> Amazon can remotely delete the e-book using a back door. It used this back door in 2009 to delete thousands of copies of George Orwell's 1984.
Tell the whole story, guys. Framing it just this way is dishonest.
Tell the whole story, guys. Framing it just this way is dishonest.
They are holding a loaded weapon pointing at our e-books. The circumstances that make them fire it are not as important as the bizarre fact that they have this loaded weapon in the first place.
This is typical of Stallman and his organization. They have good points, but the presentation of them is over the top to the point where people just stop caring.
When one's philosophy is that the Four Freedoms strictly trump any convenience in any context, you're missing out on the collective benefits that make the current transition to shared, administered, cloud-based technologies so powerful for the users that adopt them. Users are willing to accept a massive spike in convenience and utility for the drastically-less-than-1% chance that Amazon kills their favorite book from their device, without their consent, with a refund. That's not evil; it's the nature of progress (along the same lines as accepting that you might have to pay taxes---in essence, give up your own hard-earned possessions to a collective over which you have minimal power to decree how those possessions will be used---to live in a place where you don't have to arm yourself against bandits or maintain your own roads, etc.). Hell, if you don't like the way Amazon is administering its chunk of the cloud, it's a lot easier to leave Amazon than to leave a country.
The fact that they have that ability in the first place is. That is not a thing that they should have the ability to do. Full stop, end of story.
They're usually not willing, just feel helpless and like they don't have a choice. They don't know they have a choice. They are also frequently unaware of what Amazon can do:
I don't mean to say that these effects are irrelevant in any general sense, I am saying that in the context of listing disadvantages of Amazon e-books, it's relevant to mention that the contract that their customers have with them allows them to delete their books at their discretion, and that they have been doing so. I certainly don't see how they went "over the top" by just mentioning it.
> [...] you're missing out on the collective benefits that make the current transition to shared, administered, cloud-based technologies so powerful for the users that adopt them.
Just in the interest of not being extremely vague about what exactly those benefits are, let's look at the case in point. Amazon pulled two books from customers that had paid for them, from what I understand over a rights dispute. The books were not only "in the cloud", but had already been retrieved and stored on the customers' devices for consumption, and Amazon went out of their way to delete them from the devices as well, using a backdoor. What exactly was the collective benefit of the cloud in this case? How did the shared, administered, cloud-based technologies empower the users in this instance, if we take "users" in this case to mean the affected customers? Is a deliberate backdoor into your device an inevitable aspect of cloud based technologies?
Who did benefit from the action? The winners in this were probably Amazon and the claimant in the dispute. It certainly wasn't the customers. If it was your intention to address the case in point in the above quote, I think that you are conflating "cloud-based technologies" with a generally shitty customer rights, as if the two need to go hand in hand. Meanwhile, tons of people are using "cloud-based technologies" illegally to download books in without agreements and format and device lock-downs that completely screw them over at the whim of the distributor.
> Users are willing to accept a massive spike in convenience and utility for the drastically-less-than-1% chance that Amazon kills their favorite book from their device, without their consent, with a refund.
Some are not, or may not be if they had the effects detrimental to their rights listed to them.
> That's not evil; it's the nature of progress
What do you mean by progress here? In the most general sense of the word this is a rather meaningless conclusion. I don't see how the tax analogy explains it. When I pay taxes, I do it for the benefit of society. The money I pay actually go towards infrastructure and welfare. When Amazon removes a book from my library, how does it benefit society? Would Amazon go bankrupt if they did not do these things?
Another way is that building the loaded weapon was a prerequisite for their capacity to offer the world's largest library of commercially-viable ebook content, and without that "bizarre fact," the content simply wouldn't be available to anyone electronically because of the legal wrangling necessary to get it into publicly-accessible electronic format.
The ends do not justify these means.
It's inconvenient for those who prefer a world without business-driven constraints that the processes that create those constraints also create massive convenience. But they do, and the world is full of potential customers who want that convenience. Because the alternative of a marketplace where they can pay someone (and play by that someone's terms of service) to do the work for them is to learn to do that work themselves, and that's not what people want to specialize in.
That's something Amazon could do (and still can) that would not be possible to do with paper books or ebooks that were not purchased through Kindles or other devices that are not directly connected to the Internet. Not without some sort of massive intrusive recall effort anyway.
Having said that, this article is quite straw-manny. I've an ebook reader that I cannot connect to the Internet, and I use it daily. For books that I purchase, I still need to do so electronically, and that usually requires identification (through PayPal or credit card). I have no problems with ebooks in general, though; not every ebook format or reader grants the same access to the vendor, and it's not that difficult to vote with your feet.
I don't think you're "fairly typical" in this regard, nor is most of the HN user base. Most people are doing what Amazon publishes as "most convenient", which is internet-enabled e-readers with all of Amazon's restrictions.
It's somewhat unclear what you mean, especially with apple having added sideloading support in Xcode 7/iOS9.