Quote:
Originally Posted by sjfan
It's not “never” a problem in general. Managing things locally gives you the final control over them, and avoids putting availability in the hands of your network connectivity and/or a 3rd party's whims.
For some people that’s certainly minor, and the upsides of the cloud to them more than outweigh those issues. And that’s a reasonable personal decision. But it is a personal decision.
For me, it’s easier to organize things once on my computer and then sync them to my e-reader, phone, and laptop than to deal with a clunky cloud interface and trying to get it working with a bunch of devices that may not all be from that cloud vendor’s preferred ecosystem. And a lot of the time when I travel, I don’t have network connectivity, so I prefer having all my books locally available so I can pick what I want to read next without hunting for wi-fi or something.
And some providers have historically deleted books that people have purchased—most notably Amazon, in the 1984/Animal Farm debacle and similar incidents with Ayn Rand and Harry Potter books. They've said they won't do that again unless they really have to, and it’s reasonble to view that as unlikely. It’s also reasonable to decide that keeping control of your books local avoids the risk of changing publishing deals or legal understandings altering what’s in your library.
It’s also just a good security practice to limit the number of things that you connect to outside networks to those that really need it—if you're getting value from the cloud (as you are), then great, security should almost never trump usability. But if you’re not then it’s a decent idea to disable that connection entirely.
It’s much like the debate over keeping personal DVD/music libraries vs. relying on Netflix/Spotify/etc; for some people one’s a better solution, for others the reverse is true. There’s no “one size fits all.” |
What incidents with Ayn Rand and Harry Potter? I hadn't heard anything about that?
Shari