Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

It amazes me that the e-book providers think they can head down the same road as the music industry and not end up in the same spot.

I'm a serious Kindle user -- I have dozens of books. I've thought about using DRM-cracking software to free up my books, not because of any desire to share or lend but just because it's not right having a book in my possession locked away under a secret key some other bunch of people control.

This announcement doesn't bode well for Amazon. Technology can help you find markets, technology can enable markets, but using technology to force a market to appear where none did before doesn't have such a great track record. Everybody understands that you read a book, you share it (or give it away). There is no further sale. Lendle was simply trying to help Amazon work in a natural way that people commonly understand.

View on HN

> I'm a serious Kindle user -- I have dozens of books.

As you've pretty much concluded yourself: no you don't.

Which isn't just semantics, it's pretty much the essence of DRM'ed content.

He currently does have them, he just doesn't own them.

In the future, he may no longer have them, but currently he apparently does.

  He currently does have them

Well, at least until Amazon pulls another George Orwell :

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10289983-56.html

  In the future, he may no longer have them

Helps to finish reading my comment...

DRM isn't black and white though. Blu-Ray DRM is (last I checked) pretty good; thus I don't buy Blu-Ray. DVD-CSS is such a joke that it might as well not exist, so I buy DVDs without any problem, and I keep my DVD collection on my file server for easy access through Boxee. Kindle's DRM is in the joke category of DRM. It supposedly exists, but I have a tiny python program that strips the DRM off my kindle purchases, so I can keep backups on my file server in case Amazon decides to pull a PlaysForSure. DRM is definitely evil, but when it's trivially circumvented it doesn't bother me so much.

I crack the hell out of my Kindle purchases. Not for piracy, but so I can read them on Apple's superior iBooks app. It's pretty simple to do. Funny part is, I didn't start buying Amazon eBooks until I was certain I could defeat their DRM.

The Kindle iPad app is anus.

Why is it superior to the Kindle app?

When I tried it awhile ago, the Kindle app had a page turning experience that can only be described as maddening. Tap in the wrong spot, boom, page has turned. The iBooks app, for all its over-done skeuomorphism, makes interacting with the book pretty easy. Simple things like page edges make clear what will happen when you tap in a particular place. iBooks just feels really nice.

More than that, the Kindle app is just ugly. It has this janky animation when you jump to another section of the book that's painful to watch. It's a shame – the Kindle v3 hardware is a pretty badass product. The Kindle iPad app feels barebones, insipid and unpolished. Does a disservice to the brand.

That's interesting. The initial feedback I read on iBooks vs Kindle back when both apps were first available was very heavily skewed the other way: people seemed to prefer the Kindle app.

Perhaps it was just a case of familiarity and the majority of the reports at that time being by existing Kindle users. Apple has also pushed out a few good updates since (including proper hyphenation!) so that has probably helped too.

You can copy and paste snippets from it, for one. The page turning is less psychotic, for another. Speaking as an iPhone owner who uses both apps.

I have to agree with Danil. I like the page turning behavior in iBooks better, but not enough to crack my books.

I prefer the experience within Stanza to either iBooks or Kindle -- ability to resize, page turning, etc.

That said, there is a big difference between the "apps" and they Kindle device itself.

iBooks is very slow on my iPhone 3G, but the Kindle app, though not as pretty, runs fine.

I also crack my Kindle books, again not for piracy, but as an insurance policy against the sort of behaviour that people are worried that Amazon could indulge in.

I'm happy to play fair so long as they do...

That said, if I think a book is something I'm likely to want to keep long term, I still tend to buy the paper version. My Kindle is for convenience.

"Heading down the same road as the music industry" seems a bit strong. They haven't sent out armies of lawyers to extort kids in project downloading picture books, or asked Homeland Security to seize URLs

They've simply decided that a site probably shouldn't be using Amazon's own resources via the API to make it easy to find a particular Kindle title they might have been considering buying for free. If Amazon perceive it as damaging to sales they'd be insane not to. Noticeably there's a similar site that hasn't been shut down; maybe that one generates decent revenue via links to purchase books they don't have available.

I’m not disputing your comment per se, but:

1) Heading down the same road ≠ already at the same destination (pedantry, sorry).

2) I would argue they are in the same boat as entertainment industries (and newspaper industries) in that they are selling artificially (via laws & DRM) scarce “goods.”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com