Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos apologizes for Kindle ebook deletion [LWN.net]

Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos apologizes for Kindle ebook deletion

Posted Jul 24, 2009 21:37 UTC (Fri) by ccchips (subscriber, #3222)
In reply to: Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos apologizes for Kindle ebook deletion by HappyCamp
Parent article: Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos apologizes for Kindle ebook deletion

Right - and I think e-book readers are swindles anyway. Take it from someone who got all excited because they might be able to read me a book (which I cannot do on comuter trains because of eyesight and repeatedly being made fun of because of the way I read by the same kind of immature people who come up with DRM...because they know from experience how to be abusive....

..only to find out that I have to jump through hoops to have it, and that my sighted brethren are denied it.

Down with DRM. DRM is fundamentally a swindle, particularly for future generations, who won't be able to access archives because of it.

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Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos apologizes for Kindle ebook deletion

Posted Jul 24, 2009 22:11 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (3 responses)

don't equate e-book readers with DRM.

while all of them support DRM, I believe that they all also support non-DRM documents (I know that the Kindle does)

and many of the online stores that sell e-books have them available without DRM. they aren't as high a profile as the one-click ordering through amazon from the kindle, but they are out there.

on my kindle I put about a dozen non-DRM items on it for every DRM item

Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos apologizes for Kindle ebook deletion

Posted Jul 25, 2009 2:50 UTC (Sat) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] (2 responses)

Whoa! How do you *know* what Amazon can do with their (not your) Swindle?

The very fact that they can delete not just a book you paid for, but your very own notes that you wrote, is proof positive that you do not own that e-book reader.

You make many implicit assumptions about what Amazon can do with their Swindle. Are you really that naive?

Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos apologizes for Kindle ebook deletion

Posted Jul 25, 2009 20:04 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

as long as someone else can update the software on your machine without you approving the update, they can do anything to your machine.

it doesn't matter if it's a phone, e-book reader, DVR, or general-purpose PC/laptop

it also doesn't matter if the someone else is amazon, microsoft, redhat, or ubuntu.

so if you are worried about what they _can_ do, you need to first disable automatic updates.

only after you do that can you start arguing about any capabilities of their software as it's currently deployed

Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos apologizes for Kindle ebook deletion

Posted Jul 26, 2009 0:32 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

I would note that automatic updates are NOT enabled by default in a Linux distribution and you do have access to the source code of the updates. The Amazon situation with DRM is hardly the same thing.