7 ms·

Two things in particular I'll attack here: > - No Kindle You're definitely not alone in this -- a lot of my friends still prefer hard copies over eBooks -- bu

by jmduke 14y ago

Two things in particular I'll attack here: > - No Kindle You're definitely not alone in this -- a lot of my friends still prefer hard copies over eBooks -- but as someone used to literally lugging three-four textbooks to class, plus periodicals, plus personal reading, there's a clear and definitive value add from the Kindle. (That being said, just because you don't have a Kindle doesn't mean you don't, say, read eBooks on your laptop.) > - No Facebook There's a huge meme of 'Facebook is worthless' both on HN and on Reddit and other tech-oriented communities that I fail to grasp. There's no other site where I can talk and keep up with my grandparents, my college roommate, and my girlfriend simultaneously.

icebraining 14y ago
Maybe we don't feel the need to talk to three or more people simultaneously? I'd rather give proper attention to each, even if it takes a little more time.
AgentConundrum 14y ago
> You're definitely not alone in this -- a lot of my friends still prefer hard copies over eBooks For me, it's because I own physical books, but I lease eBooks. A fact still lost on many people; there was an erroneous post about Bruce Willis suing Apple over digital property, which then spawned several posts saying "TIL (Today I Learned) I don't actually own my music". It worries me that so many people don't realize this. DRM means that if I buy an ebook, it's mine to read. If I want to loan it to my girlfriend, things get complicated. It seems I have three options. We can share one account, which means that if we break up, legally one of us will "lose" all our books. I can give her my device to read it, so I lose all my books while she's reading. I can buy an extra Kindle (or other device, but Kindle seems to have the most mindshare) just for sharing, which seems needlessly expensive. It sort of seems like everyone should own two Kindles. One is for you to do whatever you like with. The second is for sharing. By this, I mean that this second Kindle is to receive a book, not lend it out. The lending Kindle can be loaded with your friend's account (n.b. this assumes you can lock it so the lendee can't buy books on the lenders account; I don't know enough about it to say), you can read one lent book at a time, then purge the account and data and start from scratch the next time. Compare this to physical books, where lending just means handing over an object and saying "get it back to me when you're done. Or, in the case of my copy of Watchmen, "forget you still have it when you move". :) I don't like digital media. Full stop. It's too new, and too much a moving target, for me to feel comfortable with it. Even without DRM, things are still legally uncomfortable. Again, if I bought an album and, sans-DRM, loaded it on my girlfriend's device, I now have a copy which is potentially traceable to me (iTunes used to watermark and/or ID3-tag certain songs, but that could be a thing of the past now), that I don't control. Likewise, just ripping a CD is currently legal, but still seems a potential grey area, and if I lost/sold the CD, wouldn't I have to delete the file? So now I have to keep track of physical objects to manage my digital files. This is all very "letter of the law" and an unnecessarily strict view of this. In reality, the way most people would handle this would be to buy the music, distribute it to appropriate people, and just forget the whole thing. People also break the DRM on Kindle books to make them usable. My view is that if you're going to do things of questionable legality after legally buying an object, how is that really different from just grabbing the files from TPB? Until digital media grows up, and old media companies adapt their models, I'll stick to radio/internet-radio-streams, physical books, and DVDs. (That turned into a rant. Apologies all around.)
- adestefan 14y ago
  I've been leasing books for 3 decades from the library and still do the same thing with my Kindle from both the local library or the Amazon Prime lending library. I've probably "bought" only one or two of the 60 or 70 or so books I've ever read on my Kindle.
  - AgentConundrum 14y ago
    The books, while the impetus for this particular comment, are only part of the puzzle. Music is pretty much entirely digital at this point in one form or another - how many people do you know carrying a discman? Movies are starting to trend harder that way too, as well as books. Now, with Netflix for movies and Spotify (I think that's what it's called, it's not in Canada yet) for music, there could be a trend away from traditional ownership and towards subscription content. How that plays out will be interesting. My point was that there's some transitional/growing pains going on, and hard questions that still need to be answered. I just don't like how things are right now, speaking only for myself.
    - sliverstorm 14y ago
      So until music and movies are sorted out, you will not buy eBooks?
- icebraining 14y ago
  My view is that if you're going to do things of questionable legality after legally buying an object, how is that really different from just grabbing the files from TPB? It depends on your motivation. If you buy them to Follow The Law™, then yes, it's mostly the same, but if you buy them to reward the people who made the thing, then it's not. In any case, there are still 40 000 ebooks that don't suffer from such problems, and in my opinion they're still worth getting a reader: http://www.gutenberg.org/ http://www.gutenberg.org/
  - AgentConundrum 14y ago
    I did mention in the previous paragraph that I was referring to an unrealisticly strict view, and that most people won't think in those sorts of concrete terms. My point was that people are used to a certain type of "property" and, before digital media, that view wasn't inaccurate. Yes, there were licenses and you weren't allowed to make copies of tapes or CDs, but there was still the physical property of the cassette, videotape, CD, DVD, what have you that was your property that you could lend, sell, destroy as you wanted. Digital media doesn't follow this model, but a lot of people don't realize that. I do, and it's not a model that really appeals to me for those types of products, so I hang onto the "old ways" and continue to buy the physical products. I buy physical books, I buy DVDs (I never got on the Blu-ray bandwagon for a number of reasons), and music.. well, I have an odd relationship with music such that radio tends to be good enough for me most of the time anyway. Also, music is the media product furthest into digital territory to the point that it's unavoidable in some ways. As for Gutenburg, I suppose I should clarify that I'm not anti-Kindle. The device itself seems useful and Gutenberg fits nicely with it. I think Safari Books works with Kindle as well, and most (if not all) public libraries can lend you digital copies of books to your Kindle. My rant wasn't directed at a device, but at the sales model of digital media. I just feel there are some growing pains left to work though. I'm not much of an early adopter for anything, and it still feels like that's the phase we're in to a certain extent. I hope that made some sense.
epo 14y ago
"There's no other site where I can talk and keep up with my grandparents, my college roommate, and my girlfriend simultaneously." Why would anyone want to do this? It is feasible to display 20 or more TV channels simultaneously, but you wouldn't be "watching" any of them, you'd looking at them at best. I'll be charitable and assume you meant something like "using the same mechanism" but even that is barely less deranged as an advantage except for those so slow on the uptake that they can only memorise one way of doing things.
engtech 14y ago
The big advantage I see to an ebook reader is when you are reading a 500+ page book. Reading Stephen King's 11/22/63 in hardcover on the bus was kind of brutal.
- hunterjrj 14y ago
  Currently reading GRRM's A Dance With Dragons in hardcover. Brutal! I read the first four on my Kobo (I'm Canadian) and it was a much more enjoyable aesthetic experience.
nullc 14y ago
> There's no other site where I can talk and keep up with my grandparents, my college roommate, and my girlfriend simultaneously. 'Necrophiliac bestiality, of course! How else am I to screw my food while I eat it?' If these people mean something to you, then you should be able to find the time to have adequate direct person to person communication with them instead of broadcasting to them and your closest 600 best buds. If they don't— then why care? I certainly believe that you find Facebook useful, but don't overstate it. People have had friendships long before there was a friend button.
- scott_s 14y ago
  There is more to Facebook than the friend-feed (the broadcast mechanism). Person-to-person communication is mostly what I use it for; it has replaced email and IM for many people.
  - thebigshane 14y ago
    What does Facebook's person-to-person communication offer beyond email and IM? (Honest question) No doubt it indeed has replaced email and IM for some people, but I would think it is just because "well, everyone else is on facebook so I'll just use that too"...
    - lotharbot 14y ago
      Facebook is my primary messaging system. It's better than e-mail because I don't have to sift through spam in my private message box. I don't even have to sift through messages from companies that I technically have a business relationship with. I only get actual personal contacts. It's better than various forms of IM software because (1) most of my relatives actually use it and (2) it's in the browser rather than a standalone client. Of course, YMMV.
      - gknoy 14y ago
        Agreed. I hate using Facebook, as I nearly never feel like posting anything, but it's nice to be able to say, "I wonder what ___ is doing", and then see their feed, or see some vacation photos, and not have to actually bother them and interrupt their day. With young kids, time is precious and often not at times which are convenient for socialization. :)
gav 14y ago
I wonder how much Kindle ownership and home size correlates. I was a strong proponent of owning physical books until about 2 1/2 years ago when I moved into a small Manhattan apartment. Since then I've bought about 200 e-books and about 5 physical books. I simply don't have the space. I have boxes and boxes of books in storage and I'm now glad that I'm not adding to that. Playing with some rough numbers into I get about 9 ft^3 for 200 paperback books, it's even worse with hardbacks. Given the amount of people I see reading on a Kindle in the subway, I wonder how many took the leap just due to size constraints.
- shanselman 14y ago
  I would say it correlates more to household income and education. Folks need to "get" digital books and feel confident that they will still own them. I've gotten tired of looking at physical books that full up a half a room so I've moved to Kindles and Comixology and haven't looked back.
  - inafield 14y ago
    My wife and I moved into a 600sqft condo and part of the downsizing were books from the past 10-15 years. Going forward we're going digital to save on physical space. Also, the puppy can't chew up our tablet as easy as a physical book ;-)
  - toomuchtodo 14y ago
    If I want to "keep" my digital books, I'll dump them from my Amazon account and send them off to Fedex Office to be printed/bound. At the moment, I'm fine having a copy of all of them (with the DRM and identifier stripped) stored as a compressed archive in Amazon S3.
stagas 14y ago
I recently realized I was using FB only for that reason, keeping in touch with people I know in real life, mainly the chat. I don't need to see any of the stories. Sure some of them are fun but they are a huge waste of time. Then I realized I could add FB chat to Pidgin (an IM client). My time using FB website has been reduced dramatically, I can still talk to my friends there. I'm happy I did that.
eli_gottlieb 14y ago
You're definitely not alone in this -- a lot of my friends still prefer hard copies over eBooks -- but as someone used to literally lugging three-four textbooks to class, plus periodicals, plus personal reading, there's a clear and definitive value add from the Kindle. (That being said, just because you don't have a Kindle doesn't mean you don't, say, read eBooks on your laptop.) As someone used to moving around a lot, I carry around much of my book collection and a selection of important research papers on my Kindle. It's damned useful to lug one Kindle instead of 20 kg of physical paper.

by jmduke 14y ago

icebraining 14y ago

Maybe we don't feel the need to talk to three or more people simultaneously? I'd rather give proper attention to each, even if it takes a little more time.

AgentConundrum 14y ago

> You're definitely not alone in this -- a lot of my friends still prefer hard copies over eBooks For me, it's because I own physical books, but I lease eBooks. A fact still lost on many people; there was an erroneous post about Bruce Willis suing Apple over digital property, which then spawned several posts saying "TIL (Today I Learned) I don't actually own my music". It worries me that so many people don't realize this. DRM means that if I buy an ebook, it's mine to read. If I want to loan it to my girlfriend, things get complicated. It seems I have three options. We can share one account, which means that if we break up, legally one of us will "lose" all our books. I can give her my device to read it, so I lose all my books while she's reading. I can buy an extra Kindle (or other device, but Kindle seems to have the most mindshare) just for sharing, which seems needlessly expensive. It sort of seems like everyone should own two Kindles. One is for you to do whatever you like with. The second is for sharing. By this, I mean that this second Kindle is to receive a book, not lend it out. The lending Kindle can be loaded with your friend's account (n.b. this assumes you can lock it so the lendee can't buy books on the lenders account; I don't know enough about it to say), you can read one lent book at a time, then purge the account and data and start from scratch the next time. Compare this to physical books, where lending just means handing over an object and saying "get it back to me when you're done. Or, in the case of my copy of Watchmen, "forget you still have it when you move". :) I don't like digital media. Full stop. It's too new, and too much a moving target, for me to feel comfortable with it. Even without DRM, things are still legally uncomfortable. Again, if I bought an album and, sans-DRM, loaded it on my girlfriend's device, I now have a copy which is potentially traceable to me (iTunes used to watermark and/or ID3-tag certain songs, but that could be a thing of the past now), that I don't control. Likewise, just ripping a CD is currently legal, but still seems a potential grey area, and if I lost/sold the CD, wouldn't I have to delete the file? So now I have to keep track of physical objects to manage my digital files. This is all very "letter of the law" and an unnecessarily strict view of this. In reality, the way most people would handle this would be to buy the music, distribute it to appropriate people, and just forget the whole thing. People also break the DRM on Kindle books to make them usable. My view is that if you're going to do things of questionable legality after legally buying an object, how is that really different from just grabbing the files from TPB? Until digital media grows up, and old media companies adapt their models, I'll stick to radio/internet-radio-streams, physical books, and DVDs. (That turned into a rant. Apologies all around.)

adestefan 14y ago
I've been leasing books for 3 decades from the library and still do the same thing with my Kindle from both the local library or the Amazon Prime lending library. I've probably "bought" only one or two of the 60 or 70 or so books I've ever read on my Kindle.
- AgentConundrum 14y ago
  The books, while the impetus for this particular comment, are only part of the puzzle. Music is pretty much entirely digital at this point in one form or another - how many people do you know carrying a discman? Movies are starting to trend harder that way too, as well as books. Now, with Netflix for movies and Spotify (I think that's what it's called, it's not in Canada yet) for music, there could be a trend away from traditional ownership and towards subscription content. How that plays out will be interesting. My point was that there's some transitional/growing pains going on, and hard questions that still need to be answered. I just don't like how things are right now, speaking only for myself.
  - sliverstorm 14y ago
    So until music and movies are sorted out, you will not buy eBooks?
icebraining 14y ago
My view is that if you're going to do things of questionable legality after legally buying an object, how is that really different from just grabbing the files from TPB? It depends on your motivation. If you buy them to Follow The Law™, then yes, it's mostly the same, but if you buy them to reward the people who made the thing, then it's not. In any case, there are still 40 000 ebooks that don't suffer from such problems, and in my opinion they're still worth getting a reader: http://www.gutenberg.org/ http://www.gutenberg.org/
- AgentConundrum 14y ago
  I did mention in the previous paragraph that I was referring to an unrealisticly strict view, and that most people won't think in those sorts of concrete terms. My point was that people are used to a certain type of "property" and, before digital media, that view wasn't inaccurate. Yes, there were licenses and you weren't allowed to make copies of tapes or CDs, but there was still the physical property of the cassette, videotape, CD, DVD, what have you that was your property that you could lend, sell, destroy as you wanted. Digital media doesn't follow this model, but a lot of people don't realize that. I do, and it's not a model that really appeals to me for those types of products, so I hang onto the "old ways" and continue to buy the physical products. I buy physical books, I buy DVDs (I never got on the Blu-ray bandwagon for a number of reasons), and music.. well, I have an odd relationship with music such that radio tends to be good enough for me most of the time anyway. Also, music is the media product furthest into digital territory to the point that it's unavoidable in some ways. As for Gutenburg, I suppose I should clarify that I'm not anti-Kindle. The device itself seems useful and Gutenberg fits nicely with it. I think Safari Books works with Kindle as well, and most (if not all) public libraries can lend you digital copies of books to your Kindle. My rant wasn't directed at a device, but at the sales model of digital media. I just feel there are some growing pains left to work though. I'm not much of an early adopter for anything, and it still feels like that's the phase we're in to a certain extent. I hope that made some sense.

epo 14y ago

"There's no other site where I can talk and keep up with my grandparents, my college roommate, and my girlfriend simultaneously." Why would anyone want to do this? It is feasible to display 20 or more TV channels simultaneously, but you wouldn't be "watching" any of them, you'd looking at them at best. I'll be charitable and assume you meant something like "using the same mechanism" but even that is barely less deranged as an advantage except for those so slow on the uptake that they can only memorise one way of doing things.

engtech 14y ago

The big advantage I see to an ebook reader is when you are reading a 500+ page book. Reading Stephen King's 11/22/63 in hardcover on the bus was kind of brutal.

hunterjrj 14y ago
Currently reading GRRM's A Dance With Dragons in hardcover. Brutal! I read the first four on my Kobo (I'm Canadian) and it was a much more enjoyable aesthetic experience.

nullc 14y ago

> There's no other site where I can talk and keep up with my grandparents, my college roommate, and my girlfriend simultaneously. 'Necrophiliac bestiality, of course! How else am I to screw my food while I eat it?' If these people mean something to you, then you should be able to find the time to have adequate direct person to person communication with them instead of broadcasting to them and your closest 600 best buds. If they don't— then why care? I certainly believe that you find Facebook useful, but don't overstate it. People have had friendships long before there was a friend button.

scott_s 14y ago
There is more to Facebook than the friend-feed (the broadcast mechanism). Person-to-person communication is mostly what I use it for; it has replaced email and IM for many people.
- thebigshane 14y ago
  What does Facebook's person-to-person communication offer beyond email and IM? (Honest question) No doubt it indeed has replaced email and IM for some people, but I would think it is just because "well, everyone else is on facebook so I'll just use that too"...
  - lotharbot 14y ago
    Facebook is my primary messaging system. It's better than e-mail because I don't have to sift through spam in my private message box. I don't even have to sift through messages from companies that I technically have a business relationship with. I only get actual personal contacts. It's better than various forms of IM software because (1) most of my relatives actually use it and (2) it's in the browser rather than a standalone client. Of course, YMMV.
    - gknoy 14y ago
      Agreed. I hate using Facebook, as I nearly never feel like posting anything, but it's nice to be able to say, "I wonder what ___ is doing", and then see their feed, or see some vacation photos, and not have to actually bother them and interrupt their day. With young kids, time is precious and often not at times which are convenient for socialization. :)

gav 14y ago

I wonder how much Kindle ownership and home size correlates. I was a strong proponent of owning physical books until about 2 1/2 years ago when I moved into a small Manhattan apartment. Since then I've bought about 200 e-books and about 5 physical books. I simply don't have the space. I have boxes and boxes of books in storage and I'm now glad that I'm not adding to that. Playing with some rough numbers into I get about 9 ft^3 for 200 paperback books, it's even worse with hardbacks. Given the amount of people I see reading on a Kindle in the subway, I wonder how many took the leap just due to size constraints.

shanselman 14y ago
I would say it correlates more to household income and education. Folks need to "get" digital books and feel confident that they will still own them. I've gotten tired of looking at physical books that full up a half a room so I've moved to Kindles and Comixology and haven't looked back.
- inafield 14y ago
  My wife and I moved into a 600sqft condo and part of the downsizing were books from the past 10-15 years. Going forward we're going digital to save on physical space. Also, the puppy can't chew up our tablet as easy as a physical book ;-)
- toomuchtodo 14y ago
  If I want to "keep" my digital books, I'll dump them from my Amazon account and send them off to Fedex Office to be printed/bound. At the moment, I'm fine having a copy of all of them (with the DRM and identifier stripped) stored as a compressed archive in Amazon S3.

stagas 14y ago

I recently realized I was using FB only for that reason, keeping in touch with people I know in real life, mainly the chat. I don't need to see any of the stories. Sure some of them are fun but they are a huge waste of time. Then I realized I could add FB chat to Pidgin (an IM client). My time using FB website has been reduced dramatically, I can still talk to my friends there. I'm happy I did that.

eli_gottlieb 14y ago

You're definitely not alone in this -- a lot of my friends still prefer hard copies over eBooks -- but as someone used to literally lugging three-four textbooks to class, plus periodicals, plus personal reading, there's a clear and definitive value add from the Kindle. (That being said, just because you don't have a Kindle doesn't mean you don't, say, read eBooks on your laptop.) As someone used to moving around a lot, I carry around much of my book collection and a selection of important research papers on my Kindle. It's damned useful to lug one Kindle instead of 20 kg of physical paper.