, as far as Amazon is concerned, I've never put anything on my Kindle. My main problem is that many books I want to read cannot be found in this form for as much as a year after they are published.
Another side effect of ebooks is that public libraries now increasingly rely on the electronic versions of the books to save space,money and they started to unload physical books by thousands.
Although it applies mostly to fiction, but no need to pirate these books , you can get them for $1.
Anyone know why it takes so long? Shouldn't it be possible to crack the DRM on Kindle (or other) ebooks and pirate them? I thought the reason it was so hard to pirate books in the past was because they had to be scanned (and preferably OCRed).
I haven't actually used it, but from what I read it's not a crypto flaw allowing the data to be extracted, but more analogous to the "analog hole". The existence of on-screen readers allows software to be written that walks through the book a page at a time, and rips the content in that way.
It's a bit cleaner than that -- it gets the decryption key from the reader with the Windows debugging APIs, and then removes the DRM. You're left with the original ebook.
And for as long as cracking a DRM scheme to gain your rightful property is illegal, I will advocate piracy.
I buy movies on DVD when I like the show. I also buy books. And occasionally, I also buy music.
The rub: I buy from Half Price Books and other used merchants. For some reason (PROFIT), I cant do this with ebooks and other e-media.
When I'm treated as an enemy, acted upon as an enemy and evil pirate, and charged an arm and a leg for media then proselytised to 'not pirate'... Yeah, Ill pirate.
I think the answer is yes -- because people who grew up with one business model find it very, very hard to give it up, logic be damned.
I'm at the point now where I have a lot of money invested in my kindle e-books. E-books that Amazon says that they really own and won't let me share with folks (until now)
Wonder how much abuse the average user is going to take before they decide that a book is a book. You buy a book, you read a book, then you give or loan it to somebody else. No amount of DRM and legal contracts in the world is going to change that. It's the common sense and natural way of doing things by billions of people versus the state, custom-made laws, and digital jails.
Daniel, while I agree with what you said, I must in the interest of fairness say that I still see a flaw in the argument.
people who grew up with one business model find it very, very hard to give it up, logic be damned ... Wonder how much abuse the average user is going to take before they decide that a book is a book
You're assuming (as am I) that e-books are the same as dead trees, and it's the publishers holding their heads in the sand.
But why must that be the answer? Why can't it be that we're wrong, that this is a brave new world that we need to adjust to?
Humility is a good idea. Look what happened to gaming: in a world where gamers voted with their wallets against I-pay-you-money-you-give-me-ownership-of-game (they were fine with only the second part), publishers shifted investment from PC games to either consoles with fairly effective DRM or games-as-a-service where a) ownership of the game is a quaint notion only remembered by greybeards and b) spending on games goes through the roof due to "free to play" (a truly Orwellian coinage, that one).
There's an entire democratic process to change what people expect out of their relationship to government. It involves political parties, speeches, elections, debates, making compromises with the opposing party, and finally resolution.
What we find over and over again is that when folks try to just use the courts and the legal system to implement change, it always results in a lot of friction. There are still people mad in the States about Roe v. Wade, and that was many decades ago.
So the way things change makes a difference. Perhaps the lawyers can browbeat the society into changing. I kind of doubt it -- especially for something this big.
Theoretically yes, anything is possible. We could easily live in a world where publishers charge many times for the same material based on all sorts of random factors like format, time of use, etc. But in reality I just don't see a change of the magnitude taking place without all of the political paraphernalia associated with such changes, no matter how many people they stick in jail or sue.
It's a shame, because just like in the net neutrality issue, the companies could have avoided this by using common sense in their licensing and distribution policies, instead of fixating on the letter of the law (which nobody cared about anyway until mp3s came along)
The minute my grandma can't treat an ebook like she did her old paperbacks the publishers have lost the game. It might be another hundred years (so it wouldn't matter to the publishers and probably be considered by them a "win"), but the laws will eventually catch up to where the people are.
I imagine this will play out like pot legalization -- long and difficult, with a generation of politicians having to pass from the scene before the posturing stops and common sense takes hold.
You do not realize how arrogant and powerful the corporations that have been in control of these industries are. Historically they have had their way and raked in enormous profits for so little effort to such a degree that the idea that they have to bend to the will of customers or to technological innovation is completely foreign to them.
It's really too bad that Amazon dropped the ball on this. You get to loan a book once, and the recipient only gets two weeks to read it. What a ridiculous implementation of such a great concept.
One of the major things that's kept me away from eBooks is that I can't share them with friends. In the office, we often pass a book around from person to person when we like it, and online lending should be just as simple and straightforward. Instead, we get a restrictive and janky process. Well played Amazon.
In fact, you don't need to turn off wireless. You can even deregister from the device's Settings menu and it'll keep your downloaded books. (Even if those span multiple accounts!)
I couldn't agree more. Being a Kindle owner, I was really excited with this proposal when it was initially pitched. Amazon took a great idea and implemented it horribly.
It's not clear if this is the publishers or Amazon (out of fear from pubs) imposing such limitations on the lending process.
It really pisses me off that in the digital world with DMCA and DRM you don't have fair use of a product/art you purchase legally. You should be able to disseminate it freely. If I want to loan a friend a music album or book, it should be my right.
Lastly, has Amazon or anyone thought of modifying the DRM to allow ownership transfer? For instance after reading a DRM Amazon book I could transfer ownership to my local library.
Friends? I still don't see a good way of sharing them with my wife without either physically giving her the Kindle or registering her with my Amazon credentials.
That's more than a minor annoyance. I like the device a lot, but mostly because I live in Italy and getting English language books is a Major Hassle and not that cheap, either. With the Kindle, it's both instantaneous, and cheap to boot. If I lived somewhere with a decent used books store, though, I don't think I would have bothered.
Exclusive LendMe™ Technology
NOOK's exclusive LendMe™ technology lets you share favorite books with friends. LendMe™ books can be lent for up to 14 days. Just choose the book you want to share and send it to your friend's NOOK, computer, or handheld device enabled with NOOK software.
It sounds like the publishers are the ones setting the terms.
Doesn't matter to customers though - most will not do this research themselves (as evidenced by comments in this thread).
Companies like Amazon basically are caught between a rock and a hard place. Either implement the sub-par experience which is what publishers let them (the Nook experience) and have customers complain about your draconian DRM - or don't implement it and have customers complain about not having the features of the Nook.
Considering the Kindle is the market leader in this space, I'm not sure it was the right choice to follow Nook into this space with a sub-par experience. Now the feature and it's limitations are more highly visible, and DRM is front and center on people's minds again.
And as usual, people outside of the United States get a sub-par experience.
"At this time, Kindle book lending can only be initiated by customers residing in the United States. If a loan is initiated to a customer outside the United States, the borrower may not be able to accept the loan if the title is not available in their country due to publisher geographical rights."
I'm confident ebooks will become DRM-free in the near future, and when that happens we won't have to worry about all of these nonsensical limitations.
If it really is the case that you can only let an acquaintance read the book once - for a total of 14 days - it's not lending; it's a friggin' coupon.
It reminds me of StarCraft 2's Guest Passes that let players have StarCraft 2 for x amount of days or play it y amount of hours, whichever is exhausted first. Except that there is a finite number of people you can give the passes.
They should really reframe the feature so it doesn't become a parody of lending. Think of all the jokes that are bound to follow from this.
Lending is one of the biggest advantages of owning physical media. This obviously does not solve that problem. Come to think of it, it almost exacerbates it. I had sort of forgot about the problem, but now it's out there, and I know Amazon is likely to be a bad place to get books from if I want to hang on to a sliver of hope that lending will be possible.
In my mind, they should have put the "lending" feature on ice and see if anything better came along; it makes them look bad and their competitors better by comparison. iBooks already supports highlighting and highlight sync, which is one of my most important features, believe it or not.
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Added: I was just reminded of the time we had to use Adobe Flash in college. The university couldn't care less about the students, so we were just told to get it. This, to the righteous paragon that is yours truly, meant getting the trial. Unfortunately for my like-minded friends and I, the trial period barely lasted the entire duration of the course, and woe unto the good student who installed it early to test it out and play around with it. At the very least, it was going to expire before the oral exams.
In Amazon's case, this means that textbooks will be rendered completely useless in terms of lending. It would have been an interesting market, but I'm sure the textbook mafia doesn't mind. Used books is supposedly its biggest threat according to another Hacker News thread.
Should Apple manage to twist the arm of the publishers, I wonder how the synced highlighting would work, seeing that your copy is removed after the lending duration, should they use the same model. They obviously can't prevent you from lending textbooks and allow other book categories, so the road is fraught with challenges. None of these have been solved very well by Amazon, though.
(1) Can someone, perhaps an Amazon employee, clarify if "loan once" means exactly what it says? Can we only loan a kindle book to one person one time only? The book cannot be loaned again to anyone? Or cannot be loaned again to the same person?
(2) As an early adopter of Kindle, It's particularly sad that, as I peruse my Kindle collection, the vast majority of our books are not loanable. I can't say that I'm surprised. But I am annoyed by it. This is perhaps a large factor in the soft launch of the loaning feature.
Is Amazon really to blame for the less than ideal lending system? Or is it the book publishers that are responsible for the rules of the lending system?
The sad part of the only lend once restriction that seems to be prevalent is that the most likely side effect of the 14 day loan is using it to get your friends or family hooked on a series.
I just sent my sister a trial loan for the first book in a series I enjoyed and think she will, and I don't really forsee her calling or emailing me to ask for the second book. If she likes it she'll just buy it herself and keep reading.
Being able to loan the book out repeatedly for a good series is likely to generate a LOT of sales for the publishers. But most of them likely don't or won't see that.
At some point, Kindles are going to get cheap enough (~$50) that I'm not going to mind lending one out indiscriminately. I'll just load one up with the ebook I want to lend and then let my friend borrow it for however long it takes him to read it.
I think the concept of lending someone an ebook is ridiculous and is a serious detriment to an increasingly digital society.
I want to be able to give my books away. Same as I can with a physical book. But the idiotic idea that I'm somehow licensing the digital version prevents that. When I'm done with an ebook it has zero value to me. These publishers are saving money selling ebooks and then taking away what rights consumers used to have.
If I license content for my kindle I am not a book owner.
Wow, a lot of comments about taking and reading without actually paying. I expect that at slashdot, but I guess I expected more from Hacker News readers.
Some of us write books and do expect to be remunerated for them. If you do not like the system, or the price, then do not purchase them. If you want to read something, then give a little back to the author. What makes you think that your work deserves pay and someone else's doesn't?
It looks like it depends on the book. The publishers get to set that restriction. If I recall, the same obnoxious restriction was enabled on Nook lending as well.
Hopefully this will lighten as time goes by and the publishers stop being so short sighted. I think they're worried about the loopholes involved such as the turning off wireless with another poster already confirmed works.
Can you point out somewhere that it says the number of lends is set by the publisher? I only saw that the publisher's were in charge of whether it was lendable or not, and not the individual terms of the lend.
For some reason, my brain finds the former to be worse than being unable to lend the book at all.
If I can't lend it, it's more like seeing a movie or going to a concert. I paid for the experience and now it's gone. Being only able to lend it once is really less of a lend and more of a "comes with one free trial for a friend." I think it might be the abuse of the word 'lend' that bothers me more than anything.
I've just purchased multiple Kindle devices over the years and loan a physical device to someone who wants something to read at my house, on a trip, etc. I usually travel with an iPhone 4, iPad, Kindle DX, and MBP17, so it's pretty easy to loan the iPad or the DX to someone for a day or two. (especially useful when on a diving trip, since a lot of people don't seem to bring computers at all, wtf?)
I really wish iOS had a "guest mode" so I could easily restrict access to my personal information, browser cookies, etc. As it is, the DX is my preferred device to loan, or "I'll make you an account on my laptop."
I think that it's ridiculous that the lent book is unavailable to the original purchaser while it's loaned out. That completely defeats the purpose of an e-book.
Edit:
Do the downvoters disagree on the benefits of having a book in electronic form? Or do they think that the restrictions are not unreasonable/ridiculous?
Why? Otherwise it's piracy. I can't read my copy of the physical book while my friend is borrowing it.
It is a reasonable compromise between amazon and the publishers that will hopefully become better as time goes by. As the publishers become more and more comfortable with it and less concerned that it will destroy their business (e.g. they'll need to adapt) the restrictions will get lighter, much like they did with iTunes.
How is it piracy? They would still have the restriction of a single lending for a single 14-day period.
Right now, my girlfriend and I are reading the same physical book. I read it at work over my lunch break and she reads it at night before going to bed. Is this piracy too?
Sorry, Im generalizing more of how the publisher views it.
I think based on the current connectivity and technology of things this is probably the best compromise they could come up with.
Your girlfriend and I can't read the book at the same physical time (unless you read at the same pace and are at the same point, I suppose). A distributed lock mechanism could be used for it, but it doesn't look like Amazon came up with these terms - the publishers did. See my other comment, but this is the exact same terms which were set on the Nook lending when it came out.
No problems. I get the point, and understand your take on the publisher's views. As someone else mentioned, it's the same growing pains we had to go through with digital music, and there is some frustration that we'll have to deal with the same issues over and over again for each new industry.
My girlfriend and I have already solved the lending issue by sharing a single Amazon account for just our Kindle purchases. Then we both just registered our Kindles to that shared account. The only problem we run into is trying to remember not to "sync to furthest page read" for anything we're both reading at the same time.
> Right now, my girlfriend and I are reading the same physical book. I read it at work over my lunch break and she reads it at night before going to bed. Is this piracy too?
The key concept here is 'excludability'. Only one person (maybe two) can be physically reading it at once. Digital goods, sans DRM, could in theory be shared with pretty much the entire world without depriving anyone of their experience.
This difference between ebooks and 'real' books is the heart of the problem, and why people want to introduce artificial excludability. Actually, I'm fine with that: treat it like a real book in terms of only letting one person at a time have it, but let me freely choose who has it when and for how long.
The whole point of this feature is to make e-books behave slightly more like real books. As it stands normally, you can't share your purchased e-book with anyone — it's prohibited by the terms of use you signed and enforced by DRM. This allows you to share your e-book like you would share a real book (well, once), wherein you can't read the book after you've loaned it out because...you don't have the book.
I realize the point of the feature, but it really is an anti-feature.
It's like if you weren't allowed to skip tracks on a CD, but had to fast-forward through each individual song so that it would be more like a cassette tape.
I've already confirmed that there is a "work-around" for this. Load the book up on your Kindle (or other device). Disable wireless (or other networking). Then perform the loan from your computer.
This way the book will be available on your device (since it doesn't know it's been lent out) and on your friend's device. Just don't re-enable wireless until you're done with the book or the loan has expired.
This way, at least, I was able to share a book with a friend and we could both read it at the same time to discuss it.
Once you're willing to violate the license and terms of service, there are much more thorough solutions: just get a bunch of kindles on a single account and share books (although if you read at the same time, the "read location" syncing could be annoying), or download to computer, rip the copy protection off, and manually load onto kindles, desktops, etc. (and optionally upload to torrent sites, Swedish FTP servers, wikileaks, etc.).
I am personally still at the "I buy books I am interested in even if I won't read them for a while, as long as they're available for Kindle and not more expensive than the paperback, to reward the publisher for making them available on Kindle" stage, but if I were angry at publishers (as I am at the RIAA), the above would seem like a better solution.
> Note - "they should make less money" isn't an answer.
They should make more money isn't a very good answer, either.
eBooks are massively cheaper to distribute, yet we see a minimal discount. Add in the fact that they're limiting lending to once per book when I can lend a physical book infinitely many times and you're looking at higher profits for eBooks than normal books.
The same way that they've been handling it till now. Book lending isn't really a new invention. Even with the turn off the wireless hack, you can have a max of two copies of the book at once. I don't think it's that big a deal.
IMHO, you have an odd notion of what the purpose of an e-book is.
I don't buy or use ebooks because of how convenient it is to copy them and give the copies to other people. I use them because they're more convenient for me.
Amazon, please make a digital bookshelf or digital public library so people can borrow e-books without asking me and I can take them back whenever I want.
