Quote:
Originally Posted by CommanderROR
... They give you ebooks and they store them for you on their server. Now, let's assume you buy the Kindle V2 next year, then I'm pretty sure that you'll be able to use your old books again. Amazon would make sure of that.
While it's not nice to be bound to one provider, it is a system that works quite well as long as the provider is big and can stay in business for a long time. Amazon is such a provider and so is Apple. The iTunes store does the same thing for Tunes that the Kindle store does for books.
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Just a comment on that... I had a hard drive crash recently, about a week after iTunes went iTunes Plus and I finally decided to buy music from them since I felt I actually OWNED it then, in the same way I OWNED my CDs. Anyway, I'm on a 2-week backup schedule... bought lots of tunes... drive crashed before next backup. It was ugly. One of my concerns was the music I had recently purchased but that wasn't on my backup. I searched the Apple web site and lo! - you get to download it once. End of story. If there's a problem, even though it's DRM-free, even though you have the same iPod and the same user ID and password, you cannot download more than once something you paid for - company policy. Now, happily they let me download it all again once I explained my plight and went throught their customer service folks despite all their printed warnings that I was doomed.... but... in my mind, paying for and downloading DRM stuff is like going to see a movie - enjoy it while you can, but it'll likely be a distant memory in the not-so-distant future. I have NEVER lost a book, and I have hundreds (thousands?). eBooks I'm pretty much treating as write-offs if they have DRM. Once the keys are gone/lost/stolen/outdated, the file is useless, and you are at the mercy of the people you bought the file from.
For the record, I DO buy DRM stuff from Sony Connect... but only stuff that I know I'll only read once and never come back to for reference.