The kindle is definitely the nicest reader, however it seems to Sony reader is the most open.
But regardless, the Kindle natively supports PDF, HTML, and plain text, and should you want to, Amazon provides a tool to convert those and other formats (including ePub) to the Kindle's proprietary mobipocket-derived format. They even provide Linux binaries [4].
Don't want to deal with conversions and manually managing your library? Just use Calibre [5]; it's open source.
And that's exactly why I placed my order: I'm not willing to accept Amazon's DRM, which will force me to read older works to get value out of the device. A goal I've had since reading a quote dubiously attributed to Einstein: "Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else."
[1]: http://www.feedbooks.com/
[3]: http://www.gutenberg.org/
[4]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000...
"ON CLASSIC LITERATURE Written for the Jungkaufmann, a monthly publication of the Schweizerischer Kaufmaennischer Verein, Jugendbund, February 29, 1952.
Somebody who reads only newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else. And what a person thinks on his own without being stimulated by the thoughts and experiences of other people is even in the best case rather paltry and monotonous.
There are only a few enlightened people with a lucid mind and style and with good taste within a century. What has been preserved of their work belongs among the most precious possessions of mankind. We owe it to a few writers of antiquity that the people in the Middle Ages could slowly extricate themselves from the superstitions and ignorance that had darkened life for more than half a millennium. Nothing is more needed to overcome the modernist's snobbishness."
But DRM is much worse. It prevents me from doing things that it seems like I ought to be able to do. If the kindle did not use DRM, I would buy one right now. As it is, I am staying primarily with physical books for the moment.
That’s just a risk a store owner has to bear.
The USA (or least New York state) has laws against false imprisonment, false arrest, and unlawful detainment.
Hardware wise I like the kindle over the nook, lighter faster, better experience, but I can't justify getting one when the moral cost is too high.
But this moral objection to DRM I don't get. News flash: actuarially speaking, "you" are almost certainly a thief. It's not like Amazon's suppliers are crazy for thinking their property might get stolen.
I do firmly believe the negative moral implications of content producers taking so much off the top of content creators take of the transaction to be much worse than the implications of someone downloading a file without paying.
This argument is all about perspective (lots of different right answers). Mine is just one that tends to support the creator not the producer, by attending live shows and book signings. Live appearances are where creators make the money.
Maybe all the content creators need a payment system/network for their web sites that allows guilty parties to pay money directly to them so they don't have to feel bad about downloading their content from sources other than the producers.
All I have to say is, you're getting offended that Amazon's suppliers think you will renege on the terms under which they provide you books and "liberate" them for the betterment of mankind as you perceive it.
You really have no business feigning outrage here, because the concerns of Amazon's suppliers are obviously well-founded. You might not renege, but given the opportunity, a huge fraction of all readers clearly will. Hell, they'll do it to avoid paying NINETY NINE CENTS to an independent iPhone software developer.
That's a little more pejorative than I would like, but less so than "thief". We all take more than we give (leech) from time to time. Often we do this with the expectation that we will pay it back - or pay it forward. For examples, consider children, or someone receiving welfare, or someone who buys a cup of coffee in a busy cafe and then takes up a table for three hours. This is a spectrum, too: if your community thinks that you have crossed some line, you will be regarded as a thief.
I like the anonymous payback idea: it could be as simple as a paypal link on the author's web site. If that became widespread, it would be interesting to study the data.
I need to change the oil on my lawn mower. I could spend the 45 minutes it would take to get to an approved oil disposal facility--or I could just dump it in the strip of weeds next to my fence.
The latter will cause no measurable harm. Hell, it might even kill some of the weeds that I don't like there, but because of the way the ground slopes down as it approaches the fence I can't reasonably mow. Even if some of my oil makes it the 50 feet or so down to the ditch that carries rainwater runoff to (eventually) Puget Sound, it will be so dilute by then there will be no measurable harm.
So, is it OK for me to just dump my oil?
No, because even though my dumping would cause no measurable harm, if everyone dumped it would cause great harm to public resources, such as Puget Sound.
The situation is similar with intellectual property. We've set up a public resource--the IP law framework--which gives intellectual goods certain legal attributes designed to make them behave similar to real property, so as to allow for the use of the same economic systems that we use for dealing with physical goods to be applied to intangible goods.
When an individual ignores that framework, he's behaving just like someone dumping oil on their weed patch. They cause no measurable harm, but if a lot of people did it, it would destroy a public resource.
No, because even though my dumping would cause no measurable harm, if everyone dumped it would cause great harm to public resources, such as Puget Sound."
Dumping oil cause SO MUCH measurable harm. It is so interesting how oil spread too thin on water(near molecular size, in fact this is a method to measure its size) and enormously change the air-water interface of big quantities of water and so its properties(chemical concentration(oxigen diffusion) and heat transfer, surface tension), killing a lot of biomass,affecting trees(you can kill trees just with oil(I have seen that with just one can of car oil)as it affects its roots, fish, insects and water wells.
Its harm is VERY measurable.
Biological Oil degrade easily, industrial oil not so.
But until there is a way to digitally loan a book to a friend, I'm never buying a kindle book again.
When you visit the mall, there are security cameras. There are security guards, there are those beeper scanner things at exits. There are ink tags, there are locked cabinets. There are display models while the real item hides "in the back". Why are you not up in arms about how the shopping mall "assumes you are a thief"?
However, point taken. The issue I have with DRM however, is fundamentally different. When someone steals a piece of tangible merchandise, the store is out because they actually borrowed money to purchase that merchandise up front, and has to eat the cost. There is no rational argument that can setup an equivalent with digital media. Additionally, There is absolutely no reason any ebook should cost more than $10 when the hardcover is available for $16-$20. Yes there is overhead in providing these items for download, but much of that overhead is directly tied to keep people from stealing it. Neat, so take $3 off the price of your ebook and more people will be willing to buy it.
By your logic, they have no business charging $75 for Harris' _Trading and Exchanges_ (a bible of market microstructure); Harris' book has a comparable number of pages and the same binding.
You are essentially advocating for fiat pricing, and against the market. You can make a consistent argument based on that, but it will wildly mismatch the way pretty much all of western civilization works.
Example: Cryptonomicon is $8.99 as a softcover, but, the ebook version is $10.99
It is not an economic injustice that the ebook Cryptonomicon costs more than the softcover.
No, but perhaps it is a sign of a screwy market. Or simply a new market that hasn't really stabilized yet.
In particular, ebook versions of reference works are more valuable in electronic form.
(I've picked up a few $5 O'Reilly titles on the App Store, but probably wouldn't even have done that if they weren't basically DRM-free ePubs with a reader wrapped around them.)
* The physical copy is run ragged because you have to flip from the front to the back of the book constantly
* In the electronic copy, if I tap the word catastatic in the text, I'm immediately presented with the definition. In the paper copy, it's just annoying enough to look that up that I'm inclined to try to derive the meaning from context, which is a trap DFW seems inclined to spring mercilessly.
* Similarly, in the electronic version, and anyone who has read IJ will see immediately the value of this, when I tap a footnote number, I'm immediately taken to the text of the footnote, and I can instantly return back to the text. This speeds up my reading time of the book significantly.
Do these factors matter to you? Of course they don't. I'm a dork and I'm just namedropping a prestige book to make a point in the most puffy way possible. But: I value these features a lot more than "right to lend", "right to sell", "insurance against loss", etc.
And in a free market, I'm allowed to do that. And, though this is a stretch and you won't be happy to hear me claim this, I think I'm closer to the opinion of the bulk of the market than you are.
The price is what the market will bear, period.
As to manufacturing costs, the cost of producing a hardcover book and a mass-market paperback are negligible, the prices of those editions are not set based on cost of production but on time of availability.
Book pricing is fundamentally broken right now. And the vast majority of authors do not make a reasonable income from their work. Books are priced as commodities, the same as you might see prices for fruit or vegetables in the supermarket. The way that authors make the most money is by milking high demand for their books from the early buyers through hardcover sales. This is why the hardcover comes out first at a higher price, because there's a lot more profit built into the earliest release. But readers would find it unfair if the paperback edition came out first and cost 2x as much as normal paperbacks for the first several months. The perception of value of hardbacks offsets this feeling, even though the price of hardback editions usually falls down to only a few dollars more than the paperback after a while. Much the same as 1st class / coach class on airplanes, the higher paying customers help subsidize the lower paying customers.
However, there is no hardback/paperback differentiator in eBooks. If the eBook price is lowered a few dollars relative to the paperback and eBooks become the dominant form of book then authors and publishers are faced with a crisis, the inability to make a profit on books. Keeping eBook prices close to paperback books helps solve the problem somewhat because the lower cost of production allows for a higher profit margin, though not as high as for hardbacks.
Ultimately, it's not the wad of pressed wood pulp that readers value, per se, but the content itself, so there is a reasonable justification that the paperback price should be the price floor for any edition of the book, regardless of media. So far this seems to have held, as today's eBook pricing still results in very lively sales.
It remains to be seen what the ultimate answer is to this crisis, but it's important to recognize the seriousness of it.