Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
Will you please make up your mind whether you are what-ifing about - lockdown in vendor distribution systems
- file formats going obsolete
The first is a problem, although since you back up your books (right?  ) the worst that can happen is you can no longer buy new books.
The second is pure, unadulterated FUD. We the users already made off with the keys. We own (pwn) the format. There is nothing Amazon can do about it unless they team up with mind-probing aliens (or gov'ts  ).
B&N has not been able to deny anyone access to their books, ever, in any way, shape or form, to date -- unless that person was depending on the ability to continue downloading DRMed books from B&N's servers (and sideload it using ADE-slash-whatever).
And that doesn't even take maliciousness. People have lost their ebooks when stores went out of business, without any malice on the store's part. |
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I have already had Kindle books that worked for years on previous generation Kindle devices that when I tried to download them to a Paperwhite the book would not work on it even though it was a Kindle book. I got a refund from Amazon, but the experience taught me that obsolescence can come to any closed, drm-protected format. That was both a locked down, drm protected ebook, and within Amazon's closed system. If I had taken extensive notes, annotations, and highlights with that ebook--those would have been gone.
You mention Calibre is open source, and that is why you are not afraid of it going away. I could say that is the same reason I like Epub and drm-free ebooks.
With Nook, a few years ago I could and did back up my drm-protected ebooks from B&N by simply copying the folder they were in and then pasting it onto my hard drive. You can no longer do that with either their Android app or their ereading devices. And who here is willing to bet money that in a few years, at most, nook will even be around, and perhaps millions of readers be without their ebooks.
You assume that everyone can just use Calibre to set their ebooks free. I assume the average reader is not going to do that, not take the time to learn how to do that, or be afraid of breaking a law to do it.
For the technically inclined, you are right. But your average person who is not on this Forum, and is using a closed system with closed file formats that are drm-protected and will have serious issues when their supplier of choice goes under, and the way things are going, Amazon will probably be the last man standing, and as I just pointed out, even with Amazon it is no guarantee your ebooks will not become obsolete in a few years when they change devices and software.