Quote:
Originally Posted by m-reader
I didn't really expect him to praise the competition either. Thorny question for Mr Bezos, lame answer ...
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I'm no fan of Bezos and the order of answers in that quote is amusing but I don't think his actual point about the lending limitation, one person one time, is lame at all. In fact, it is kind of insulting to me that B&N would even bother with such a feature when it is neutered to near uselessness.
One person, one time, and 14 days. What if that one person can't finish it in 14 days? Too bad. What if a year later you want to lend it again? Too bad.
These are the same artificial limits we've always had with DRM with one single one-time, extremely limited exception that comes off, to me at least, as more of a slap in the face reminder of the kind of anti-consumer inverted control scheme that publishers have been masturbating to at board meetings for the last decade.
In fact, in actual practice, I imagine for many people that sharing a single amazon account, say... within a family, would actually be quite a bit better. You have issues with shared annotations and page updates if two people read the same book at once, but, otherwise you have unlimited access to up to four devices/people or whatever the lowest limit is. Though, I am not sure Bezos wants to say that out loud because I doubt publishers are happy about anyone ever getting access without paying again, and again, and again... *sigh*
Of course, the correct solution is to eliminate the digital shackles and allow people the freedom to choose to violate the law or not on their own as is the normal case in life.