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anon895 comments on Knowledge is Worth Paying For - Less Wrong
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I agree with the main theme (that knowledge is often worth paying for), but you should be much more careful before advising technologies like Kindle which are heavily loaded with DRM and kill-switch. We all know how Amazon disabled all copies of 1984 from the Kindles once. The fact it was 1984 is a "funny" coincidence, but the point remain. Granting to a company (by itself, or because asked by a government to do so) the power to destroy all the copies of a book in the world in one click is not something we should do.
http://www.defectivebydesign.org/amazon-kindle-swindle explains it better than I do.
Until ebooks are respecting the rights and freedom we have with paperbooks (like a plain PDF do, but not a Kindle ebook), I would recommend to people to buy good-old paper books, even if they are a bit more expensive. Freedom is also worth paying for.
(Sorry if this is a bit out-of-topic, but it seems an important point to me; and yes I know that political arguments should be two-sided, there are positive aspects in Kindle and most ebooks, but I wanted to bring attention over a very negative aspect which is, IMHO, sufficient to overcome the positive ones).
Amazon removed one edition of 1984 due to it being sold by a company that did not have the copyright. Given how much backlash there was just over that, it is extremely unlikely that Amazon or any other major e-book provider will engage in any form of substantial censorship or removal of material. The risk does exist but it is so small as to not really need much attention paid to it.
A more substantial problem seems to be the great difficulty which one has in lending e-books. There have been some steps taken to handle this but they are still very suboptimal.
People know Kindle DRM can currently be broken, right?
Tried it, didn't work for me. :(
Huh. Worked fine for me using files from a previously existing setup of Kindle for PC under Windows XP.