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Comment by kwantam | Hacker News Reader

Really? Some evidence for this claim would be very useful.

How many people are boycotting the Kindle because the lending feature is broken?

How fast would I get sued if I made a magical piece of software that allowed people to lend digital music purchases to their friends in some hypothetical way exactly analogous to lending them a physical CD (i.e., only one copy ever exists)?

How fast is the RIAA lawyering up over Amazon et al offering services where I can store my music in their cloud and stream it to myself?

Really, I don't think I'm making a hugely strong claim here.

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I don't know anybody that doesn't at least express regret over the fact that books on their Kindle can't be shared, and I know more than one family that shares one giant account for all their purchases as a workaround. It's definitely not something people are completely happy with, although they're not as up in arms as I'd like...

> How many people are boycotting the Kindle because the lending feature is broken?

I won't be buying one until they remove the DRM.

Admirable, but regrettably, people boycotting Kindle or any other product because of the DRM are in the minority that is easy to ignore.

> How many people are boycotting the Kindle because the lending feature is broken?

Yesterday Amazon announced they're selling more titles on Kindle than hardback and paperback put together.

> How fast would I get sued if I made a magical piece of software that allowed people to lend digital music purchases to their friends in some hypothetical way exactly analogous to lending them a physical CD (i.e., only one copy ever exists)?

What does this have to do with me asking you for some evidence that people were more accepting of the fact that they can't lend books out?

> How fast is the RIAA lawyering up over Amazon et al offering services where I can store my music in their cloud and stream it to myself?

Again, not sure what this has to do with you saying people accept that it's reasonable to not lend out books.

I think we understand different things by "evidence" - you're positing hypotheticals.

[updated to add missing not in my penultimate sentence]

> > How many people are boycotting the Kindle because the lending feature is broken?

> Yesterday Amazon announced they're selling more titles on Kindle than hardback and paperback put together.

That's his point. Not many people are boycotting the Kindle, despite its titles being less lendable than their physical counterparts. This seems like evidence to me; it's not likely that you'll find a longitudinal study of people's attitudes towards book lending over the past 50 years, but anecdotally I think it's reasonable to posit that people would have scoffed at Kindle-like lending restrictions on physical books 50 years ago (and probably still would). What sort of evidence would you require?

But you can lend - you just hand someone your Kindle. What you can't do (right now), is take a copy, send that copy to someone and be prevented from reading the .

Having said that, I clearly misunderstood his original point - I had physical items in mind when I responded.

There's an implication that we're all blissfully unaware, and one day we're going to wake up, and all the rights that matter will have been taken away from us, one imperceptible slice at a time. I pretty much disagree with this - I think the tradeoffs that are being made are deemed acceptable.

We yearn for more (the ability to share anything we want with anyone we want at any time), but we've have collectively decided to sacrifice some freedoms to gain others.

From where I'm sitting all I see is a steady erosion of personal freedoms and an ever-increasing number of behavioral mandates we have to adhere to. I invite you to point out these new found freedoms we've traded up for.

I don't think I said we traded up, but it's not like we've lost everything. Here are some freedoms (or benefits)

- freedom from physically needing to get to a bookstore - I know this sounds trivial, but there are many people who have difficulties with access

- the freedom of choice: I can still continue purchasing the physical artifacts and carry on as before

- being able to carry around hundreds or thousands of digital artifacts in incredible. I grew up with Walkmans, and having to create tapes, then moved onto carrying around CDs in cumbersome cases to go with my portable CDman.

Are these trivial freedoms? Possibly. Is my life better - certainly.

The problem is we've given up long-term benefits in exchange for short-term ones, and it's not clear where that's going to lead us.

Steam makes my life super convenient, but what happens if I move to a country with super-aggressive bandwidth caps? For that matter, I don't even know if Steam would let me access my US-bought materials from another country.

As hackers, we're used to working around the problem. The problem is that that attitude lacks foresight, and "death by a thousand cuts" can become a reality.

> For that matter, I don't even know if Steam would let me access my US-bought materials from another country.

Yes.

But don't come to Australia or you'll have to pay a fortune for your games.

Dawn of war 2: Complete Pack (Australian Steam) $99.99 http://store.steampowered.com/app/56437/?cc=au

Dawn of war 2: Complete Pack (United States Steam) $59.99 http://store.steampowered.com/app/56437/?cc=us

Please note: The currency in both of these “products” is identical.

I think you're confusing freedom with convenience. This seems to be a common mistake. In my experience the two are frequently mutually exclusive. Here's an example from my personal life:

I like to rock climb on the weekends. Two of my favorite climbing destinations (I like them both for different reasons) have wildly different characteristics.

One is a top-roping area managed by the State Park Service and the management plan and local rock quality conspire to force you to utilize specific pre-planned routes. There are well-maintained trails and a parking lot up top. This is insanely convenient as you can just walk up, clip into anchors at the top of the crag, drop a rope, and you're in business. The convenience factor makes this a really great spot if you're taking out a group of inexperienced folks for their first time climbing. That's convenience.

The second area (in another state park) has no anchors of any kind. Parking is at the bottom a couple miles from the crag and to get to any of the climbs you're looking at a 45 minute hike uphill weighed down with a bunch of gear. The rock is also a lot taller here so toproping isn't an option, everything has to be lead from the ground up, on gear, with no pre-placed protection available. In non-climber terms this means you have to hang your ass out on the line and risk taking a fall on every climb you do there. You are totally free to pick any section of rock that suits your fancy, but this also means you have to be able to assess risk and know what you're about. That's freedom.

What you can't do (right now), is take a copy, send that copy to someone and be prevented from reading the

I thought you could do exactly that, if the author allows it, for something like 14 days. But there is a difference here: the author has the say on that (for now, anyway).

Handing someone my Kindle is like lending my whole bookshelf when someone asked a pocketbook.

then buy another kindle.

And if I want to lend more than one book at a time, I would need to buy even more Kindles? Very scalable idea...

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