It's hard to muster too much outrage about this. You can't read your "rightfully purchased iBooks" on any other device either; you can't read them on a Kindle, nor, to the best of my knowledge, on an Apple Mac computer of any sort. You can't to my mind reasonably expect to play them on jailbroken phones either.
Why are you even buying iBook books? I can't understand the market proposition to them. Kindle books work on Apple and Amazon hardware, and have a wider selection. eBooks are already content-protected (this doesn't bother me, but bothers most geeks); why would you opt into the more protected of the two major options?
> Kindle books work on Apple and Amazon hardware, and have a wider selection.
Kindle's DRM seems to be a sweet spot: effective enough to prevent casual piracy, but generally not annoying, and easy to bypass for anyone who cares about controlling their own media.
> Keep in mind that by doing so you would still be supporting a consumer-hostile ecosystem.
I find Kindle to be a massive upgrade over tangible books for me - I travel, so physical books get gifted away after finishing them, while I get to keep my Kindle books. And they're cheaper.
As a consumer, it's been a huge win for me. Could it be even better than now? Yeah sure probably, but I love paying less for books, getting them instantly, and being able to keep them instead of gifting them on for weight/space reasons.
Compared to what? I think it'd be easier/cheaper for anyone of moderate technical skill to learn how to remove DRM from a kindle book in order to duplicate it than to scan or photocopy a physical book in order duplicate it.
Many tech publishers sell unrestricted .mobi files if you buy directly from them. Some sci-fi publishers do as well, though most of what I read on my Kindle comes from feedbooks.com.
I didn't say don't do it; just to be aware that by buying books from Amazon, you're sending a message that you're OK with DRM.
According to the Topaz developer[1], it was cracked over a year ago; apparently the Topaz algorithm was, like .azw before it, trivially bypassed by prodding at the KindleForPC application.
Furthermore, Topaz is a rarely-used specialty format. It has existed for at least three years (based on the blog's date and text), but AZW/mobi continues to be by far the dominant format for purchased Kindle books.
While I can't speak to why other buy via iBooks, I have made exactly one iBooks purchase which was for a title that was not available in Kindle format. Everything else I get is in Kindle format that gets the DRM stripped and is then put back into iBooks because I prefer it to the Kindle app for reading. I have no idea why some books come out in iBooks first, but what was a non-issue at the time is now a minor annoyance.
As I understand, iBooks lets me highlight and add bookmarks and synchronize these. People read differently, but I'm the kind of person who needs to highlight or use those Post It! bookmarks.
I am sure you can highlight and synchronize on the kindle. After all, Amazon even publishes a top 10 list of most highlighted passages. (I haven't tried highlighting myself yet).
I doubt that this was solely intended as a 'screw you' to jailbreakers. More likely, it's because Apple can't guarantee the integrity of DRM on a jailbroken system, and that's one of the terms in their contracts with publishers.
It appears that Apple is throwing caution to the wind and opening themselves up for a slew of lawsuits over… iBooks. Really? Even if a corporation doesn’t like us messing with their perfect OS, they can’t stop us from doing what’s legal.
Sigh. Someone else who doesn't understand our rights include the right to enter into a contract that places burdens on both parties.
There's no legal or moral reason that Apple can't say "I'll sell you this for $X plus your promise not to do $Y.". You don't have to like it -- in which case you shouldn't make the agreement -- but it's certainly not wrong.
Yes there are. There are plenty of rights which the law gives you which you can't surrender, because they occur in asymmetric situations where one party has more power than the other.
For example you can't sell yourself into slavery and you can't surrender your right to reverse engineer a technology (in most developed countries).
Anti-competitive practices is another area where the law has intervened in these sort of situations in the past. For example in the case of printer ink refills (although the law has chosen not to intervene in the console market).
I assume that we can all agree on the slavery part, but I'm not so sure about the reverse engineering one. Your personal feelings may differ, of course, but I'm having trouble constructing an argument against the signing-away of reverse engineering rights, from basic natural law principles.
Here's another fun example: clearly the right to free speech is fundamental, at least to those in our society. So how is it that a court can uphold, e.g., an NDA?
Though I consider the specific situation with iBooks and DRM to be both mild and reasonable, it does invoke a thorny legal and moral question: exactly how much of your rights are you allowed to sign away voluntarily?
Extreme ends of the spectrum are very clear: selling yourself into indentured servitude is a violation of basic human rights, while selling your time for eight hours a day is not.
Many advocates for digital freedom would argue that allowing customers (particularly the non-tech-savvy who don't know what they're agreeing to) to give up the rights to their devices and content is inherently immoral. I don't agree entirely, but I see their point, and if there was a ballot initiative proposing consumer protections against things like DRM lock-in, I would likely vote for it.
Crippling functionality in response to jailbreaking is a bad move. Basically, you're pissing off exactly the people who have the ability to embarrass you. Just detecting jailbreaking is tremendously powerful in itself, and can be leveraged to great advantage. Crippling functionality isn't one of these ways, though.
No, this does not open Apple up to lawsuits. Any corporation has the option of telling you what configurations are supported, and choosing to not support configurations that are the result of extensive tweaking.
The lil blogger says "The Library of Congress declared that it is completely legal to jailbreak your devices."
Firstly, the Library of Congress hardle makes legal decisions, and additionally, if they did, that does not imply that a company can not lock them down.
Not to sound trollish, but have you looked at Android's notification system? It's absolutely wonderful, and I really don't think I'd change a thing about it. If you aren't too tied to iOS and are willing to switch, I'd say it's worth a look.
Yea, androids is much better than iOS. The notification system is by far the worst thing about iOS, but I'm sure that the iOS solution will be good when they do revamp it.
Perhaps you'd be happy with a Palm Pre: hotspot..check (and free with Verizon)...possibly world's finest notification system...check.
I had an iPhone for a year and now have used a Palm Pre for a year. I just bought my son an iPod Touch and yuck!! The celebrated UI of iOS is quite a turn off compared to webOS in my opinion.
I am running 4.3 beta, so I have got the first I couldn't care less about the second. Why do you need better ways to get interrupted? I honestly cannot understand all this talk about Android having better notification system. I can see missed calls and new messages on the apps badges, that's enough for me.
Why are you even buying iBook books? I can't understand the market proposition to them. Kindle books work on Apple and Amazon hardware, and have a wider selection. eBooks are already content-protected (this doesn't bother me, but bothers most geeks); why would you opt into the more protected of the two major options?