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Comment by evgen | Hacker News Reader

We want to be able to listen to Pandora and sync with our Kindle to read e-books. The vast majority of the iOS userbase just want to listen to music and read e-books and do not care as much about what delivery mechanism provides the content. As much as I hate to admit it, they are not really going to miss Pandora or the Kindle app as much as we might like to hope. [For future reference, try not to use the Kindle as a counter-example when talking about restrictive DRM and walled gardens, it may be possible to remove the DRM but pretending it is not there in the first place isn't really honest...]

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It is important to draw a distinction between "the Kindle" (the hardware device sold by Amazon) and the "Kindle Store" (Amazon's e-book sales platform).

The Kindle Store, yes, is all about the DRM. And it's the "platform" accessed by the Kindle app on assorted devices.

However, if you're talking about the hardware device then it's entirely reasonable to ignore the DRM issue. You plug it into your computer and it mounts as a USB drive, onto which you can drop books in a variety of non-DRM'd formats (annoyingly not ePub). You can purchase said books from a variety of vendors who are happy to sell you non-DRM-encumbered products.

Amazon obviously really wants you to use these two things together, and the Kindle (device) is well set up to work with the Kindle Store. But they're not forcing you to use only their DRM with the hardware you bought.

The iPad also displays and sync ePubs with no DRM with iTunes, same as the kindle.

Yeah, I didn't want to imply that iOS was forcing DRM on people. I just see the argument that the Kindle == DRM far too much, and wanted to correct it. :)

My mother recently said to me:

"My friend showed me how to use Pandora. I love it, but you probably wouldn't like it because its all my music."

Point being, I think you're drastically underestimating Pandora/Netflix accessibility and market penetration.

This would make a nice video campaign for Pandora. Various different types of people saying "It's all my music." with references to the music they love.

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