Quote:
Originally Posted by cybmole
the computer games industry sells product that requires Internet activation or in some cases requires on-going on-line verification but all the major players have stated that before they ever turned off their servers, they would release patches so that their product would continue to work off-line.
like with books, technically you own the game licence , not the game, but there is some assurance that it will not become worthless overnight
the equivalent for Amazon would be them making all previously bought & downloaded kindle books continue to be readable on PCs. I don't know if they could or would do that.
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Amazon would not have the ability to do that. They have given publishers the assurance that their products will be protected with DRM, so in the event that they have to stop offering the Kindle service, that obligation would have to continue. It's also possible that Amazon might be forced to close down (e.g. due to bankruptcy - no matter how far fetched that sounds) and wouldn't actually be able to come up with a workaround or other fix.
Amazon is not like a games publisher, they don't own the content they're selling - they're more like a service like Steam or iTunes.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cybmole
They have a monolpoly on the .mobi, .azw formats and thus a monopoly on the reader software. ( I know calbre reader can step in but it's not a real mobi reader, it does an on-the-fly conversion to epub in order to display the text, & the book has to be de-drmed)
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I'm not sure how this is relevant.