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Comment by manicdee | Hacker News Reader

While watching the keynote, I thought to myself, "I wonder how many people will complain about the free album?"

And here they are, not only looking the gift horse in the mouth, but questioning its pedigree, complaining that it's a clydesdale when they wanted an arabian, and complaining that their stable which is designed to accept new horses automatically, accepted a new horse automatically.

If you tick the box "automatically download new purchases" you've already "lost control of your phone" because you're accepting Apple's assistance in getting any new media that appears in your account onto your phone.

Do people complain like this about Kobo and Kindle readers automatically downloading new books?

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Irrelevant of that setting, I don't think that this is a brightest move, few days after that whole iCloud thing.

I mean, you are aware how it works, I am - but a random Jane Doe only heard that celebrities had their naked photos leaked and now something strange had happened with unknown music appearing on the phone: https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=iphone%20u2%20wtf

> Do people complain like this about Kobo and Kindle readers automatically downloading new books?

Yes. Partly because all an ereader really needs to do is to display books, and Kobo's fucking awful software makes it nearly impossible[1] to do so unless you have a working internet connection on the host computer, and the Kobo, and you upgrade the Kobo before using it, and you download and install software on the host computer, and you set up an account. Walled gardens are bad, but they're even worse when I have to spend so much time laying the bricks.

And the Kobo is one of the better devices - everything on an SD card so you can back it up and tinker away.

[1] you can use a bit of SQL to persuade the Kobo to not need all the online stuff. How many Kobo readers know what SQL is?

> Do people complain like this about Kobo and Kindle readers automatically downloading new books?

Kobo doesn't do anything like that, at least not mine. For one, I deactivated wifi to have better battery life. But also before, no books I didn't buy were pushed onto it, maybe apart from an example book I don't remember anymore.

Kobo and Kindle both sync promotional copies (typically a few sample chapters) of books you might be interested in.

Ok, then that it is a valid comparison. Did they even change it so that is part of the Library? I vaguely remember a feature like this (still using my kobo, just not updating regularly) , but it was separated.

My kindle only does that if I request a sample chapter. It's a nifty feature, but I need to explicitly choose that.

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