On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 12:41 PM, Ted Gould<
ted@gould.cx> wrote:
>
> Honestly, I think that it's okay for people to do what they wish with
> their content as long as they're upfront about it. And, I think that
> Amazon has been with this device. I bought a Kindle (which I like) and
> on doing that I realized lots of things:
>
> * No more used books from the used book store
> * No more donating old books to the library
> * No more giving a book to a friend when I'm done
>
> All of these are big negatives for me, but there were lots of positives
> and I'm actually impressed with where Amazon has gotten some of the
> publishers to go (considering all are probably a hard sell)
>
> * You can highlight text and that text is saved on your device in
> a text file that is properly attributed. Easy to add in blogs,
> etc.
> * You can get free samples of books pretty much as soon as they're
> released.
> * You can save clippings of periodicals. I have tested to see how
> long this lasts and/or what format it's saved in.
>
> Also, not trivially, the books are cheaper and most periodicals don't
> have ads in them (all the ones that I've gotten don't).
>
> I think that long term we'll see Amazon start to drop DRM just like
> Apple has. Not because they want to, but because publishers will
> realize that they're not in control, Amazon is. Just like the monster
> the music publishers created in Apple. But, I think the genius here is
> that Amazon seems to realize it too. They're not subsidizing the device
> (which makes it expensive) and they have a revenue model when there is
> no DRM through WhisperNet (which is a very cool idea). Plus, they used
> the ePub standard for the format and their DRM. I think that Amazon is
> just as happy to get rid of the DRM as soon as the publishers are.
> Hopefully soon :)