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Amazon Stymies Lendle E-book Lending Service
CheerfulMacFanboy writes "CNET quotes Lendle co-founder Jeff Croft: 'They [Amazon] shut the API access off, and without it, our site is mostly useless. So, we went ahead and pulled it down. Could we build a lending site without their API? Yes. But it wouldn't be the quality of product we expect from ourselves.' Croft also said 'at least two other Kindle lending services got the same message' yesterday.'"
Let's make a web site that completely and entirely depends on some interface provided by large perpetually hungry company!
And compete with that company!
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
While I understand that the Kindle is sold somewhat as a loss-leader and a mechanism to try to sell ebooks for absurd prices (it's bad enough that paperbacks are $9; to charge that same price that costs you NOTHING to duplicate, NOTHING to store, NOTHING to ship, NOTHING to advertise is...hard to swallow), at some point even your lawyer-swaddled management must recognize that if one too blatantly attacks all *reasonable* means of use of that hardware, the only things left are going to be people who are willing and able to use your hardware WITHOUT your consent/cooperation, ie pirates.
Cutting off Lendle (and with a classy c&d sent from a 'do not reply' email address and no recourse to appeal or discuss), secretly editing books, purging books that people have purchased - all of these things simply indicate that you as a vendor are untrustworthy. Therefore the trusting will go elsewhere, the unscrupulous will continue to use Kindles and here's the kick: you're not going to see a DIME of their activities.
-Styopa
Nah. Somewhere in between is better.
We do need some system of rewarding people who work hard, or else, evidence shows, people will just slack, and you end up not with everyone equally rich, but instead with everyone equally poor, so to say.
On the flipside, we do also need mechanisms for ensuring that capitalism is a servant of the people - and not it's master.
I tend to think the scandinavian countries hit the balance close to optimal, but offcourse I'm biased, being Norwegian myself. Some people would say we're -too- socialist, while others would say we're not -enough- socialist, to a certain degree it's a matter of personal taste, I guess.
But I think it's fairly clear-cut that capitalism in the USA, needs *more* moderating influence, and that it has gone too far in the direction of giving power to the wealthy.
You've previously stated that you make close to $150k, why not just say that instead of skirting around the question?
Oh, I know, it's because you know no one will take your claim of being "poor" seriously. Well, fortunately for us, this isn't 4chan and your posts never get erased.
Have a nice day. :)