I have to say I find this post patronizing.
I feel like an atheist posting in a Christian forum. I’m posting that there’s no evidence of God’s existence. And everyone else is agreeing that there’s no evidence. But then they all say they believe in God’s existence and they find it amusing how I let the evidence shape my beliefs.
What evidence is there that Amazon can reach into your PC and do anything whatsoever to your files? Even if you are worried they can take books off your kindle device, you don’t even own a kindle.
Your definition of “destroy” is “make it slightly inconvenient.”
Good heavens, people seem to be taking my words wrongly all over the place today. It wasn’t meant to be patronizing. I just don’t see the point in trying to sell things to someone when they clearly don’t want to. It’s also why I don’t debate. Why argue with someone over and over again? Why do we have this deep-seated urge to prove someone wrong? Why would you think I was being patronizing when I just don’t really care? I mean, I’ve told you what’s great about the Kindle. If that doesn’t suit you, so be it. We can still be friends and get on with our lives - my enjoyment of the Kindle is not contingent on you enjoying it too.
ETA: Or did you want to continue this conversation? If so, by all means, have at it. I don’t own the thread.
I’ve said it here before: my Kindle is one of the best things I have ever owned, and it has improved my life in many ways. It has brought me joy. I love that thing passionately.
All you people fetishising the smell of musty paper: go hang out with the skinny jeaned hipsters talking nonsense about vinyl. You guys have a lot in common.
Patronizing? She was being nice!
Nobody is debating you on evidence that Amazon can and has deleted a grand total of ONE Kindle title, after a disreputable vendor sold a book it didn’t have rights to. So yes, Amazon can delete Kindle books if you 1) have your Kindle’s wifi on and 2) don’t have a backup of that book on your computer.
The rest of us just don’t see that one time as evidence that Amazon will do it again, or we don’t care that they have the ability to do it. Amazon would take a HUGE hit to sales if they some day decided to start deleting Kindle books; I’m willing to take a bet that they will not do it again.
What I find more likely is that someday a newer, better e-Book technology will take hold, and the books I bought for my Kindle will not be readable on the new shiny device, much like the hundreds of dollars worth of VHS tapes I bought are useless to me because I no longer have a VCR, and the CDs I own are no longer played because I prefer my iPod. Personally, I’m OK with that.
There’s drawbacks to real books, too. They wear out, I lend them to people and can’t get them back, and they’re a pain to cart from house to house when I move. I’m OK with that, too. I hold no illusions that I buy a book once (in whatever format) and will have it on hand to read for the rest of my life.
What sort of scanner are you using? I’ve found it takes for-freakin’-ever to scan a book laid flat on glass, and cutting the spine and feeding the pages through an auto document feeder doesn’t work on paperback-size/thickness pages.
I’d love any tips for this.
It is a lot easier to convert file formats than converting video tapes to digital. When/if the new shiny device shows up, it will either accept .mobi files or there will be a dozen converters on the 'net to help you.
Urg–NOT TXT, use RTF. TXT strips out all the formatting (italics, etc) and RTF is pretty non-proprietary! 
And that is why I have calibre on my computer, I read in it, I use it to convert from one format to another and remove any DRM from any purchases I make of ebooks. I load whatever I want to read into my droid phone, where I use aldiko as a reading program. I don’t have shite to do with Amazon or Itunes with respect to my reading matter. [though I do use zinio to read magazines I have subscriptions to on my computer.]
Jesus Fucking Christ. Get calibre and get rid of your freaking fixation on amazon and kindle. There are off brand ebook readers out there, that have jack shit to do with amazon and kindle. There are other programs out there that you can use to manipulate the files that are ebooks. Do I really need to take this to the pit?
What pisses me off about either Amazon or publishers in general that I can buy a dead tree edition of a book from Amazon UK or Amazon Canada but I can’t buy the exact same book in an electronic edition (without–purely hypothetically–creating a fake account, sending the fake account a gift certificate for the cost of the e-book, purchasing the e-book with the gift-certificate, using a proxy to fake my location (you can only download a UK book if your IP address is in the UK–or so I hear) and then downloading the book. Hypothetically of course.
Why would they let me buy the dead-tree edition of a book that’s only available in the UK, but not the e-book edition? Are they…stupid?
I apologize. Your post came after several posts from other people and I let the cumulative weight of those spill over on to my reading of your post.
You are correct that I’ve said what I’ve had to say and have heard what other people have to say, so there’s no point in repeating things.
No worries! The Kindle is good for me; that doesn’t mean it’s good for anyone else in the world.
I’ve been reading books on my phone since 2003 or so. I can’t go back. I’ve tried.
I’ve been reading a lot of books on the iPad and iPod touch (the iPod touch is always with me, so it’s convenient). The main problem I have with eBooks is that they depend on software to read, and you have to depend on a developer to keep on maintaining that software. If the company goes out of business or stops supporting the software, then after a few short years the books can become unusable.
The main advantage of eBooks, for me, is that I can have as many books as a I want and they don’t take up any space. Right now I have boxes and boxes of books in the garage. All those boxes of books could fit on something that I could put in my pocket.
Agreed 100%, but I thought about this at length, and I just don’t see Amazon going out of business anytime soon. I’d actually be more concerned about Barnes & Noble, which is why I didn’t get a Nook.
I’ve had a Kindle since the first model, upgrading along the way (used models go to my younger sister, who subsequently gives her used models to our niece); currently reading with the Kindle Touch. As an early convert, I found the e-ink technology fine for reading text, and of course the convenience of the thing was just unbeatable. Consequently, my book reading has been exclusively Kindle-based for years now - I’ve even bought ebooks of physical books I actually owned (but had not yet read). The one thing I found lacking was its presentation of news and magazines, as the e-ink couldn’t represent color and the screen size was not conducive to magazine layouts. But that was okay, I thought; I’d simply use the thing for what it was meant to do - read text.
But as I became more and more acclimated to the hand-held model of tablet reading, I became more and more resistant to paper in other areas. Reading newspapers was torture; reading magazines only a bit less torturous. I resolved to find a solution to that problem as well, and so recently bought an iPad, which I use for news and magazines (I considered the Kindle Fire, but wanted the larger screen size of the iPad). It’s somewhat embarrassing to note how happy I was when Scientific American was recently made available on the iPad, thereby eliminating (nearly) the last of my paper-based reading.
So enjoy your Kindle (or Nook, or Kobo, or Sony reader, et al), but be aware - it’s a gateway drug. You’ll soon find yourself loath to turn paper pages at all anymore!
Just to be clear I wasn’t trying to convince Little Nemo that he should get a Kindle. Just that the information he was stating was not correct. (Huh. Now that I type that out I realize I sound like that guy from the xkcd comic strip. I’m quietly backing away from the computer.)
Oh. I thought of another really cool thing that I like about the Kindle Touch. Tapping on a word to get a definition has already been mentioned. In addition to that you can tap on a proper noun and have an option to check Wikipedia. Which is awesome! Sometimes I will be reading some novel and an interesting historical tidbit is mentioned. I’ll think to myself it would be really neat to find out more about that. Before I would just grab my phone and type it in. Now, I don’t even have to put the Kindle down. Ah, technology how many ways will it find to make me lazy?
We’ve been over this many times. Ebooks are HTML documents, with a small amount of tweaking. I don’t think anyone expects HTML documents to become unusable any time soon.
It’s still possible to read/use 16-bit Word documents created over twenty years ago without much difficulty. HTML documents are a lot more open than that. HTML is designed to be cross-platform, cross-OS, cross-hardware… it works on everything.
While ebooks are usually DRMed, the DRM is fairly easy to remove, leaving you with a document that will work on everything. So, in fact, there is zero chance that anyone will be left with ebooks they can’t use.
(And just in case: I have personally created/edited ebooks using Sigil, so I know for a fact what I’m talking about, not just repeating something I read on an internet forum.)