Quote:
Originally Posted by Katy Did
But to be fair, Amazon's format is proprietary, so for the huge majority of users that entire 1.25GB on a Paperwhite is reserved exclusively for Amazon books. Whereas since the Nook supports epub, it's quite easy even for novice users to buy ebooks from other sources and to sideload them. I'd guess that this is why B&N are restricting the space: their 'walled garden' isn't quite as secure as Amazon's, given that they can't depend on the format itself to prevent people buying elsewhere. And sure, this isn't a factor for the majority of us here, who know how to convert between formats, but we're a very small section of ebook buyers. I do disagree with the limitation on principle, but I also don't think Amazon has some kind of moral high ground on this one: if anything, their restrictions are even worse.
While, as I said, I disagree with the limitation, I can't say that it'll really affect me in practice. I'm a big reader, but even then, having 200 books on my e-reader would be enough to last me for at least a year, I should think! I suspect that's true for most people. I'm more annoyed by the lack of page turn buttons and just the general sense that the Nook is losing all the things which distinguished it from other e-readers.
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This is not true, people are able to side load books onto the Kindle. There are people on this very board who download books from this sites e-book "store" and other free sites, like Project Gutenburg, without any problems. There are people here who buy from Bean, Smashwords and other independent bookstores who load their books onto their Kindles without any problem.
It is true that you cannot download a Kobo or BN e-book onto a Kindle without removing DRM and converting the book but that does not mean that you can only read Amazon bought books on the Kindle or that Amazon has restricted the space for non-Amazon books.
You can sideload books to a Nook but you are limited in the number of those books you can add. That was less of an issue when you had an SD card because you could simply load the books onto the SD card. Without the SD card, BN has pretty much forced people with large collections to find a work around, buy only BN ebooks, or move to another e-reader without similar restrictions.
I would point out that it is hard to load a BN e-book onto another e-reader. It used to be, and I believe that it still is, that the Nooks ADE is different then Sony and Kobo's making it so that BN ebooks could not be read on a Kobo or Sony. Given that Kobo and Sony are mainly used outside the US and BN had not had a presence outside the US until recently, this really wasn't a big deal. That could change now that BN is starting to sell outside the US.