Comment by tjoff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tjoff | Hacker News Reader

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Vendor lockin is a big issue. Why should I buy a book that I can't use the way I want because of DRM, I can't get in my native language and is completely tied to a company? Oh, and it also costs more...

It is insane but greed has made the above commonplace across all aspects of the digital world.

Personally I think ebooks are still worth it, even if I have to buy it, strip the DRM (which is illegal) before reading it (on an eink display of course). But it has never been ready for mainstream (will it ever?) and it is not the techs fault.

We still don't even have a decent movie streaming service, and even if one existed it wouldn't matter because the content you want to watch makes that choice for you.

A decade ago we had awesome home theater software, they still exist but they aren't compatible with the media that is offered today. For that we need another device (chromecast) which is probably the dumbest device you can buy but somehow that is the best option available for consumers in 2018.

This is actually not too different from the e-book market in China, which is even more fragmented. There are at about a dozen well known e-book readers, and the books are not shared among different apps. Even crazier, Tencent published two different e-reader apps, both having large amount of users

Yes, DRM makes ebooks about 20% as useful as they should be. I don't think I'd mind paying more for ebooks if I could grab pieces of the text I find interesting and collate them with my own notes in a document that lives in an app designed for documents (like word, or Evernote, or Bear, or HTML.....)

Some random thoughts to what could be going on, in no particular order:

1. Yarr, pirate it. Easier to consume things when you have few qualms as to how to obtain it.

2. Nothing lasts forever. Lock-in only exists if you can't let go for the next thing that comes along.

3. Upward mobility in quality of life and social class leads to a renaissance.

> 1. Yarr, pirate it. Easier to consume things when you have few qualms as to how to obtain it.

Don't some e-Book readers disallow you from reading things that you didn't download from them (or they don't support epub)?

> 2. Nothing lasts forever. Lock-in only exists if you can't let go for the next thing that comes along.

But you also can't migrate your old library to the new one, which is the main problem with lock-in (the issue isn't that you physically cannot switch away, it's that you cannot switch away without losing things that you've bought into).

Kindles don't have that restriction, and they're by far the biggest ebook reader family on the market. Yeah, they only support MOBI, but that's just a simple file format conversion that Calibre (FOSS, available on all major platforms) can easily handle.

> Don't some e-Book readers disallow you from reading things that you didn't download from them (or they don't support epub)?

If theory 1 is true, then the readers without this user hostile approach will thrive. Obviously pirates don't care for DRM locked devices.

> But you also can't migrate your old library to the new one, which is the main problem with lock-in (the issue isn't that you physically cannot switch away, it's that you cannot switch away without losing things that you've bought into).

My point was mental, not physical. People might naturally just drop old stuff for new shiny things. If things appear plentiful compared to the old ways, this attitude is easier to adopt. Do you regret throwing away your coffee cup in the morning?

do you regret throwing away your family photos? your car? your friendships?

The true problem with piracy is actually not the issues that others have mentioned with readers disallowing sideloaded files.

The main issue with piracy is that both Amazon and Apple have far more advanced typesetting systems in the custom file types (Kindle Format 8 and iBook format) that you get when you buy from their store.

The .epub format its still based on what, XML? .epub makes up most of what you see when you pirate. If you look closely you can see that most epubs actually are really badly typeset compared to the versions of the store.

I wish there was a guarantee that when you bought a legal eBook from Amazon that it would be well edited.

I bought the Kindle version of A Deepness In The Sky recently and it's full of what seem like OCR errors. Missing punctuation, spelling errors like "A1" instead of "AI", the word "hands" mysteriously in italics for a chunk of the book... There's no way anyone read it before putting it up for sale. I wrote to them in their formatting feedback form thing but that's just gone into the void.

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