[Infowarrior] - More on why I'm anti-Kindle

[Richard Forno]

I don't care how convenient it may be but this sure doesn't sound  
convenient, and thanks to Murphy's Law of Life, this is usually when  
you need access to such books! (and can't get 'em)   Sorry Amazon,  
I'll stick with hard-copy,contrarian that I am.

-rf


http://www.boingboing.net/2009/06/22/some-kindle-books-ha.html

Some Kindle books have secret caps on the number of times you can  
download them
Posted by Cory Doctorow, June 22, 2009 7:10 AM | permalink

It turns out that there's an undocumented restriction on Kindle books  
-- if you download them "too many" (where "too many" is a secret  
number) times to your Kindle or iPhone or whatever, you run out of  
downloads and can't get copies anymore.

Months ago, an Amazon manager wrote to me to tell me that the Kindle  
now had DRM-free options for ebooks, and to ask if I had any  
questions. I had three questions:

1. Is there anything in the Kindle EULA that prohibits moving your  
purchased DRM-free Kindle files to a competing device?

2. Is there anything in the Kindle file-format (such as a patent or  
trade-secret) that would make it illegal to produce a Kindle format- 
reader or converter for a competing device?

3. What flags are in the DRM-free Kindle format, and can a DRM-free  
Kindle file have its features revoked after you purchase it?

He never answered them. After promising to get back to me, he just  
disappeared and stop answering my emails. I wrote to Amazon later on  
behalf of the Guardian newspaper, asking the same thing, and they  
never replied to that, either. And my contact at O'Reilly, who are  
releasing their entire catalog as DRM-free Kindle books, has been  
blown off by his Amazon contact on these questions, too.

The news about a secret limit on downloads is part of #3: we found out  
the hard way that Amazon can revoke your Kindle's ability to read your  
ebooks aloud after you've bought them. Now we discover that there is a  
secret counter that limits your refreshes of your Kindle library (say,  
across multiple Kindle devices as you upgrade, or replace lost, broken  
or defective units).

It may be that the market would be willing to pay Kindle book prices  
for books with these restrictions (and whichever other ones are  
lurking in the shadows), but it's just not fair or right for a company  
that prides itself on being customer-centered to refuse to tell you  
what you're buying when you buy its ebooks.

     When I got the Amazon Kindle app I knew there was one particular  
book I needed to download to both devices immediately. It's a  
reference book that I wanted to make sure that I had on my device as  
the weekend began. But when I opened the app it only showed me a small  
subset of my books. "What?" I wondered. I went into that digital  
download portion of Amazon store and there I saw a list of all the  
books that I have purchased for my Kindle. "Great," I thought "I'll  
just choose the books that I want and click the ' download/send it  
to...' Button next to the item." I clicked and a few books gave back  
the message "successfully sent to". A number of the books, however,  
including the one I was looking for, gave back the message that they  
were unable to be sent to my iPhone. I tried to download it to my iPod  
touch and received the same message...

     The customer rep asked me to send every one of the books in my  
Amazon library to my iPhone. Most of them gave the message that they  
were sent but a number of them returned the message "Cannot be sent to  
selected device".

     "Oh that's the problem," he said "if some of the books will  
download and the others won't it means that you've reached the maximum  
number of times you can download the book."

     I asked him what that meant since the books I needed to download  
weren't currently on any device because I had wiped those devices  
clean and simply wanted to reinstall. He proceeded to tell me that  
there is always a limit to the number of times you can download a  
given book. Sometimes, he said, it's five or six times but at other  
times it may only be once or twice. And, here's the kicker folks, once  
you reach the cap you need to repurchase the book if you want to  
download it again.