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Comment by Travis | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure why you were downvoted. I suppose the counterargument would be that you can't lend just one book at a time, or something similar. However, that is as much a consequence of packing all your books into one device as it is amazon's fault.

I don't see why people would expect a business to be run in a method that yields no tangible benefits (why does amazon or penguin want you to share books?), but could have consequences (reduced sales).

Sometimes it seems like people are shocked when companies act in their best interests. It's very strange.

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The point of the article is in fact that because the companies have acted in their (perceived) best interests, we have lost freedom.

And that maybe we should care.

Look, I love the law as much as my fellow citizen but this is ridiculous. If you don't like the restrictions placed on you by Amazon, don't obey them! Just break the DRM and give your books to whoever you please. Until Amazon actually manages to track and prosecute people who do this, which doesn't exactly seem likely, you haven't lost anything at all.

You are a human with free will. You can choose to do whatever you think is ethical and rational. If you think it's ethical to give books to other people, and you aren't going to suffer for it, then why aren't you doing it? I think it's really weird that we can sit here on Hacker News and talk about these arbitrary restrictions that Amazon has made as if they are actually restricting something. They are restrictions in name only.

Have you ever heard of Milgram's experiment? People will actually torture each other if commanded by a higher authority, much less not share a book :)

Have we really lost any freedoms? You can still get any book on paper, and will for the near future. You can still swap books all you like.

If people are willing to give up their right to loan books in exchange for the convenience of eBooks, it sounds more like an exchange of freedom for convenience. But that's a choice people make, which is something I can't get too worked up over.

I also don't buy an argument that paper books are going away any time soon. There are huge swaths of people 40-and-up who will never read ebooks (and I suspect that is the demographic that reads more "books" than the younger set)

Have we really lost any freedoms?

Not per se. But it is withdrawal of extra freedoms/features that electronic media and the internet provide e.g. nearly-free copying and distribution and random access.

There are many possible (and legal) applications that are made impossible, even for the buyer of a book. Think e.g. of corpus linguistics, applications for automatic annotation of phrases, etc.

The media companies are trying to turn what is new and provides enormous potential benefits to the population into what is old, because it is easier to stay with old business methods than to reinvent yourself.

"Not per se. But it is withdrawal of extra freedoms/features that electronic media and the internet provide e.g. nearly-free copying and distribution and random access."

This just means that these attributes (sharing, copying, etc.) are not something inherent to the medium. While I agree that these restrictions can prevent cool features from being enabled, it's a stretch for me to believe I'm entitled to those features.

It also sounds like you're projecting a little onto the media companies with your last paragraph. Isn't it just as reasonable that they are clinging to old business methods because the new ones may cause their non-existence? In that sense, they are acting in rational self preservation.

These restrictions are not only preventing "cool features", they are preventing progress. You seem resigned to that fate, but I for one am not.

What progress?

This just means that these attributes (sharing, copying, etc.) are not something inherent to the medium.

They are precisely inherent to any digital medium.

That's what some find so galling. Part of the point being made here is that you need to resort to cumbersome kludges to prevent people from enjoying the opportunities that are already enabled by the medium.

We have lost no freedoms. Using a Kindle and subsequently agreeing to the terms of service are voluntary. If you feel strongly about sharing books, don't use ebooks.

That sort of reasoning works fine right up until there are only ebooks. Then there's no alternative, and the terms of service are effectively no longer voluntary.

When has that happened though? Music, arguably the first form of media to go digital, has also gone non-DRM. What about the Internet, the largest collection of non-DRM information ever in the history of humankind? How about freely available lectures, via services like Open Courseware? Or distribution of virtually any kind of media via archive.org? That's not even going into non-legal methods of exchange.

For the content you want, there may one day be no alternative, but I find it unlikely. The trend through all of RMS's posturing and windbagging has been more and more free exchange of information than there ever has been.

Take a university class. Odds are that your required textbook is not Open Courseware.

Most people don't seem to understand this until they encounter it on a close and personal level -- as rms has.

> If you feel strongly about sharing books, don't use ebooks.

I understand what you're saying, but I feel like I should point out that there is a very large corpus of ebooks available that are not customer-hostile. (feedbooks.com, pragprog and oreilly, etc.) In fact, the Kindle hardware works great with them. It's only content purchased from Amazon which is objectionable.

Those who purchased a kindle have gained based on the only meaningful metric: they valued the benefits of an exchange over its costs. Freedom was not "lost".

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