Code Red
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Chris Wysocki
Caldwell, NJ
The nine most terrifying words in the English language are "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." - Ronald Reagan
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The Party of "No"
Technorati and Me
Technorati is indexing me again! They had to make a code change to fix the problem with my blog getting stuck in their queue. Kudos to Eric M. and the guys at GetSatisfaction.com where they have "community powered support for Technorati".
Well, they're "sorta, kinda" indexing me anyway. It's on a 24 hour tape delay or something. So I never get picked up by Memeorandum because they pull from Technorati and Technorati has stuff I posted yesterday listed as my latest blog entry. And that's old news to Memeorandum.
Wankers.
Recent headlines from my Posterous Blog:
Tuesday, 23 June 2009
DRM hobbles the Kindle
As you already know I'm not a Kindle kind of guy. I like paper books, I like their feel and their heft - you know when you're getting to the end. It's easy to look at two of them at once. But ebooks are the wave of the future, or so I'm told.
Enter DRM (Digital Rights Management). Much to the chagrin of the people who buy ebooks there are limitations on how many times you can download them. Why does this matter? Because people trade-up their readers — Kindle 1 for Kindle 2, iTouch for iPhone, etc.
When they return to Amazon.com to re-download the books they've already paid for they encounter an ugly surprise thanks to the Kindle DRM:
"Oh that's the problem," he said "if some of the books will download and the others won't it means that you've reached the maximum number of times you can download the book."
It gets worse.
I asked the customer representative where this information was available and he told me that it's in the fine print of the legalese agreement documentation. "It's not right that they are in bold print when you buy a book?" I asked. "No, I don't believe so. You can have to look for it."
We're not done- it gets even worse.
"How do I find out how many times I can download any given book?" I asked. He replied, "I don't think you can. That's entirely up to the publisher and I don't think we always know."
Yup, I'll be sure to run right out and buy some ebooks now! Why not? They expire; they're a never-ending revenue stream for the publishers and the retailers. You're not buying the book, you're borrowing it, albeit for an extended period of time.
It's as if those paper books on your shelf were to self-destruct after a year or 2 if you try to reread them.
Amazon has apparently issued a "clarification" to the policy.
According to the last customer representative spoke to ...
You are able to redownload your books an unlimited number of times to any specific device.
Any one time the books can be on a finite number of devices. In most cases that means you can have the same book on six different devices.
Unfortunately the publishers decide how many licenses, that is devices, a book can be on at any one time. While most of the time that will be five or six different devices there will be times when it's only one device.
At the present time there is no way to know how many devices can be licensed prior to buying the book.
Finally, when you have reached a limit of six devices and you swap one older device for a new one, it does not automatically reset the number of licenses so you can add the new one. Amazon can release all of the licenses which will remove any given book from all of the devices and then allow you to re-download it that same number of times.
So the books self-destruct but if you call up Amazon and beg they'll let you re-download them again. Meanwhile that paper book just sits there on the shelf, ready at a moment's notice to be opened and read.
I can even lend that paper book to a friend. And she can lend it to someone else. And so on. And so on. I suppose you could lend someone your Kindle but at $489 that's a pretty expensive gadget to hand over to a casual acquaintance. A typical paperback is $5.99; I won't lose any sleep if it doesn't come home again.
And what do you do in a hundred years (or even sooner) when Amazon isn't
there to answer the phone anymore?
Posted at 14:47 by Chris Wysocki
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