I don’t know if the DX needs to be “hacked,” per se. I have one, and I just don’t have any of Amazon’s stuff on it. (Well, one title that I bought when I first got it, just for giggles.) I don’t ever have the Whispernet on, and I transfer my various public domain or other non-DRM’d eBooks to it using the USB cable, including PDFs, which the DX supports natively. Having a whole slew of classics, including Euclid’s Elements and Hilbert’s Foundations of Geometry, has been a real boon for me. (I write/edit math textbooks.)

I’d like to think that by buying the DX but not buying content from Amazon, it says, “Hey, I like the device, but not how you handle content. Fix that,” although who knows. The whole situation is disheartening. They have a pretty good device, and although you can use it without any DRM ever touching it, the kerfuffles they’re causing are of course going to taint people’s feelings about the hardware.

And Yes they do smell better and no batteries needed!

I think that’s why books haven’t gone the same way music has; books are a pretty good technology. mp3 players let users replaces bulky and/or easily breakable media with something portable, and the great part about it all is that you can buy any old CD you want, rip the songs, and put them on your player with ease. On the other hand, there’s no easy way to buy a paper book and rip its contents onto an eReader. (Other, than perhaps literally ripping it by cutting off the spine and feeding all the pages through a scanner, but that’s still pretty cumbersome.)

I love the idea of having something similar for books that I have for my music–setting aside the audiophile arguments of fidelity of vinyl vs. CD vs. mp3, I can carry just about every song I own with me. I hope it happens for books, but we’re not there yet.

1. Size
2. Wireless connectivity (I don’t need it)
3. Price

I found exactly what I was looking for in the Cooler Reader (http://www.coolreaders.com/).

DRM didn’t work for Lotus 1-2-3 and it hasn’t worked for any other product, including that proprietary operating system 90% of the world seems to use.

Mike

Yes, it does. Right now, about 90% of what I have on mine is from Project Gutenberg.

But, I’m sorry, BoingBoing. You know I love you, honey. But I have a hard time separating this recent action by Amazon from this previous action of your own.

I know you’ll correct me. Because I know I’m wrong in your eyes. But I can’t help seeing the symmetries. Forgive me, my BoingBoing baby. I hope you can still love the Hokano.

And I do still love the BoingBoing.

Maybe you can explain it to me once again. Just so I have it clear.

Then, you can still read the material that YOU paid for, and Amazon’s thievery won’t matter quite as much. Until they pull something new, that is.

As long as this keeps up, ebooks can never succeed. It is an astounding level of brain damage.

What I want to know is how far Amazon’s control over the Kindle goes. Can they delete my DRM-stripped versions of legally purchased books? Can they remove support for open files loaded over usb? At what point do they start breaking even existing laws?

I was going to buy a Kindle for the Wikipedia access and just strip out the DRM, but now I’m beginning to have second thoughts.

“In your parts of the world you have to give up your fingerprints if you want too pawn something? Yeech…”

Yes, in most US cities, the vast majority of items being sold in these institutions are stolen. At least until these cities instituted policies that were in line with the fingerprinting / identification…in my case, I asked around to a few less than desirable acquaintances where I could get rid of stuff with few questions asked, and my property was located quickly. These folks know where to go…

In studies I’ve read, policies like this actually significantly decrease the burglaries and car thefts…these days, there are almost NO car stereo theft in areas that require fingerprinting and ID. I’ve always believed, if you believe a right to be true, you don’t abuse it…it makes it easier for people to take them away…and it makes it easy for people like me who are actually pretty liberal on rights issues to agree something needs to be done. IN this case, it is a regulation of a business, not regulation of what private peoples do between each other (i.e., if you want to sell your car stereo to a buddy, there is no law that says he must finger print you before selling it).

“Personally, if I got something from a pawn shop and paid it, and the original owner or seller had his finger in my pocket, he would get them broken. Self defense, such a nice concept.”

And if I found someone with my personal property that was taken illegally, I would take it back at any expense.

Actually, no I wouldn’t…I support the rights of those that feel this way, but I don’t care much about MY property any more. I realized this a few years ago when someone stole a bike I was building. Had it locked up on a locked enclosed porch. I thought I was extra cautious about this, but I guess I wasn’t enough (my porch doesn’t have an alarm on it, but the rest of my house does…)

I saw my bike with its custom paintjob on the street while driving and actually made an effort to run the guy over (ruined a good set of tires on my car doing so jumping a curb). And I realized that it was just property…it was my work and soul that went into it, but it was only property. My personally belief is that if someone is willing to steal, they obviously needed it more than I do…and it took a while for it to actually get ingrained as part of my core beliefs…not just something I say. But thats on me…if you want to break someones fingers for taking something that belongs to someone else, good for you. If someone wants to run someone over for a piece of property, I wouldn’t hold it against him if I were on a jury…I personally decided it wasn’t worth hurting someone over it.

Anyhoo…

“If you have button on your website/software that says “Buy” or “Purchase” to complete the transaction and/or you call the transaction a “sale or purchase, etc” then, the consumer gets all of the first sale rights that are granted by copyright law, regardless of whatever other agreement might be in effect.

If you don’t want the consumer to enjoy all of the rights granted by the First Sale doctrine, then you should use “Lease Now” “Rent Now” or “Enjoy for a bit until we decide to take it back Now.”

“The problem is that device owners (that’s you and me) aren’t a party to these disputes or negotiations.”– You are party when you buy the crappy devices since you are supporting the manufacturers that build the junk.

There’s nothing to stop someone from building a non-broken “e-book reader/editor” with excellent features, and it gaining widespread acceptance. Buying anything less and pimping it on your blog, no matter its “cool” features just hurts the cause of freeing information and accelerating scientific/cultural progress.

No? Then they’re not remotely similar. What happened here isn’t about censorship (although it sets a worrying precedent). Instead it’s just driving home the message that, despite all the money you spend on a kindle, you don’t own it; Amazon has complete control over it, so Amazon effectively still owns it. And you’re not buying a copy of the book, you’re buying a license to read that book until Amazon decides to revoke that license without asking you.

That would be OK if Amazon advertised itself as “The world’s biggest library” and permitted users to reverse the sale whenever they want, but it doesn’t. The terms of the Kindle site talk about buying a “permanent license to read the book” but all of their marketing, site design and the “buy” button tell users that they’re buying a copy of the book, with all the property rights and First Sale Doctrine rights that word implies. It’s deliberately deceitful.

If you want to get back into tinfoil hat mode, you shold be much more worried about stories like this one. Amazon has been pushing updates to books. Presumably this is just to correct typos and format problems, but the ability to edit books after distribution — and without the permission of the owner/licensee of each copy — has scarier censorship implications than merely deleting them.

Does anyone at Amazon pay attention to this stuff?

I have an ereader. Nope, I don’t have a Kindle.

Screen too small, annotating on documents is a pain, non-native PDF support is a pain, lack of open-source-ness was a BIG factor.

I put my money where my mouth is and purchased a more expensive reader than the Kindle.

A year later (or in other terms, some 1,500 documents (books, magazine articles, research papers, essays)(roughly 300MB) I’m still happy with my purchase. None of the documents on my iLiad have/had any DRM.

Yeah, and a lot of them have marginal notes scribbled a over them. And some of these initiated conversations with the authors about those notes. Speaking of which, um, Cory…

Distribution n. the act of ensuring media can not be viewed by the public.

Don’t buy craptacular products like a Kindle and they will go away. It may be the coolest piece of HW since the Newton, but it’s still a deal with the devil.

Speaking of Apple….

Same thing’s true about Itunes, too. Funny how Amazon sells DRM free music to compete against the big red fruit. Will Apple start selling DRM free books? (Doubtful).

There’s a point where the importance of copyright is exceeded by the importance of the maintenance, alive and kicking, of key literary and philosophical concepts, so shag the system – it is highly important that people retain unfettered and easy access to all ideas – otherwise we become China.

For the same reason I rarely buy MP3s. Just, low-fi, electronic, and easily lost by my disorganised file keeping.

So – for those AGAINST this kind of thing, form a huge community of people willing to invest time in pumping and supporting demand for this, then don’t buy anything at all. Make the budgets disappear down the plug. Make the investors way over-estimate the potential market. They’ll get badly, badly slapped.

The key to product launch is that estimate of demand, and the preparation spend is calculated according to those market tests.

C’mon, I hear the a-moanin’ and a-groanin’ like a pack of hawgs, but do something amusing and effective to shift this. The marketeers and the copyright-holders smell dollaroonees in the hills, and will do anything to get them.

Hold ‘em back.

After all, you and I are not the customers around here. The readership is the product. The advertisers are the customers.

My comment was a silly, alcohol-fueled rant that I now find somewhat embarrassing.

Say, how do I go about deleting it?

And I don’t know a good way to solve this conundrum. I want my machines to download bug fixes, but I don’t want them to delete things. Hmmm. But I can’t scrutinize every new patch. This sux but it has nothing to do with DRM which is all about what I do with my copies.