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Originally Posted by ArmadilloPilot
I didn't know there was any ability to lend books you have paid for. Is the one week rule universal from wherever one happens to purchase the ebooK?
BTW - My reader has made through the storms and Fedex forecasts they can deliver it tomorrow...only one day late.
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Barnes and Noble started the one time for two-weeks deal, and that forced Amazon to grudgingly commit to doing the same thing, the Sony doesn't offer this as far as I know, and sadly you can't buy directly from either of the Book Sellers who do yet, because they are resisting Adobe's efforts to standardize Ebooks DRM. (though B&N has said that they intend to sort this out with Adobe, so there is some hope).
Most folks just strip the DRM, but you shouldn't go crazy here and start passing around books to little known acquaintances, or posting any kind of copyrighted materials on P2P, because there is also a nasty little technology called stenographic watermarking that can rear it's ugly head.
Basically, by using a number of invisible formatting changes in the original EPUB or AZW file, the seller can encode the purchasers name at the time of download in such a way that it's impossible to easily find and remove.
Remember, due to the DRM, they have to create a custom encoded copy for your download anyway, so it's not really that much more complicated to make some minor tweaks to the file to encode your account info.
The DRM stripping scripts or pluggins can remove the DRM from a file by simply reading your local crypto key and decrypting the file, but this does nothing to remove any possible watermarking.
Later if that file shows up all over the Internet, they would be able to show in court that it was YOUR copy that was pirated, and you could potentially be liable for hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages and fines.
So I would be the first to agree that they should get their act together and come up with a legal method of sharing ebooks that works for all formats.
In the U.S. they passed the "Bonehead Mickymouse Protection Act." a few years back to make copyrights run nearly FOREVER but how about a "copyrighted materials purchaser's bill of rights"?
Like telling the CLOWNS at Amazon, Barnes and Nobel, Borders, etc, that if they tell you that you are "Buying" a book then you REALLY OWN THAT BOOK and can share or sell it!
It is a universal world wide precept of commercial law, that if you OWN something, and have clear title to it, then you can SELL it.
Heh, guys and gals, I know these are tough times, so surely there is a least ONE starving lawyer out there that would like to clear a cool million or two on a class action consumer fraud lawsuit against Amazon.
If we can sue Taco Bell for supposedly misrepresenting the percentage of BEEF in their TACOS, how the hell does Amazon get away with claiming you are 'buying' a Kindle book, WHEN YOU CAN'T THEN TURN AROUND AND SELL IT?
Buy it once, read it ANYWHERE? Yeh, right how about SELLING it on the 'used Kindle book' market so it can be read on SOMEONE ELSE'S KINDLE.
Or just lending it out a few times when you are not reading it?
Or GIVE it to a friend to read on his or her Kindle?
Can it be read THERE Amazon?