ladybusiness | (Reply)

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When a colleague of mine bought his Kindle, we had a long discussion where I tried to explain why even though I like books, as I don't need an e-reader to make reading easier, I would never buy one as long as DRM was part of the plan and while companies failed to make their devices work the way regular books do. I think that was kind of shocking for him, because I am the quiet girl who doesn't know about technology and he is the genius programmer.

It actively pisses me off that when you buy an e-book you basically don't own it at the moment, you sort of license it, while when you buy a paper book it's yours to do with as you will as long as you don't make a profit from redistributing lots of photocopies. If you're going to reinvent something, that still exists and works quite well for many people, then you shouldn't go around slapping limitations on your new product that don't exist on the product you're (maybe) competing with. I know that in theory DRM just reinforces the technical, legal restrictions that are written in the front of each book, but personally I think that's a bullshit argument.

It must be really hard at the moment for people who saw e-books as something that would really help their reading experience, because the technology just isn't right yet in terms of user experience and just ethics.