Ebook Fraud | Hacker News Reader

Ebook Fraud

schneier.com

72 pointslogic14 comments

I've always felt it strange how Amazon has concentrated its resource on penalizing their own customers by locking down the portability/sharability of books - thus preventing customers from their full rights under copyright (such as full right to loan or sell on a book). They'll even enforce that by removing the API keys to sites like Lendle.

Yet they totally leave the door open for scammers to upload content they don't own the copyright to and have no interest in really enforcing that side of the business.

It's the main reason I won't buy a Kindle, as much as the thought of owning a beautiful ebook device reader attracts me so much.

It's the main reason I won't buy a Kindle, as much as the thought of owning a beautiful ebook device reader attracts me so much.

So buy a Nook. Or a Sony.

I have a Nook which I use exclusively for out-of-copyright content. (I doubt I'd ever pay real money for an eBook, since I like paper books far too much.)

Sony pocket reader would be near perfect if they added amazon's side buttons, and a one/two tap method to get to a fully expanded out table of contents like iBooks. Being able to use it while charging from the computer would be nice too.

It's not strange at all. Obviously Amazon makes money every time you buy Kindle content, even if it's crap, whereas Lendle threatened to reduce their revenue.

It is, however, short-sighted. If 99.9996% of the available eBooks are crap (like Sturgeon's law squared) then the e-publishing industry will die.

With Kindle, you can lend books out. I don't any internal details on Lendle, but the action doesn't actually stop lending services, from what I can see.

It's really a fine balancing act of trying to deliver the best customer experience (Which Amazon really does want to do). Without the co-operation of publishers, there wouldn't be any content, and then what's the point? Before Amazon pushed the publishers, the eBook market was tiny and unfriendly. Getting the experience as good as it is today has been a colossal amount of effort.

I don't know how enforcement is on scammy books, but I can't seem them being a positive user experience, so I can only assume that some action should be taken.

But at the same time, you really don't want to take down stuff unless you're sure you want to. It is non-trivial to determine who owns what content, and requires human intervention.

Reminds me of the Drudge Report "app" that was simply a mobile version of the site created by Jon Gales, without permission from Jon Gales (or, presumably, Matt Drudge).

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2329283

For anyone who missed it, that case ended well enough. I muscled them into giving a $10,000 donation to the Red Cross and after making it they transitioned off my servers. Best of both worlds as I never felt right about making money off it as I was screen scraping Drudge's curated links in the first place.

http://www.jongales.com/blog/2011/03/18/hacker-news-comment-...

I found Techcrunch on there a half dozen times, all paid subscriptions. Was only alerted to it when somebody asked 'hey why don't you make your Kindle edition free or cheaper than $5 a month' and I said 'we don't have a kindle edition'.

"Far from making editors superfluous, systems that democratize publishing have an even greater need for editors. "

Pure gold.

(all the following was a mistake I misread the comments somehow as part of his own post)

He's said some pretty brave things for someone who says he can't afford an attorney. Maybe he shouldn't be admitting that?

Is it legal for Amazon to ignore DMCA requests of any kind? "Safe Harbor" laws do not allow them to set restrictions like "only on law firm letterhead" do they? Some lawfirm should set up a $50 DMCA online form that faxes to Amazon.

I don't follow. Nothing in there is even remotely grounds for legal action - it can all be verified by pointing to a single example, and even at worst it's opinion and using the most well-known site as an example. And there's no mention of "DMCA" anywhere by Bruce, just by commenters.

Did the content change between your post and my reading? Or are you connecting commenters (ie, Carl Bussjaeger) with Bruce?

Wow, somehow I kept reading into the comments and thought it was him still.

Sheesh, can I blame it on poor sleep last night?

That was embarrassing! (but he needs to format comments differently than his posts)

Eh, it happens. They are a bit abnormally similar to the post though, I do agree with you on that.

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