I’ve been reading ebooks for years, since I had a Palm IIIe. It’s probably approaching ten years, looking at the sale date of the IIIe. Now I read them on my mobile phone (see app 7).
One common thread all the way through has been my scepticism of locked ebooks. I won’t buy paper books that require a secret decoder ring and I won’t buy locked ebooks. For all the (deserved?) criticism he’s been getting this month for a bizarre personal appearance, Richard Stallman’s 1997 Right to Read essay was an inspiring illustration of where that road leads.
For years, I’ve been told I was worrying about something that would never happen. No locked ebook vendor would ever be stupid enough to delete books that their customers had bought. Well it happened: Amazon unsold some Orwell books that they hadn’t really got permission to sell in the first place. I feel this is the tip of the iceberg, though. DRM and Rogue Employees | etbe – Russell Coker highlights just one more of the possible problems. Amazon has lost their unselling virginity now. If they’re not punished, they’ll do it again and again and again.
Have you bought locked ebooks? What do you think of the Amazon Un-selling Scandal? Has it changed your view at all?
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