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.
And that maybe we should care.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.