Posted on 04/10/2013 1:23:10 PM PDT by grundle
An Amazon Kindle user has had her account wiped and all her paid-for books deleted by Amazon without warning or explanation.
The Norwegian woman, identified only as Linn on media commentator Martin Bekkelund's blog, approached Amazon when she realised her Kindle had been wiped.
She was informed by a customer relations executive that her account had been closed, all open orders had been cancelled and all her content had been removed, but has been unable to find out why.
The move, which will shock ebook fans, highlights the power digital rights management (DRM) offers blue-chip companies. DRM is used by hardware manufacturers and publishers to limit the use of digital content once it has been purchased by consumers; in Amazon's case, it means the company can prevent you from reading content you have bought at the Kindle store on a rival device.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
DRM: just another form of overreach.
{It assumes that the user is not, and cannot be, the owner of the protected material.}
I love my Nook. Surely Barnes and Noble won’t do that, as they are book sellers above all else.
In other words, they steal the ebooks from the owner.
She’s better off without gay loving Amazon.
I use send to kindle firefox add on. In fact a lot of things I find at project Gutenberg, highlight them and send them to my kindle.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sendtokindle/
This article says Amazon “seeks to control what content is read in which territory of the World.”
That’s not an accurate description of what is going on.
Amazon signs contracts with publishers, and the publishers specify which countries Amazon may sell the online books to.
There may be multiple publishers of a book, each having licensing rights to a different part of the world.
Or a publisher might decide for marketing reasons to only allow the book to be sold in a certain country. They might decide to charge a different price in a different country, and it’s up to Amazon to stop people bypassing the region restrictions with Proxies.
I really doubt Amazon would arbitrarily want to stop sales in a particular country if they weren’t required to do so by their contract agreement.
Paper. There’s nothing like it. And no digital crooks to reach into your bookshelf.
A topic that is gaining attention : electronic property rights.
You buy an eBook (or at least the license) and you die. Do your heirs have the right to access that book? Ditto for music and videos from places like iTunes etc.
And say that you store your family photos on line (e.g. Photobucket or DropBox) rather than a hard drive or prints in a shoe box. After you die, do they essentially evaporate into cyberspace or can your heirs control these?
A lawyer’s wet dream !
Let ‘em try to take my real books.
I want to buy a Nook, but I can’t get an answer from their sales department or the local BN to this query:
I want to use a tablet to study languages. Kindle lets you download a book written in a foreign language. Then you can download a dictionary that interacts with the language of the book one just bought. One can highlight a foreign word and the English translation appears above it.
Can you do this with a Nook? I do realize that Amazon is deeper into the European market than is Barnes and Noble. BN just recently entered the British market and that’s it.
I like that the Nook lets you expand the lettering of magazine articles. I haven’t been able to get a Kindle to do that.
Maybe I will have to get Nook for the magazines and Kindle Paperwhite for the language instruction.
Yep. Hate drm. Everything’s a license now, not a transfer of ownership. Break terms of the license, as interpreted by the licensor, and pffft, no more product. So I don’t buy products like that. And yes, I know drm can be defeated, but its not worth the trouble to me.
I HEART Amazon. For directing me to sellers who sell books for $0.01 + shipping.
Regardless of whether your family can "inherit" access to your digital content, it's disturbing that they can remotely wipe your device while the device is in your possession. That smacks of a warrant-less seizure of stuff in your possession.
I'm currently setting up a computer and access for a relative who is late in joining the technology curve. I highly recommend backups that are kept in your possession at home. Don't just rely on backups in the "cloud". If my devices get wiped, I simply restore from personal backups. You can also reset computer dates to dates valid within a licensing range for content. Lots of ways around these limiters on your accessing stuff you paid for - but you need to be proactive.
This whole DRM thing is moot once you have the .epub file in your hands. These nook books are just zipped up html files with a .epub file extension. You can make your own with zip.exe if you have the need or desire.
Anyone who doesn’t have all their books backed up on another computer system shouldn’t own a nook anyway...or they have too much money. You can copy the files anywhere you want and share them with anyone.
I assume you're posting from a Linux machine?
I assume you haven’t seen Amazon’s commercial with the gay “husband” promoting their Kindle.
I understand your concern about Amazon.
But the same parameters apply to Apple and MS.
I can’t answer all of your questions, but I’m sure Barnes and Nobel would love to hear from you.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.