This is the saddest thing about ebooks. Who are you going to buy them from? Amazon? Apple? Two gigantic behemoths of corporations who dont give two shits about their customers? Barnes and Noble , who probably because one of those behemoths won’t exist in short order, but whose reader at least allowed non-proprietary formats? With all of them, they neutered most of the social joy of books.
I’ve read several books on my Nook (yes, I’m weird), that I’d love to share with my mom or other loved ones. Before ebooks, I’d just go to her place and drop it off, where when I returned to pick it up We’d kill a pot of coffee discussing it. Not so in the wonderous, and convenient future, where sharing is a crime.
Not that it matters, I haven’t touched my ereader in over a year, nor have a purchased a single eBook. It’s cheaper and more convenient to just buy books (sadly from Amazon, since there are basically no independent bookstores left in my city of 4 million people).
Wait, there’s a help desk for microsoft? Their updates keep breaking my audio on the windows side of the one dual-boot box I’ve got, and I was unable to find any customer support number at all. They sure do a good job of hiding it.
Dunno. This was in the before times, when XP was new & shiny. Mainly it involved unfucking grandmas’ PCs whenever Media Player or their HP printer received an update. And poor benighted souls who’d mistakenly installed Norton of course.
I have two teenage sons and a wife who has three devices (she is a doc). The crap about having each person with their own PC or laptop for syncing or charging bugs me to death. God forbid you accidentally plug an iphone into the wrong computer. Even so, I have never and will never buy DRM infected media, unless I can immediately strip the DRM off. Everything we have is kept on a couple of hard drives in a safe. No cloud. My main apple gripe right now is the music player. My car is set up with a cradle that charges and plays when you insert the phone. I used to be able to set it on shuffle, where it would play all the music on the phone randomly. With the latest update, I cannot find that function. It wants me to select and play albums, one at a time. Since I mostly have only one or two songs from each album, I have to spend way too much time scrolling and clicking, which I do not want to do while driving. Every time I drive, I get more and more pissed off at Apple.
Oh, god, do people actually say that? That’s even worse than when we originally started saying “the cloud/in the cloud” to mean “the internet/on the internet.” (Reversing this substitution works in 100% of all cases. Try it!)
Wrong problem. Replacing an iphone with another iphone doesn’t come anywhere near the joys of managing an apple ID… its the soft bits of technology when things get really interesting…
Before they started Clouding things up, the ridiculous nonsense of their iTunes “sync” that would erase data if it thought you weren’t using your main computer made me just start using Android phones instead. I have never looked back.
A few years back my iTunes acct. was hacked. Then the computer (my only) died a permadeath before I got it sorted. End result: no way to update my two mobile devices without wiping them and losing the purchased music(maybe there was a way, but Apple support wasn’t able to make it so).
I fired Apple. I don’t care how pretty their toys are --it’s all gold-plated crap to me.
No; sorry. As Mark has already said, “don’t blame Apple” doesn’t work in this situation.
I can certainly respect that view, but it’s not one I share. I buy music and books in digital formats IN ORDER TO have nothing tangible cluttering-up my home - I specifically don’t want doorstop novels (eg Neal Stephenson - a gift paper copy of ‘REAMDE’ went straight to the charity shop and I went straight to the Kindle store), and I got tired of musicians being precious about ‘album as artefact’ and piling-on novelty packaging (eg Steven Wilson).
That said, I tend to buy ebooks for ‘read-once’ purposes, and still buy paper copies of books by favourite authors, which I’m likely to repeatedly re-read - ultimately, I do prefer the versatility of the physical format - and I buy films on DVD, in the absence of a legal way of downloading and keeping films in a packaging-free format.
