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Comment by moskie | Hacker News Reader

This was essentially my justification for buying a Kindle: it's about the price of a new bookcase.

I have 3 full bookcases in my house right now, all of which I bought, new, for under $25 each. And one I got for $5 at a rummage sale. When the Kindle goes to $25 (and opens up the SDK), I'll be ready with my money in-hand. Until then, I'm waiting until they lose some of the insane vendor lock-in.

How much have you spent storing and moving them and their associated loads?

For younger people just starting to build a library I think the value proposition is definitely in favor of eReaders. They don't have to buy or move book cases, they can carry their entire library in one hand, you can re-download all your books in the event of a catastrophe (imagine trying to find and repurchase all of your books if they were destroyed in a fire) -- I could go on.

I'm under 30 and already have 3-4 bookshelves full. And that's after throwing away half of them. At this rate my Kindle will save me a bundle of money and pain.

The vendor lock-in is an annoying issue to some, but it's not an game-stopper for many people.

So, yeah, more expensive than the nominal value of some bookcases but there's much more to consider than that.

Insane vendor lock-in that can be readily and legally circumvented with Calibre, a free and open-source piece of conversion software that runs on the three major consumer OSs?

You can remove Kindle DRM with Calibre? News to me.

(Also, it still doesn't address the principle of the matter: digital music has gone DRM-free, it's time for eBooks to do the same.)

Calibre does not remove DRM as a built in feature but there are plugins available that do it.

DRM is bound to lose on books. One reason is the analog hole, same as with music. A dedicated hobbyist with a scanner and OCR could easily produce unencumbered e-books even if DRM were perfect. Also, the bits in an e-book are always going to be easy to pirate just because there are so few of them. A book weighs in around a half a megabyte of uncompressed text.

Are you aware that there are a great many places to purchase DRM-free ebooks at places other than Amazon? And that programs like Calibre can format-shift these to kindle-readable formats?

You're not vendor-locked with the Kindle with these tools. Your /brain/ might be vendor-locked though, if you think that a Kindle will only ever read stuff bought from Amazon. I bought a Kindle for a friend, and torrented hundreds of ebooks for her. She hasn't paid a cent to DRM formats. When she wants a new book, she can purchase an ebook from somewhere other than Amazon if she wants to avoid DRM, and use Calibre to convert to .mobi format, which the Kindle happily reads.

But that's my point exactly: I don't want to torrent books, I want to purchase them legally.

Also, do any DRM-free stores have nearly the selection of Amazon/B&N/iBooks? From what I understand, the DRM-free stores only have independent/self-published books.

I bought a kindle for the exact same reason. I already lent half of my books a couple of weeks after the kindle arrived, and here, to lend a book its to lose it.

"It's a gift. Never lend a book." —William Adama

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