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> what guarantees do I have that I can still read those books if B&N goes under

As the MSN Music shutdown (and others) demonstrated, quite possibly none at all. That's how DRM works.

There's no DRM media allowed in my house. I plan to live a lot longer than most companies' digital media divisions will!

I still have MSN Music and Buy.com purchased albums in WMA format hanging around my music folders on backup drives... paid in full, "purchased" music that was turned into junk data I can't decrypt and play when the stores turned off their licensing servers.

I have a first-generation WiFi-only Nook. I have never registered it with B&N and have it permanently in airplane mode (i.e. WiFi disabled). For over a year I used it only for DRM-free EPUB (mainly O'Reilly e-books).

Last week I finally broke down and bought a DRM book from B&N's website. It let me download an encrypted EPUB file, which I transferred to my Nook over USB. Without having to enable WiFi or register my Nook, I was able to open and read the EPUB just by entering my name and the credit card number used to purchase the book. (By the way, I only had to do this once.)

It still sucks because it's DRM, but I'm reasonably confident that with this setup, B&N can't remotely kill my books, and it should keep working even if B&N goes bust. You might want to consider it.

So I guess one concern with that is, what about four years from now? Obviously by then you'll of course be using an iPad 5 or 6 or whatever, because it will simply be the Greatest Device Ever Until the Next One Is Released, and you no longer have the same credit card? Is that book lost forever? I'm not criticizing your decision to break down and buy a NookBook, I'm sure I'll do it too at some point -- I just can't help that little nagging voice saying "You'll be sorry!"

I mean, I'm not super-concerned with the prospect of wasting $15... it's the principle of the thing.

what happens when your credit card hits the expiry date?

Troll feeding

He'll get a new expiry date. Credit card companies don't issue you a new number unless they really have to (card was use fraudulently)

Instead they just issue you a new expiry and CVC - and often even update merchants who are charging you on a regular basis with the new info, or allow transactions to continue to go through even with expired date/cvc

Still a valid concern regarding the card # being replaced due to fraud. I keep an encrypted list of all my past CC #s for this very purpose: Far too many places use the CC# as a life-long immutable number (think SSN).

I realized after re-reading the original comment that he only has to valid date his CC on first opening.

What I was wondering is if he had to re-validate at some point in the future, would the expired card trip him up or would his encrypted copy still work?

I'd guess it would still work if he is doing this all without a network connection. If that works though, I hope their using the credit card info as a hash instead of directly storing it in their encrypted files... because that would be scary.

To be 100% honest, I've bene nothing but very very happy with my Kindle.

Purchased a book by accident? Refund instantly or done within 5 minutes. Switching devices? No problemo, pages are synced up to the last page you read. Wiping your device? All your books are online and available for download.

This seems like a fringe case that I'm not too worried about. I have a full purchase history on Amazon.com and if anything fails, I am pretty sure their customer service wouldn't become huge pricks to me for no reason at all.

I don't doubt I'd probably have a very similar experience to yours with my device. It's entirely possible that I could use it as intended for the next ten years and never experience a single hiccup with the service.

I guess worrying about those edge cases just kind of comes naturally, perhaps a little too much personal experience with Murphy's Law?

Perhaps really my chief complaint boils down to the stereotypical issue with DRM: If I paid for a book, why do I need your permission to read it?

Actually, as a device purchaser, I personally don't care about edge cases. (It can happen to anyone.)

However, as a service provider, edge cases are what keep me up at night but are fantastic opportunities for providing even better service. I'm not saying Amazon shouldn't care, but I personally wouldn't care too much about an edge case as long as Amazon does that person good.

As for DRM: if it isn't invasive or affect my experience with the book (Kindle and Steam are good examples here.) then I am okay by it. If it is used in some weird way to censor things? That's uncool.

DRM isn't inherently "used for" one thing or another.

A kill switch is a capability one party has over another. Once in place, it can be used for any purpose.

I also have been extremely happy with my kindle. The closest I have to a complaint is the limit on the number of devices that can be authorized for certain books, and even that is normally reasonable. The cloud based reader accessible through a browser also makes that restriction less painful (though I wish they would enable highlighting...)

But I still have concerns about the DRM. Amazon seems extremely stable, but things in tech move fast. Even if Amazon survives, I may eventually want to move to a completely different reader from a company that doesn't exist now, and the DRM will make it hard to take my library with me.

I love the cloud drive player Amazon rolled out for MP3s, but I have it redundantly backed up on 2 harddrives. With the Kindle content I don't have that option.

You can hook your kindle up to your PC and pull the AZW files off if you wish to keep the content backed up.

But what are those files worth if your Amazon account gets mysteriously locked, or Amazon goes bankrupt 10 years from now?

I've had the opposite experience as you. While the kindle is a very sexy device, all it really does well is the reading part. However, pretty much every e-reader does that part well.

The thing I hate most though is the whole Kindle experience. Buying e-books from Amazon is kind of scammy since there's no confirmation page when you buy books and there's no way to turn off one-click for kindle books. Also, I wasn't able to find where to refund the book at all when I clicked "buy" thinking that there would be a confirmation page.

Also, the syncing is kinda broken because if you click a link in the book and end up in the appendix, there's no easy way to reset the furthest page read. Finally, epub is such a "free-ing" format since I can purchase books from Google books as well. Sync is just a minor convenience since e-book sellers will usually let you re-download the book anyway if you've purchased it.

When you purchase a book on your Kindle, you get taken to a page saying you bought the book.

There's a link for "Made a mistake?" which I clicked once, thinking I would get a confirmation page as well, and the refund was instantaneous.

Kindle customer service was excellent to me too - bottom half of the screen died and Amazon sent out a replacement device immediately, then made arrangements to collect my broken one, at their own expense. Unlike the iTunes store I was able to get through to the right person by following the instructions provided.

Its not too difficult to imagine edge cases where communication between the person taking the phone call and the person able to resolve the situation breaks down; that can happen in any large company. But then getting things resolved also requires good faith on the part of the complainant; filing chargebacks against a reputable company within a month of the problem isn't the best indication of this.

They aren't intentionally being pricks; they just don't care. Caring costs too much. It's cheaper to have an unresponsive automated customer service system that lets a certain percentage of customers suffering from edge cases fall through the cracks. This guy was the unlucky one today.

I'm sure many of these same concerns apply to the Kindle

Not really. I have a Kindle 3, and have loads of non-DRM-ed, 3rd party books on it.

I meant Kindle books, from Amazon.

Books sold on the Kindle Store don't require DRM. You can sell creative commons licenced works using "Kindle Direct Publishing" on the Kindle Store with no DRM at all.

The DRM on Kindle ebooks is actually surprisingly easy to crack, and I do so as a matter of principle. I believe in supporting the author and pay for my Kindle library; I also ensure my ebooks can't be taken from me if the company folds/the publisher decides they don't want my money (ie. the 1984 Amazon debacle).

This is actually the reason I own a kindle vs other devices. If I find that I cannot crack the DRM of a book I purchased, that will be the last ebook I buy from amazon.

Anyone know if the Kobo has similar issues?

I've totally written off the Kindle because of similar 3rd party content issues - anyone have first hand experience with the Nook or Kobo when used with ePub (mainly) and PDF (rarely) files?

I have a Kindle 3, and I only use 3rd party content, i.e. none of the 100ish books on my kindle were bought from Amazon. None have DRM. I can read them fine.

As far as I can tell, the Nook is perfectly fine with non-DRM'd 3rd-party EPUB's and PDF's (the only limitation being the amount of internal storage on the device allotted for 3rd-party stuff).

I have no idea if it works with DRM'd 3rd-party content, though.

I have the original no-wifi cheap kobo, it only has free content on it.

I connected it the PC and and simply copied epub and pdf to it using calibre. It comes with 100 free books that you can erase, none of the memory is reserved (except for the OS)

ePub works perfectly.

pdf is a little limited in range of zoom, for technical books I convert to epub with calibre and download that.

The only downside of the Kobo - it takes a long time to boot up if it has fully shutdown. Then once it has started it takes a long time to open books.

So far my first generation Nook likes my side-loaded ePub files real well. I don't put PDFs on it. I also don't buy through B&N as I have an allergic reaction to DRM. :-)

I have 173Mb of files purchased and downloaded separately and side-loaded from PragProg, Manning, O'Reilly and SitePoint. (And a few classics from Gutenburg.)

I've had a Kobo Touch for about 8 months now, absolutely love it. I have one DRM book downloaded through the Kobo book store and the rest of them were side loaded through Calibre. No problems, nice and smooth.

The device doesn't require Calibre for side-loading either as you can just drag the epub to the mounted device. Loading and using your own fonts is also a nice feature.

As for PDFs, if they are smaller page sizes it's pretty good, but the zooming and panning functions are kind of a pain--mainly because of e-ink, but partially due to UI.

I've only had one issue with the Kobo Touch when I had to reload my books, as for some reason the database became corrupted.