I have mixed feelings about that. Sometimes, there seems like no better way to ruin pleasurable book reading.
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Itâs 1984 all over again.
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You left out Stranger In A Strange Land, which I always thought was a poor choice to use to introduce anyone to the world of SF.
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Also, the B&N chat person suggested he call them on the phone and try to resolve his issue that way, and he got huffy because he canât be bothered to make a phone call.
I mean, it sucks that the support system has an above the salt and below the salt support tier, and if you contact below the salt, they canât do as much as if you contact above the salt, but thatâs the way corporations function these days. If he had called phone support, itâs quite likely he would have been able to get a free copy of the book or a store credit.
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High school English class is a poor place to introduce anyone to ANY genre. Itâs aversion therapy for reading.
Everyone in my grade 9 class, as in earlier years, was handed a copy of a novel. This time we were told NOT to read ahead. Because for much of the semester the teacher led the class in reading it together. So that she could stop after each paragraph to endlessly dissect it for hidden meaning. âBlah Blah Blah! Write that down! Blah Blah Blah!!!â And weâd all write it down, not knowing what the hell she was talking about.
And then one day without warning, two thirds of the way through the novel, months after we started, weâre done with it. Weâre ordered to hand in our copies on the spot, with no opportunity to finish the story.
Anyone who wasnât reading novels for enjoyment before, probably never read another novel again.
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Emphasis on the âRe-download.â If youâre stupid enough not to back up your e-book collection on SD cards or a separate computer, well then.
I really canât imagine a case where in the 10 seconds between clicking âpayâ and downloading a book becomes unavailable. And even if it does, you get your $$ back. Then pull it off of bittorrent.
Plus, as everyone (should) know, the first thing to do with purchased ebooks, DRM or not, is to rip them thru Calibre so you have a clean archived version.
It was DRMed, as were all the other books I bought from Peanut Press/eReader and Fictionwise. At least $200 worth of which Barnes & Noble couldnât copy over to their new library. Which is an entirely different issue, and one Iâve filled out the EFFâs form about.
Itâs kind of a fine line I walk in the article, as saying that I cracked the DRM so as to be able to back all those books up and not lose them would be outright admitting to having violated the law. Which doesnât seem like a terribly wise thing, to me, even though a lot of other people donât seem to care. So Iâm not admitting to that.
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Did you know that Barnes & Noble doesnât let people directly download Nook e-book files outside of e-readers or apps anymore?
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Yeah, read that⌠not as good as A Deepness in the Sky tbh. It seemed like it was written as movie option bait⌠YA perspective, cutsie in places⌠ADitS was amazing. ymmv
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Thatâs too bad. I mostly had the opposite experience. While I did read Stranger In A Strange Land as a class assignment in either Jr High or High School (donât recall), I had been well into Asimov, Clark, Simak, Lovecraft, Wells, Bradbury, etc., by that time, having got started with Have Spacesuit, Will Travel and A Wrinkle In Time at an early age. But the teacher wanted to hear our own interpretations of what it meant, rather that tell us what the established interpretation was. Another teacher told us that itâs perfectly okay to skip the boring parts of Moby Dick. The book police will not arrest you.
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My kindle has updated its firmware three times while in airplane mode.
Yeah, its fantasy, along with Glory Road. Many SF authors seem to get this Fantasy itch at some point. Take John Varley with his Titan trilogy.
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Iâm pretty sure the publisher of the study guide would end up accusing the guy of pirating their book.
Agree, something in us sometimes fights an assignment even if we would do it for fun. Still, perhaps some folks who wouldnât have been exposed to it will be. We would need a complicated study to determine the cost benefit analysis. For fun, I mean.
(Edit: spelling!)
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Mineâs an older e-ink model. No actual wifi. It can only communicate wirelessly using Amazonâs 3G Wispernet, and when I turn that off, itâs off.
There was a recent update to the firmware. I only knew about it because Amazon emailed me after a month or two had gone by without it being auto-installed. After doing some research, I went ahead and applied the change, but only with a hard connection to my laptop (you could download the update, if you didnât want to do it wirelessly). Surprisingly, the hack I installed many years ago to let me use my own âscreensaverâ images was still intact afterwards. It basically just changed over to a slightly easier-to-read set of fonts.
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If that was his only issue, I might agree. However, the article makes it pretty clear heâs pretty much way out there in terms of the user experience with ereaders.
Bought the book through a service before he had a device to read it on in 1998. Got it, Read it and stored it away.
ELEVEN YEARS LATER, that company gets sold to B&N.
Five years after THAT, B&N then shut them down. B&N gives lots of warning that they are doing so, specifies they may not be able to move everything over, advises that people download and back up those files and provides instructions to do so (although there are multiple ways to do it).
For the first time in a few years, he takes stock of the books that should have been transferred, finds one missing and then checks with a hapless chat support person.
I mean, I get it: heâs trying to illustrate how B&N basically screwed up on this book of his. But itâs not exactly the most common scenario for Nook users. One of the original advantages of the Nook over the Kindle was the ability to side-load books using CalibreâŚbut the market voted and generally, Amazon won. As a guy who has written for an e-Reader site for eight or nine years, this shouldnât have been a surprise.
They SOLD him the book. Not leased, not loaned, not temporarily licenced. Buying it means you own it, and it doesnât vanish because the seller was bought out or went under. Thereâs no time limit.
If you SELL something - using the word SELL - and your DRM system later kills it, even when your company goes under, then youâre a scammer. That includes many DRM systems that have killed all the video and audio and e-books they âsoldâ, not because the company went under, but because they simply lost interest.
Yes, by definition that applies to most DRM systems, but itâs still a basic truth.
If you buy the company doing that - as opposed to buying the assets after bankruptcy - then you have an obligation to honor their contracts. Otherwise youâre taking part in the scam.
Replacing the product with a fake - especially when you still sell the product - and refusing to make it right - is even worse.
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For one thing, B&N didnât sell him anything. They bought the company that bought the company that sold him the book. I donât have access to the original purchase agreement (and apparently, neither does he, since he no longer has email going back that far), but from what Iâm getting, he purchased a PDB file version of the book for his Palm PDA. eReader only released in PDB format, while Fictionwise would allow you to convert.
They didnât take the file from him; he failed to make sure he had it on his device before they discontinued the service to allow him to get it again while it was live. He was unable to get the file that had been brought forward from two companies in the past in a convoluted history. He obviously considered it too much work, especially since they HAD let him download it, he still has it and can sideload it (and I say this as someone who has sideloaded files on my Samsung Nook). This isnât a case of buying a book from B&Nâs store and having it lost, itâs a case of them no longer supporting a transaction from two companies back and 18 years in the past for a device from a company that went out of business years ago.
That they sold it to him doesnât mean they have to make sure he can still get it years later on another device. In point of fact, he made an agreement with Fictionwise/eReader/B&N that he specifically WOULD NOT, which is why they sent him a 90-day warning that they were shutting the company and access down. Iâm just not seeing how B&N is being unreasonable or criminal here.
Not cool bro. Thatâs like walking up to somebody that just got out of a car crash going âIâd have worn my seatbelt.â Or someone that lost every photo theyâd ever taken of their child because the autoshare function on their phone depended on a site that didnât allow easy exports.
Thatâs⌠just⌠Dude no. the point here isnât the guy having backusp or not, itâs the vendor making a collosal screwup and then halfassing and footdragging while fixing it. Barns and Noble chat AND phone support is pretty crappy. Chat is⌠well itâs OKish but the phone is you talking on a guy wit ha thick indian accent going off an obvious script and if you say one word not in the approved responses they ainât lifting a finger.
Their store staff are pretty awesome though. Always go to their store if at all possible.
