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Comment by jackowayed | Hacker News Reader

How does more utility == more freedom?

I can lend physical books to friends, I can sell them when I'm done with them, I can buy them cheap from others who are done with them. That's freedom. And that's what the books I have the opportunity to buy on my Kindle lack (ability to lend some Kindle books in a lame way aside).

No matter how many more books I have on the Kindle because ebooks are cheaper, the only freedom I have with them are to read them on devices that Amazon decides to support and to lend my whole Kindle to someone to let them read something.

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Buy a physical book. Read it. Sell it. Net result is you had the book for a short while, effectively got a discount on it (because you sold it), and if you change your mind and want to read it again you'll have to go buy it again.

Compare to buying that book on Kindle. If the savings are more than what your net cost is in the physical case, you come out ahead, because on the Kindle side you don't actually get rid of the book. At most you stop syncing it to the device. If you later decide you want to read it again, you don't have to go out and buy another copy.

Even for books that you would not sell, Kindle can be a win on freedom simply by being cheaper. I'm free to read more books if I'm spending less per book. It then becomes a matter of weighing the options. Go with physical books, and I don't have to worry that maybe some legal snafu will result in my books ceasing to function. Go with Kindle, and read more books for the same money.

What Stallman overlooks in most of his arguments is that many of us are adults. We are capable of considering the alternatives and deciding which of the competing freedoms are most important to us.

Lending on the Kindle has worked pretty well for me. Can you clarify why it's lame?

Also, can you name a device that Amazon doesn't support, apart from the Nook? I frequently read my Kindle content on the Kindle itself, my two PCs and my Mac, and my Droidx. I could also do it on any tablet (if I owned one), or my wife's iPhone.

Not to mention, you can read any non-DRM content you want on the Kindle.

And it's not that more utility == more freedom. It's that easier-to-self-publish is going to lower the barrier for people to create niche content by bypassing the big publishing houses. It's also going to create lower priced books overall, as well as more and better free content.

I also personally think it's only a matter of time before the publishers realize what the music industry has mostly realized after a decade: DRM doesn't work. I think it will slowly phase itself out. Just a guess, though, YMMV.

You're missing my point, which is that more books and cheaper books equals more freedom.

I'm not arguing against the notion that you should be able to do what you want with something you've purchased. But every business model ever conceived limits freedom in some way, and the echo-chamber argument that's put forth here consistently fails to take into account the fact that ebooks (and the business models that accompany them) have the potential to increase freedom by promoting reading.

At the end of the day, nobody's preventing you from buying a paper book; if you want to lend the book out, buy the paper version. Simple.

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