Quote:
Originally Posted by akira28
This is not misleading at all. Why should Ectaco state this? Does the Sony Reader website state that their all their Gutenberg books can already be read on your Palm/smartphone/Jetbook? Do the Sony or Kindle websites state that if you change devices to a different brand all the books you bought with DRM would be rendered worthless? If they don't then by the same measurement you must come to the same conclusions: Sony and Amazon are also misleading.
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As to your first point, it WOULD be misleading if they were doing a head to head comparison with the Jetbook, didn't mention the Jetbook's ability to read Gutenberg books, and advertised their ability to do so. That would be misleading, because the implication then would be the ability of the Sony to read Gutenberg books was an advantage over Jetbook. Here, they don't generally advertise their ability to read Gutenberg books, nor do they compare themselves to the Jetbook, so the analogy fails.
I suppose you could argue that the 100 Sony free classics or the Sony-google collaboration might be misleading, in that they tout the availability of those classics as an advantage while in truth they were available for free elsewhere. But who cares? I wasn't claiming that Sony or Amazon were perfect, and it wouldn't offend me if you accused them of false advertising either.
As far as your second point, it is a good one. As I said before, both Sony and Amazon are not perfect, and I think DRM is an anti-consumer technology. But in the end, I suspect that more people will be disappointed by the fact that they can't read the book at all on the Jetbook than the possibility that their DRM'ed book may not work on a future device.
To give an analogy: people may have been disappointed by iTunes's old DRM policy, especially when they got locked out of their old music purchases by accident (too many authoizations). However, I bet most people would still have preferred the iPOD, even knowing the limitations of DRM, to a music player that could only play music in the public domain as well as a few obscure indy bands (especially if you couldn't burn CDs that you bought to your player).