THIS is why I own Amazon stock

[Oban]

Book DRM is ok, because publishers are good.

Game DRM is bad, because publishers are bad.


What part of this do you not understand?

[Jain Zar]

My iPod Touch can do e books, as can my Palm Tungsten E2.
Kindle is mostly oohed and ahhed over because Amazon released it.

Get back to me with how long your iPod lasts with the backlight constantly on.  And a Palm?  Puhleeze.

Both are good devices.  Neither are ebook readers, and weren't intended to be.

True, but they are half the price or so, and do lots of other things.  And if we are going to a future where we never fucking OWN ANYTHING because its all easily lost 1s and 0s, we might as well have it cheaper and in all in one devices.

The zombie apocalypse cannot come soon enough I think. :(

[Kitsune]

Get back to me with how long your iPod lasts with the backlight constantly on.  And a Palm?  Puhleeze.

Both are good devices.  Neither are ebook readers, and weren't intended to be.

My iPod lasted long enough for me to read a novel on the free Stanza e-book reader app, and still had juice left over.  The battery went from about 70% to about 20% in that time.  I'm a fast reader, though; the novel only took about four hours.  I also did some reading on Baen's free library site; that wound up taking a bigger toll since I was reading off of a website with corresponding wifi use.

I used to be interested in e-book readers.  Not $300+ interested, but watching in case they fell in price some day.  I'm not interested in them anymore.  The iPod fits in my nerd holster for constant carry, the display is amply good enough for reading text without any eye strain, the reader software is free and connects to online book repositories for free downloading of out-of-copyright books...  There is really no downside whatsoever for my needs.  Stanza can't read DRM-encrypted books, so I couldn't do stuff like buy Kindle files from Amazon to read on the iPod, but I think I can live with that.  (Plus, it's not like there are DRM-removal tools out there...   )

[Venkman]

Please. If you love having a portable device, there's a good chance you're going to be near an outlet often enough to recharge it. The only it's a problem is in the sort of restaurant you wouldn't be reading it at anyway (others would give you an outlet... believe me, I know) and on an actual airplane (airports have outlets all over the place). The whole idea of battery life being the end all be all went out 15 years ago when laptops started doing more than being glorified PDAs.

The Sony device is better for younger demographics than the Amazon device, but they're both predicated on the same idea: tangible ownership is no longer a requirement. It's the same thing with movies and games. Hoarding a bunch of purchased media is a burden for those who don't want to dedicate the space to showcase it. And if you're married, in a house and don't have a whole room dedicated to your own private man-cave/office, you know exactly what I'm talking about. We want to have experiences, there are plenty of ways to continue doing so, and most of them don't forever require the one specific media they originated on. We don't have arcade machines in our houses, but play plenty of old arcade games. We don't all have zombie Nintendo 8-bits kicking around, but can still play them. Most of us probably don't have functioning turntables, but listen to music all the time.

tl;dr version: Netflix.

It's the experience that matters, not the media upon which it exists.

[Der Helm]

They don't sell prepaid debit cards there? 

Now, THAT was some helpfull advice.

At least for me.

[bhodi]

Please. If you love having a portable device, there's a good chance you're going to be near an outlet often enough to recharge it. The only it's a problem is in the sort of restaurant you wouldn't be reading it at anyway (others would give you an outlet... believe me, I know) and on an actual airplane (airports have outlets all over the place). The whole idea of battery life being the end all be all went out 15 years ago when laptops started doing more than being glorified PDAs.

The Sony device is better for younger demographics than the Amazon device, but they're both predicated on the same idea: tangible ownership is no longer a requirement. It's the same thing with movies and games. Hoarding a bunch of purchased media is a burden for those who don't want to dedicate the space to showcase it. And if you're married, in a house and don't have a whole room dedicated to your own private man-cave/office, you know exactly what I'm talking about. We want to have experiences, there are plenty of ways to continue doing so, and most of them don't forever require the one specific media they originated on. We don't have arcade machines in our houses, but play plenty of old arcade games. We don't all have zombie Nintendo 8-bits kicking around, but can still play them. Most of us probably don't have functioning turntables, but listen to music all the time.

tl;dr version: Netflix.

It's the experience that matters, not the media upon which it exists.

You just destroyed your own point. The playstation is really the last console that you can do that with, and CDs are the last format that you'll be able to do that with.

Welcome to DRM. I hope you like the next big thing, because you won't ever get to enjoy the hits of a previous decade. Unless, of course, they were big enough hits that some exec thinks that you'll buy the game or song a second time on a new format, of course.

[bhodikhan]

There's no way Kindle / Kindle DRM is going to be working and available in 2050.

I don't think I'm going to be working and available in 2050 either. Kindle works for me now while I'm still breathing.

[Daeven]

To me, even more than music and games, the written word is about physical medium. The weight of a hardcover. The smell of pages. Maybe it's because I grew up in libraries, and have the old fantasy reader/gamer's romance with stacks of dusty tomes. Maybe its because when I try to read on my computer for long periods of time, my eyes start to burn and I find myself more easily distracted.

Whatever man. I would have maimed China with my bare hands to be able to load all my textbooks into something like a kindle in college.  You want to make college affordable? Sell text books in eFormat. I bought way to damn many $50+ *used* texts in the early 90's. I can't imagine what things are like now. Sell 'em at a Student rate and go for a swim in the cash.

To be honest, I agree. But compared to a mass market paperback? Give me a kindle and an eBook any day.

[Venkman]

You just destroyed your own point. The playstation is really the last console that you can do that with, and CDs are the last format that you'll be able to do that with.

Welcome to DRM. I hope you like the next big thing, because you won't ever get to enjoy the hits of a previous decade. Unless, of course, they were big enough hits that some exec thinks that you'll buy the game or song a second time on a new format, of course.

Err, no, that WAS my point. The idea of content ownership is why we have DRM. I'm talking about the idea of media ownership though. We're becoming media agnostic. Along the way people have realized they don't need to own that DVD or CD when they can just grab the song and movie from online/Netflix. And that's because the experience they want to have is about that moment, alone or with friends, not the braggning right of having that CD or DVD on their wall somewhere.

On DRM for a second, I get why people hate it. But I don't get how people don't connect that with all the stuff they've bought over the years for entire platforms that have gone defunct. It's probably because all of those old games can still be played... except of course that they're not played in the original format nor in the original way.

[schild]

You just destroyed your own point. The playstation is really the last console that you can do that with, and CDs are the last format that you'll be able to do that with.

Try one generation later. And Moore's law along with the theory of Spanish Hackers Don't Want to Pay for Anything pretty much guarantees all future consoles will eventually be emulated also.

[bhodi]

Try one generation later. And Moore's law along with the theory of Spanish Hackers Don't Want to Pay for Anything pretty much guarantees all future consoles will eventually be emulated also.

Bullshit. PS2 emulation is VERY 'meh' and I highly doubt the PS3 will be emulated at all thanks to the hypervisor.


I agree that we are moving towards subscription based rather than owned based content, in games, movies, and music. Companies are protecting these, let's call them what they really are, revenue streams, via weighty DRM. It's simple lock-in. I'm trying to explain to you all, who seem to think it's a good idea, why it is in fact a bad idea.

Extrapolate that a bit, and it takes no great stretch of the imagination to see that when the only way you can get content is through 'viewing' licensing wrapped around a very specific and secure service, there is no way to get at the bits of data for emulation, no way to develop emulation for those bits, and no way to distribute that emulation once you have it. You're trying to use emulation as an example of part of the "going to all-digital", and I'm telling you that is the one thing you will not have.

You'll be stuck with whatever modern streams will provide, and you will like it. What happens when you want to play those programs you downloaded via steam on windows xp, but now you're running windows 2020 and valve went out of business because they got sued into oblivion by the 'concerned citizens for social uplifting'?  You're fucked, that's what you are. Or, when a company that owns or buys the rights to an old but popular game and then sits on it, hoping to maybe remake it one day maybe? Since you can't legally distribute it, it won't be distributed via these streams that you are already locked into.


This all comes back to the kindle, because that is exactly the situation here. As unlikely as it sounds, let's play out a scenario. Let's say someone creates a device that emulates a book well enough, and provides features books don't (up-to-date content, convenience of huge libraries), call it the Kindle mk. 2. People will begin to switch. Let's say it becomes the next itunes for books. Eventually, due to printing costs, publishers decline to print 'dead tree' formats of many of the newest books. Then, gradually, all of them.

What happens when a book publisher has it out with kindle mk 2's content managers and they strip the content? There's no other way of getting it. What happens when "kindaloo" comes out and it's so much better that people want to switch, but it's a different company? Oh, they've lost their entire library. Don't think it can happen? Look at the battle between rock band and guitar hero - guitar hero has a pretty damn good shot of taking that particular crown. Look at HD-DVD. There are countless examples of why this should throw up red flags, even without getting into the paranoia of having a total monopoly of a single content portal from which all sorts of social manipulation can occur.

[NowhereMan]

Whatever man. I would have maimed China with my bare hands to be able to load all my textbooks into something like a kindle in college.  You want to make college affordable? Sell text books in eFormat. I bought way to damn many $50+ *used* texts in the early 90's. I can't imagine what things are like now. Sell 'em at a Student rate and go for a swim in the cash.

Problem with this is that textbooks are expensive, partly because they're not expected to sell in large numbers and partly because the audience they do have is fairly captive. The 'consumers' (lecturers) making the decisions aren't buying the books and so cost isn't a priority in deciding which book to put on the require reading list.

At the moment most students can get away with buying a copy a couple of years old from another student for half the price of a fresh one, quite a few publishers try to get round this by releasing a new edition every couple of years that by and large just changes the page references but replace textbooks with DRMed e-books and suddenly students all have to buy a fresh copy right off the bat. There's no second hand market.

Personally I love the sound of the technology, if there was a way of  introducing a universal file type for this and some form of DRM that permitted unlimited transfer requiring the original copy be deleted I think it would be really awesome. However I don't see any way of achieving the same level of balance between personal control and relative protection for publishers that we have in books. Of course the point about publishers no longer supporting formats is to some extent missing how much control publishers have over what you can read already from a practical standpoint. If you want to read an old book you own, whether on paper or ebook you can. If you lose your original copy then your ability to read it is limited by being able to get a copy regardless of format. If it's popular it'll have been reissued and you're fine. If not you're going to have to trawl auction and second hand shops to find a copy, or alternately trawl the net for an emulation or crack for it.