How the e-book landscape is becoming a walled garden

[soulfuldog]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I rarely re-read books myself. But I'll be damned if I'm going to take the chance that one day in the future when I decide I do want to re-read a certain book, that I'm going to have to buy it again (in the event I've moved on to a different reader with different DRM). That's not ideology talking... I'm just that much of a frickin' cheapskate. I still have access to 30 year old pbooks I bought, and I'm going to have access to 30 year-old ebooks I bought. That's not geek. That's pack-rat.

I've only ever re-read a handful of my very favourite books, so for me it's just about making sure I am able to read books I've bought on whatever e-reader I happen to own.

My Kindle might break in six months time and I might decide to try the Sony PRS-T1 instead, if there's books I've yet to read there's no way I'm going to re-purchase them just because I'm using a different e-reader.

[jbcohen]

IMHO I think you all are looking at the problem of the walled garden wrong. While it is convient to think of electronic books as a walled garden I do not think that this helps describe what the landcaspe looks like. I like to think of electronic book readers as many different pits in a huge field that is electronic books. Each of these pits require me to be in a different format in order to get into that pit. The Kindle pit will require that I be in AZW or MOBI format where as the B&N pit requires that I be in an epub format. I do understand that there is the little matter of DRM to take care of but I see that personally as a nusance rather than a limiting factor. I have found too many sophisticated tools for removing the DRM to get worried about it. If I bought a book from B&N, and I understand how to do this, I would remove the DRM and use calibre to translate the book into the MOBI format then side load it to my kindle. I have a lot of friends that do that regularly.

[QuantumIguana]

How is the pit analogy any different than the walled garden?

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by jbcohen

I like to think of electronic book readers as many different pits in a huge field that is electronic books...

So there's really no difference between stepping over a garden wall or climbing out of your pit. The idea, though, is that each "garden" is supposedly a nice place to stay, which is why people will stay there and not wander off; whereas a pit is something for everyone to get out of a soon as they can. If we were dealing with pits, there'd be no discussion, because everyone would want to be anywhere but the pits.

Either way, the barriers are purely psychological: It's the individual's choice whether to get into and stay inside a wall (or pit), or to step out and visit other gardens.

[Joykins]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

One thing about the original quotation is that it is a bit of a straw man. Sure there are three or four major vendors right now (amazon, apple, B&N and Sony) but saying that they can decide who gets in and who does, while technically true, doesn't represent reality. Reality is that they all want all the authors and ebooks they can get. If you own the rights to a book, and it doesn't violate the standards of the store, then any of the stores will be more than happy to sale the book if you sign the contract. Now, it may be true that books that you buy from Amazon are only readable on Amazon readers, sans effort by the user, but that is a different issue.

Most of them provide free apps that can be used on multiple platforms. I've been buying my books cheapest-available that way for a long time, far before actually trying to get one format on the other's e-reader.

[Joykins]

Originally Posted by QuantumIguana

That you have to hack it is evidence that it is a walled garden, you've simply climbed over the walls.

You don't have to hack anything. I can use my phone and/or PC to get and read ebooks from B&N, kobo, Sony, Amazon, Harlequin, Samhain, Carina, Baen, etc. etc. etc.

Now, I can't put the DRMed Kindle books on my nook or vice versa without stripping DRM, but anything ADE-compatible does play well with the nook/kobo/sony/ADE-DRM compliant indies/DRM-free whatever. But the "walled garden" is the customer's insistence on/preference for using one particular brand of e-reader, not the BOOK. Customers are picking the garden(s) they prefer.

[Prestidigitweeze]

I'm amazed at how few people reread their books. If a book is terrible or mediocre, I stop reading it. If it's superb, then I savor it and will definitely read it again. Great books (by my own standards, not anyone else's) are often so rich that they seem like entirely different books to me the second time.

I backed up my copy of Bouvard et Pecuchet because the Polizzotti translation is so excellent I know I'll use it for reference, and because I wanted to be able to use my Sony Reader's French-English dictionary whenever I read or reread it. Same with Lydia Davis's translation of Swann's Way: In Search of Lost Time.

Few authors of any vintage write fools as well as Flaubert. Everyone else either makes them sentimental props (Dickens) or snickers at them like adolescents at a fart joke (Nabokov), whereas Flaubert exacts complete sympathy from us even as he makes us laugh at appallingly bad decisions. And because his language is so richly internal (new terms had to be invented to describe certain of his syntactical leaps and devices), each new translation brings more of his nuances to light.

He's thoroughly inside his character's heads, and shows us the validity of every point of view, which is why the completeness of his characterization makes me go back again and again to learn from him. Same with George Eliot, who also manages the trick of balancing empathy with observation and intelligence.