Careful with the “easy” replacement of physical books. It can turn out to be pretty difficult in some cases.
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Pretty much why I like me some torrents. Fuck paying for something that can be taken away on a whim
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Things like this are why I support FOSS (free open source software) and the EFF.
It’s very simple folks- if you can’t open it you don’t own it.
Digitally being able to open something or hold on to it is necessary otherwise it’s just DRM.
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You don’t own the music you buy on CD or iTunes either, just the CD/file plus a license to the music. Distributing copies is still illegal. That’s pretty much fine with me, so long as I can play the file however I like.
Oh and Blu-Ray still has DRM. While it’s possible to circumvent, it’s a pain in the ass, and illegal. I’d sure love to be able to pull movies off the discs I own so I can keep them on a server, mux in my own subtitle/audio tracks, etc but doing that would make me a nasty criminal.
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The two are very different. With a CD you own the physical copy, which the doctrine of first purchase allows you to rent or re-sell, just as you can do with a physcial book.
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Having worked in the ebook business for years, I can tell you this. For a very long time publishers were paranoid that everyone was going to rip them off with this whole digital distribution thing. They wouldn’t have signed contracts with Amazon and others without some confidence that the average joe couldn’t share books with 100 other people.
There were exceptions though. Baen books were including CD-ROMs full of an author’s works. It was interesting that I could pick up a later book in a series and catch up to that point by reading the previous books on my Palm Pilot. No DRM to worry about, I guess I could have uploaded them to a newsgroup or BBS if I wanted. But instead I read the series, enjoyed the book, and recommended them to friends.
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They are pushing people toward piracy, back toward controlling their media outright.
Did I miss something, or why is this book’s title on the Japanese side of things?
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Shouldn’t “customers will receive refunds“ actually say “customers might receive refunds“? What if the customer no longer has the credit card they purchased with? What if the customer is deceased?
For that matter, shouldn’t customers be refunded the current value of the book, if that’s greater than the original purchase price? After all, they need to replace it now.
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Probably computer books become obsolete so fast they’re a bad investment. Related story: My son is learning Illustrator for school, so my Mom ordered an Illustrator book for him on the internet. We’re checking out this obviously brand new, newly printed book, and I notice that it says “Illustrator 10” on the cover. I said to my son, “I thought they started using letters for their version numbers, a long time ago.” Sure enough, Illustrator 10 was like a turn-of-the-century version. Poor Mom, how was she to know that this brand new book sold on Amazon as if it were relevant could only be of historical interest?
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“This is my family’s Illustrator book. Sometimes it needs a new cover, and every year the content is completely revised, but it’s still the same book.”
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Why weren’t publishers prosecuted for creating and installing DRM that had no way of dealing with a work going out of copyright, which is the natural state of all IP? DRM must be able to be removed to comply with long established copyright law.
signed,
IANAL
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Remember: you’re not buying a book, you’re buying a licence to view the book.
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i know this makes me somewhat old-fashioned but among the many hazards to my dead-tree library, this is one hazard i do not fear.
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This is a way civilizations can die. Even without malicious DRM take backs like this, long term digital archiving is still a largely unsolved problem. Our great great grand children will no longer be able to find a lost trunk in an attic filled with printed ephemera, playable records, photos and memories. Instead, they’ll find a box of dead electronics devices, or nothing, because everything was on long since dead cloud accounts. :-/
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my great grandchildren will find boxes and bookshelves filled with actual books.
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Yes, but, they will ask, ‘how did grampaw switch these on?’ and, ‘where do you plug it in?’ 
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That’s me in a nutshell. I had a pretty extensive library with them but I switched over to Baen when for what I later found out was a dispute with the author out of nowhere Microsoft deleted the entire gladiator detective series (I can’t remember the name but it was both exciting and hilarious and set in ancient Rome). How on earth will I get a refund? My bank has changed names and I’ve moved. I don’t even have the PocketPC devices I read them on anymore.
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There’s been a bunch of people saying “use Calibre and remove the DRM”, without mentioning that Calibre doesn’t remove DRM by default. Instead you need Apprentice Alf’s DRM removal tools, which your favourite search engine should be able to find. Works fine on Kindle and AdobeDRM for me, and theoretically it should remove the Microsoft DRM as well.
I’ve pretty much stopped buying physical books. Mainly because I’ve run out of shelf space, and obviously I’m not going to get rid of any books, so I’m basically stuck unless I move into a bigger flat (unlikely). While I do like books as physical things, once I’m actually reading them the medium makes no difference to my enjoyment of the story, it could be ink on dead tree, or e-ink, or carved into stone for all I care. Once I’m reading all I see and feel is the text. My favourite thing about ebooks is being able to take a weeks reading and fit it into a small device, rather than having to bring an extra bag full of wood pulp.
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This? It does sound fun. Thanks.
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