Comment by martingordon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by martingordon | Hacker News Reader

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I bought a refurb Kindle 2 29 days ago and am a click away from returning it and pre-ordering a Nook. I haven't bought any books on the Kindle yet (I'm working through a copy of Atlas Shrugged I downloaded, a book I own and isn't available in Kindle format), but it struck me that if I had, those books would be completely useless on the new reader and not only that, I can't sell them or give them away.

The publishers are going to go through the same process the music industry went through for 7-10 years and hopefully we'll eventually have DRM free books. The difference between books and music is that while someone might want to listen to a particular song out of their thousand song library at any given time, it's much more unlikely that someone would like that kind of random access to their books. I just hope DRM will only be an annoyance and won't sabotage eBook reader adoption.

To me that random access is the killer feature itself. What other benefit would I have from using an ebook reader if not to carry around my whole library instead of just the book I am currently mainly reading.

* Size * Ease of transition between books (you can carry 2-3 books so you won't ever be without a book). * Search

The purported "loan to a friend" feature of the Nook does sound a bit Zune-like. It's unlikely that there will be a DRM free approach, but I've seen notably less hacking on the Amazon format than on AAC. Perhaps since the decryption doesn't happen on a general purpose computer, it's harder to crack. Or maybe crackers don't read books?

The Kindle DRM is trivially broken. Kindle ebooks are basically just Mobipocket ebooks.

This makes the book publishers' dilemna much simpler than the music publishers'. 99.99% of people don't read more than 30 books a month - though people might sample more different books and be more willing to drop books they didn't like, on a flat fee.

So what they should do is offer a $30/m for 30 books a month subscription. I'd be perfectly willing to pay that for access to their entire library, with the ability to at most read through 30 books per month. Another way to do it would be per page, so that you can sample many different books... e.g. 10000 pages for $30/m (assuming about 300 pages per book on average).

I would buy that in a heartbeat. I'd still buy physical books, but only those I want to own. Meanwhile, whoever's pulled this thing together gets a solid yearly income of $360 from me - much more than they get from all but the heaviest readers today.

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