4 ms·

To be fair, you can find tons of kindle books for free in torrents and on the internet anyway, amazon doesnt stop you even from copying them to your kindle. I m

To be fair, you can find tons of kindle books for free in torrents and on the internet anyway, amazon doesnt stop you even from copying them to your kindle. I m sure amazon and even the authors are aware of those limitations and are focusing on a better experience readers would be willing to pay for.

officemonkey 15y ago
I think Amazon has mostly learned the mistakes of the record labels made. They realize if they go hog-wild on the DRM that the public are just going to go the torrents. The rest of the publishing industry occasionally forgets and does dumb stuff (like get pissy over the text-to-speech function in order to protect their audiobook profits). In fact, I won't be surprised if DRM is eventually dropped from eBooks you buy.
- joe42 15y ago
  The textbook renting service Kindle introduced last month depends quite heavily on DRM. I verified recently that I can "rent" a book for, say, 30% of its "buy" price, remove the DRM, and be left with a DRM-free book (not limited to a month rental).
  - mahyarm 15y ago
    It's padlock DRM, cheap, easy and keeps out the vast majority of casual piraters by being more of a hassle than just paying the usual $10. Biggest bang for the buck. People who are really cheap or poor would just go to the library and get it for free in some form or torrent it anyway and you wont get any money from those people.
- Tivs 15y ago
  Agreed, put your resources toward a much better user experience as opposed to preventing people from accessing your content. DRM is something you have to constantly bandaid as people break it, and it's always broken quicker than you can push out fixes for the most part, so it's just futile.
JonLim 15y ago
Kindle user here. Started out by downloading a handful of books from various authors whom were recommended to me. After seeing how poorly formatted some pirated books were, I downloaded some samples of other books, and the formatting was great. Went and bought a whole whack of books right after that. I pirated the first book in Song of Fire and Ice (Game of Thrones) and bought the rest because I loved the book so much. So yes, Amazon has played this arena VERY well, in my opinion.
- notatoad 15y ago
  kindle user here. started out by downloading a handful of books from torrent. after seeing how poorly formatted some were, i started buying books from the kindle store. after the third or fourth book i bought, i realized amazon doesn't do any better a job than the pirates do. as long as you download single books and not packs of .doc files, the formatting is probably better on pirated books in my experience.
  - JonLim 15y ago
    Depends on the book! A lot of my Chuck Palahniuk pirated books were so poorly formatted that I just decided to buy the damned thing after viewing how good the sample was.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- NolF 15y ago
  I've had quite the same experience. Downloaded some books, started reading it, and after enjoying the book so much, the little formatting errors were too much and decided to buy the book.
- FilterJoe 15y ago
  I've used both a Kindle and Nook and found the formatting of books in stores to be poor for the majority of books (but not all). I get out-of-copyright classics (or public domain books) now from places like Feedbooks and Manybooks which do a much better job of quality control on the formatting. Feedbooks.com is my favorite but they only have a few thousand books.

officemonkey 15y ago

I think Amazon has mostly learned the mistakes of the record labels made. They realize if they go hog-wild on the DRM that the public are just going to go the torrents. The rest of the publishing industry occasionally forgets and does dumb stuff (like get pissy over the text-to-speech function in order to protect their audiobook profits). In fact, I won't be surprised if DRM is eventually dropped from eBooks you buy.

joe42 15y ago
The textbook renting service Kindle introduced last month depends quite heavily on DRM. I verified recently that I can "rent" a book for, say, 30% of its "buy" price, remove the DRM, and be left with a DRM-free book (not limited to a month rental).
- mahyarm 15y ago
  It's padlock DRM, cheap, easy and keeps out the vast majority of casual piraters by being more of a hassle than just paying the usual $10. Biggest bang for the buck. People who are really cheap or poor would just go to the library and get it for free in some form or torrent it anyway and you wont get any money from those people.
Tivs 15y ago
Agreed, put your resources toward a much better user experience as opposed to preventing people from accessing your content. DRM is something you have to constantly bandaid as people break it, and it's always broken quicker than you can push out fixes for the most part, so it's just futile.

JonLim 15y ago

Kindle user here. Started out by downloading a handful of books from various authors whom were recommended to me. After seeing how poorly formatted some pirated books were, I downloaded some samples of other books, and the formatting was great. Went and bought a whole whack of books right after that. I pirated the first book in Song of Fire and Ice (Game of Thrones) and bought the rest because I loved the book so much. So yes, Amazon has played this arena VERY well, in my opinion.

notatoad 15y ago
kindle user here. started out by downloading a handful of books from torrent. after seeing how poorly formatted some were, i started buying books from the kindle store. after the third or fourth book i bought, i realized amazon doesn't do any better a job than the pirates do. as long as you download single books and not packs of .doc files, the formatting is probably better on pirated books in my experience.
- JonLim 15y ago
  Depends on the book! A lot of my Chuck Palahniuk pirated books were so poorly formatted that I just decided to buy the damned thing after viewing how good the sample was.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
NolF 15y ago
I've had quite the same experience. Downloaded some books, started reading it, and after enjoying the book so much, the little formatting errors were too much and decided to buy the book.
FilterJoe 15y ago
I've used both a Kindle and Nook and found the formatting of books in stores to be poor for the majority of books (but not all). I get out-of-copyright classics (or public domain books) now from places like Feedbooks and Manybooks which do a much better job of quality control on the formatting. Feedbooks.com is my favorite but they only have a few thousand books.