Actually it's a bit of both - during peak times if an ISP has over-sold their lines, the "hogs" could be what pushes them past the limits of what their routers can handle. One person downloading a 10gb file is generating roughly 1 million packets per second of traffic per second for every router in the path between source and destination. The average web browser with 10mbps, however, will burst 1 million for a few seconds and then stop for 20-30 seconds, even several minutes, before bursting again at 1 million for a few seconds. In this case, a "hog" can generate the same traffic that 10-20 web browsing-only users will, or even more.
If the ISP can only actively handle 40mbps, then 20 people downloading large files at peak times can kill the speed for the other 100 people who are just browsing the web. At off-peak times, however, the bandwidth internal to the network is meaningless.
This has nothing to do with the technical limitations of high bandwidth - there really aren't any if the ISP isn't stupid.
Unfortunately, a lot of ISPs are stupid. But anyways, you are 100% correct for off-peak hours - it's the heavy users who are cutting into the ISP's profits by generating more cross-network costs than average for the ISP.
Your analogy is flawed, a better analogy would be this:
Does traffic in Redmond increase when Microsoft employees get off work? Knowing someone who lived there, I can say yes, yes it does, and very, very badly. Well, your Modem is like Microsoft, and each packet you send is like an employee. When you unleash those packets at a rate of 1.25 million every second (around 10mbps), you can bet your ass it causes more traffic than someone who sends them out at less than 200 thousand every second (around 1.5mbps).
All of those packets must be forwarded by a switch to a router, which must process it and route it to it's next destination - probably another router, which must process it again, maybe this time sending it over a large network trunk, where it gets routed again, and routed again, then forwarded before landing at the destination modem.
100% of the latency you see is caused by the switches, routers, and modems on the net. These devices are extremely fast, but each and every packet must be at least partially read by each and every device between the sender and the reciever, and depending on the type of device it must use more or less processing power to determine the destination.
There is no limit to how much data can move across a wire, be it copper or fiber. There is also virtually no delay between when the data leaves the modem and when it reaches the first node in its journey - regardless of the technology (copper or fiber) the data moves across these wires at the speed of light. But there is definitely a limit to how many packets a router can process at a time (fiber tends to be faster because with optics they can use simpler modulation techniques than with copper), and if you are sending more packets per second than your neighbor is, you are definitely causing more traffic than they are.
Now, whether or not the highways are backed up depends on how well the ISPs have built their infrastructure relative to how many cars they said their highway could handle. They may have told you you'd be able to send out 1.25 million cars per second, but if they told the same thing to 1,000 other people, well at some point they started lying.
What he means by "Tiered Service" is adding another dimension to the tiers:
762kb at 5, 10, and 20gb per month instead of 5gb per month only 2mb at 10, 20, 50, and 100gb per month instead of 10gb per month or unlimited only 5mb at 20, 50, 100, and 150gb per month instead of 20gb per month or unlimited only
Et cetera, et cetera. The bandwidth determines how many people they can have downloading at the same time, and so they should divide it according to the size of the piece of the pipe they are willing to pay for. In my opinion, the throughput should be a reasonable markup from what it costs the ISP. If it costs Verizon $0.50 per gigabyte to access Comcast's network, they should charge $0.75-$1.00 per gigabyte to their customers.
The way I see it an average internet plan would look something like this:
$10 per month for a 10mbps connection $1 per gigabyte of data consumed.
So, if you download 50 gigs a month, you'll pay $60 a month for your connection. If you download 100 gigs a month, you'll pay $110 a month. If you download 70 gigs one month but don't even access the net the next, you'll pay $80 for the first month and $10 for the second month.
It makes it very flexible, pretty simple, and the consumer has complete control over their broadband costs by simply consuming less or more. Also, heavy users become a non-issue - in fact, because you're marking up the throughput costs as well, your heavy users actually make you MORE money each month. It essentially neutralizes the ISP's complaints while giving the consumer just as much data as they are willing to pay for. You want unlimited? No problem, but it will vary depending on how much you actually use.
For the media company interests, it makes that blue-ray copy of whatever the latest movie is a lot less attractive, because it just cost you $30-50 to download it - though DVDs will only be $5 or so.
The price per gig probably wouldn't be that high if an ISP committed to something like this (as opposed to just "trying it out" at ridiculously high prices, dooming it to failure), it would probably be closer to $0.50 per gig, but I'm only speculating.
The US lags in broadband because there is simply a hell of a lot more ground to cover. Even our most urban cities are far less dense (and therefore more expensive to lay the infrastructure for) than the average European or Japanes or Korean urban center. Get outside the urban areas for these countries and the picture looks a lot closer to the US broadband situation. Suburban and remote areas get far poorer bandwidth options than the urban center, for precisely the same reason that the US in general has poorer bandwidth than Europe - it's far more expensive to do.
As soon as return on investment drops below a certain point, it isn't worth it for the company to make the upgrade. When the ROI is negative, there is no chance in hell that it will happen. It's a simple fact, and all your whining and conspiracy theories won't change anything.
That's why the only places in the US that are being upgraded are either the very rich communities who will pay the extra cost, or the very dense communities (that are well off enough to buy internet access, obviously).
You know just about all bittorrent clients allow throttling on both the upload and download within the client itself.
Since ACKS require very low bandwidth, you should be able to set your torrent uploads to slightly below your max upload speed and everthing will work fine.
If it doesn't work fine, then either hulu or your ISP are doing something funny, and a higher-bandwidth line won't do you much good anyway.
ACK packets are extremely small, 4 bytes actually, no matter how much you are downloading 5-10kb/s should be more than enough if ACKS are really your problem. Doing some very rough math, a 10kb/s upload can handle the ACKS for a 30mbps connection. There's more handshaking than that, though, so for reliabilities sake you'd want to cut that assumption down to about 5-10mbps. Since you have about a 3mbps upload (400kb/s times 8 to get mbps), you probably have a what, 10mbps download? So set aside 20kb/s in your torrent app and your Hulu and your torrent should both be fine.
If not, like I said, there is some funny business going on, and if Hulu is saturating your 400kb/s upload something is REALLY wrong, there is no reason on earth that it should be. More likely you are simply getting queuing delays, but it should not be drastic unless the torrent is very low priority - which it may be down the line from you, who knows.
I can't tell the difference between the Netflix HD movies and my DVDs (i.e. they come in at DVD quality), and I get that at 3mbit, and voip, RDP, and desktop sharing don't require all that much bandwidth for what they do - the big issue with all of those is latency, not bandwidth (after a certain point, very low bandwidth would be an issue). Video conferencing will use a bit more than those, especially if you have a very high quality video conferencing setup, but I would be extremely surprised if you saturated a 10mbit line with that, and certainly you aren't using more than 20mbit.
Also note that a 100mbit connection can have a latency of 4,000ms just as easily as a 56k line. Latency has absolutely nothing to do with bandwidth, and those applications you mention all require very low latency to achieve high quality results, but except for video they don't require much bandwidth at all. And the video requires a lot less than you think it does. Hell, if your latency is really bad even web pages will load slowly. It would look kind of odd, you'd click a link and wait, and wait, and wait, and wait, and all of a sudden the page would be there, regardless of what it was. You wouldn't get slow page loads, you'd get delayed page loads, which can be even more annoying. You'd be able to send 12 megs per batch of packets, but if it takes 5 seconds to get to the destination it's still going to take 10 seconds to load (5 there 5 back).
You're not dreaming and producing as much as you think you are if you think all of that stuff is saturating your 100mbit connection, either that your you aren't paying attention to what your true throughput is and you're only really getting less than an average 5mbit connection would.
Where a 100mbit connection would be useful is in massive downloads. If you download 30-40 gigs a day, you might find a 100mbit line usefull, as downloads don't care about latency (it just queues up the next packet, any latency just means it starts a few seconds later) and your downloads would be extremely fast. Any packets that drop are simply re-sent later.
Line saturation isn't the issue - if a telco offers 10mbit connections, they generally ensure that their infrastructure is capable of handling the peak usage, which is never going to be even close to 100% of their customers using the full 10mbit connection at the same time, peak would be somewhere around 10-15% of users doing that, depending on how much they sold their lines.
The issue is that for every byte that leaves Verizon's network, they have to pay one of the other large telco's to transmit through their network. If verizon sells you a 10mbit connection for $30 a month, and you saturate that 10mbit connection 10-15 hours a day, chances are it costs Verizon more than $20-30 a month to support your downloading habits. With overhead and maintenance, Verizon could be losing $5-10 a month to sell you internet.
In truth it probably isn't nearly so drastic, but if you destroy their profit margin they don't make money, and if they don't make money they aren't going to have a reason to sell you internet access. They should never have sold you "unlimited" internet if they could not make money off a customer who used it that way.
The internet is not free, different large companies (like Verizon, Comcast, Sprint, and AT&T), and for example if Verizon wants to send data across Comcast's network, it has to pay a fraction of a cent for each and every byte.
Obviously, when what your customers use costs you money, the less your customers use the more money you make. It is very possible that their pricing model is such that if a customer uses their 10mbps line for 16-20 hours a day at full capacity that they will not make any money off that customer. In fact they could easily be losing money.
This has nothing to do with the technical limitations of high bandwidth - there really aren't any if the ISP isn't stupid. This is all about business contracts and a customer's internet usage habits causing higher expenses than the profit they bring in.
I love how people make bold advice based on 2-year old information.
There are now about seven or eight manufacturers of ebook readers, and 20 or so models to choose from. The majority of those support ePub format, including anything that has been released in the last year or two, and ePub is quickly becoming the format of choice among ebook retailers.
Except for the Kindle, interoperability is here. Go out and buy an ebook reader - if there is a particular format you want you can hunt down the device that will do it, but really all you need to do is look for ePub and Digital Editions (so you can buy those nasty DRM titles, which are the majority).
It almost looks like Amazon is positioning themselves to be the Macintosh of ebook readers - except since within the next year or so they won't have any great benefits over the other readers, they'll tank. Having access to Amazon's ebook store would be great, as I think they are the largest individual retailer for ebooks.
I definitely agree for any sort of referance material - I tried to load some Cisco pdfs on my PRS-500 and it was completely unusable. Love it for books, hate it for manuals.
That's why I'm getting a Que from Plastic Logic when it comes out - as long as the price isn't too absurd.
I don't know of an e-reader that can't do multiple fonts and illustrations and all that, it makes no difference. I don't see why it's a sticking point for you.
Ripping CDs for personal use is legal in the US. In fact, it's legal to do the same for DVDs and Blue Ray too. Unfortunately, some monkeys in congress pushed through a bill dreamt up by the media industries that makes it illegal to attempt to circumvent copy protection schemes, even if it is legal for you to copy the media.
It's like saying breaking into a car is illegal, even if it's your own car. Stupid.
Most CDs have no copy protection, so ripping to mp3s (again for personal use) is legal. That's not the case for DVDs and BDs though, thanks to that idiotic law.
Supporting a common DRM standard is good, but far from "opening up".
ePub is based on the IBEP open publishing standards, so, yeah it is opening up. It's just not the kind of "opening up" you wanted.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Some people here on Slashdot claim that they don't buy Blu-ray disks at least partially because their DRM hasn't been broken so wide open that it's still inconvenient to do all kinds of things like back them up or work around unskippable content. Since you compare ebook DRM to CSS, are you saying that DRM for text is ridiculously weak anyway (which is true) so no one, including the GP, should worry about it?
That's not what I was saying at all. I was saying publishers won't sell digital copies of their works without some kind of guarantee that it cannot be copied all over the place willy-nilly. They are not unreasonable for wanting this, because selling the books is where all of their income comes from. It is unreasonable to refuse to buy ebooks because all ebooks are not available in a DRM free format. If you don't want to pay for an ebook, that's fine, but why should a publisher make the ebook available to you? If you want to read only free and public domain works, well, you can, ePub is not a DRM only format - the publisher can choose to protect their works in this way or not, it's up to them.
He might also be able to find quite a few of these books already available (illegally) online, and might feel that it is morally OK to just obtain a DRM-free copy from there. I think that a lot of people would agree with him, also.
In all honestly, the only people stuck in this situation are Kindle users - most all other formats can be converted. I also disagree that it is morally ok to obtain new copies of his books illegally. Scanning his own books in and converting them himself I don't see anything wrong with (a-la backup style), but it's an uncommon use for a paper book, and if he wants the convenience with out the effort, he should be willing to pay for it again.
I don't agree that people should not have to pay for books that the author has not offered for free and are still within the original copyright terms, I think it's reprehensible to steal these works. On the other hand, I also think copyright extensions have become a mockery of the original intent of copyright, so as far as that goes, I'm with you.
Baen books are one-offs, generally the first book in a series is free (for the authors who do participate), and the rest you have to buy in print. There are a few exceptions, but I don't think any of the authors who participate in Baen's program offer a large selection of their works for free.
There are, however, some fantastic essays about why authors should be releasing their books for free, especially after the first 6 months after release, which is when books make all their money. It's a great site.
I don't disagree that the Kindle is a great piece of hardware, frankly I was jealous when I saw my first Kindle 2 in person. However, in the long run the lock-in is a serious deal breaker for me, and I think it trumps all of the Kindle's great features.
I was actually worried about this with Sony as well until recently, as they were all.lrf format (though all but the oldest e-readers could do ePub, mine just happens to be the oldest). But they have switched completely to ePub, and I will be sending my reader in to have it upgraded to use ePub on Sony's dime. That right there sold me on Sony, and combined with the fact that you don't need to buy all your ebooks from Sony alone means, for the time being, I'm definitely a Sony guy.
Sony is partnered with Adobe, and Adobe's DRM is designed to be moved around - you can move an ebook to up to 6 devices initially, and it's just a call to customer support to move it to more. I don't think Sony allows lending yet, but ePub supports it and I'd expect to see it in the not too distant future - especially since the B&N Nook is already doing it (I say already, but no Nooks have actually been delivered yet).
You're never going to get non-public domain non-drm books except from a few select authors. I wish it weren't true, because I would prefer non-drm as well, but using that as a requirement for an ebook reader is unrealistic. All ebook readers support non-drm formats, and virtually every ebook reader out there supports more non-drm formats than the Kindle does.
Also, unlike the Kindle's DRM which is Kindle exclusive, the ePub DRM that B&N, Sony, Google Books, and a half dozen other ebook retailers are using is portable from device to device. It is only designed to prevent multiple copies, and even provides functionality for time-limited lending - which makes your ebook unavailable to you after you transfer it to someone else for a set period of time. Once the time limit is up, yours is made available again and theirs is disabled. It is about the only sane way to apply DRM, and they seem to have done a very good job of it.
The lending feature allows libraries to get into the e-book game, opening up the millions of library-donated books out there for lending. They can only lend out copy for copy, just like paper books, so Publishers don't get screwed and neither do consumers.
Like I said, everything is going ePub because it is the most sane format. All of the most popular readers support ePub except for the Kindle, and pretty much all new ebook readers support ePub. In other words, everything is becoming more and more open and available and transferable.
And this isn't to say I'm a Kindle partisan. If I were in the market now I'd be looking at the other options too. I'm just saying that its disingenuous to say you HAVE to use DRM-locked files on the Kindle -- this misinformation has been spread endlessly around the internet.
I don't think anybody ever said you HAVE to use DRM on the Kindle, it's just Amazon doesn't make it easy to use anything else.
The Kindle only supports text and mobi as non-drm formats. While you can get.mobi from a few places (the number is shrinking, btw), most ebook sellers/givers don't offer it in.mobi format. I'll just say right now that plain text is a horrible format for reading a book, especially if it was formatted poorly. For anything that is non-drm and not.txt or.mobi (like.doc,.html,.pdf - though I think the larger kindle can do.pdfs) must be sent to Amazon for conversion and sent back. It's stupid, and slow.
The only one you'll be locked in with any more is the Kindle, which is why I always recommend against it despite some of its really cool features - wireless G in particular. However, a number of e-book readers do Wi-Fi, which is nearly as convenient (though not quite), and a few new readers are doing the wireless G also. Pretty soon Kindle will be the worst choice in almost every way - unless you really, really like buying your books from the Amazon store, and hate checking out library books.
Amazon did the ebook world a great service by shoving ebooks into the limelight, but now they need to shape up and join everybody else to make ebooks more usefull and less divided instead of being the ebook-isolationists that they are now.
Most new ebook readers support DRM ePub files, and the ePub DRM itself supports moving files from one device to another. Also, the ebook readers that don't support DRM made by companies worth their salt are being updated for free to support it, Sony I know for a fact is doing this, and I imagine others will follow suit when eventually the only ebooks being sold will be ePub DRM.
In other words, this new, budding little industry is solving the problem on its own.
I don't think there is anything wrong with concept behind the law per-say, but I do have a problem with the law making formerly legitimate activities illegal for no good reason. In that, I agree there is something wrong with the law as it stands today. The original problem is a legitimate problem for publishers of books and other media, and should be adressed somehow.
I know you can get the public domain Google Books for free via the Sony store, I have no idea why they wouldn't offer them through themselves in the same way, unless it is because of a stupid deal with Sony.
In any case, since Sony is doing ePub now, you don't need a Sony reader to buy (or download for free) ebooks from their store.
There are also writers like Doctorow and Lessig that publish under the GPL and host their books in many formats on their websites. I wish someone would set up a list of these writers with links.
Check out Mobile Read, they have regular uploads of free e-books (non-public domain, about 500 in there now, as I recall) as well as a great community of e-book enthusiasts.
To be clear, and this FUD has been going around since the thing came out, you can use non-DRM formats on the Kindle. TXT and MOBI/PRC files can be read no problem -- the device mounts as a flash drive, you copy them over and they appear readable on the home screen.
Text has been available for everything, and mobi pocket is going the way of the dinosaur. I appologize for not including them, but it's a non-issue as everything else does it too, and text ebooks suck monkey balls. However, anything other than those (like.doc or.pdf, the most common document formats in the world) must be sent to Adobe and, at their grace, sent to your Kindle. Also, books purchased from Amazon for the Kindle are non-transferable, even to another Kindle, and you cannot buy books from another store for use on a kindle (unless they, for some reason, give it to you as a txt file). That's a huge deal-breaker for me.
The lack of ePub could be a frustration if a good DRM-free ePub store appears...
You mean like the Sony Store and Google Books who, combined, are far larger than Amazon's store? Yeah, ePub is already more available, and more transferrable than Kindle books.
...but given that the spec leaves room for any DRM scheme to I expect that it will be just as fractured as anything else.
So far, the exact opposite has happened, and I'll tell you why: who the hell wants to be the publisher of an ebook that nobody else can buy? What sense does that make? Also, you can now check out library books on any e-reader that suports ePub DRM, and like I said there are more ePub books available than there are Kindle books. If you include public domain books available in ePub (which number in the millions, thanks to Google Books and Project Gutenberg), Amazon's kindle is left in the dust.
There is no source that I know of for new, legal novels without DRM.
By the same token, there is no source that I know of for new, legal DVDs without copy protection, and no source of new, legal Blue Ray movies without DRM. What's your point? It's a stupid argument because it will never happen (except on a select, book by book basis), and if we have a ubiquitous technology for managing legal copies, like ePub is fast becoming, it will only be a problem for people who wish to copy the material illegaly.
Frankly, there are already half a dozen ePub stores, and there are more opening up all the time, like the Barnes & Nobel store, which was formerly all proprietary.pdb books, but now offers ePub books as well. I don't know if you know this, but B&N is one of the largest book sellers in the world.
Your information is out of date, just like mine was. Unfortunately, correcting me doesn't make the Kindle look any better, while correcting you just makes it look worse.
The one thing I'll praise the Kindle for is the Wireless-G access - this was a huge boon and a number of ebook readers - including the latest Sony - are emulating it. However, in the long run the Kindle was the wrong horse to bet on, as they are the ones that are going to have all the troubles you describe.
EPub and PDFs are clearly winning the ebook document war, even Sony ditched their proprietary format for it.
I also didn't say DRM was necessary for anything but library books (I don't think it is and I don't like it), but it's also not going to go away. No matter how stupid it is, publishers will always want it.
Basically Amazon is the only holdout for inter-operability. Everybody else is moving to ePub, which seems to be more sanely designed than most DRM out there (it is designed for lending, and removing an ebook from a device for the purposes of moving it to another device).
I love my e-book reader, but I would never recommend it for school books.
Imagine one of your books on a 6" (or smaller) screen - yeah, it sucks. So if you don't read for pleasure don't bother.
The only good ebook reader for technical books and documents is the iRex (I wouldn't touch a Kindle with a 10-foot pole, because of their obscene lock-in), and that would set you back about $800. The Plastic Logic Que should be out early 2010, and it may or may not be cheaper, they have not released pricing yet.
Most of the books I read come from the city library anyway. It's not much use there, either.
The ePub DRM allows libraries to lend books now, and libraries are starting to pick it up. So eventually this will be a big bonus for e-readers, not a down side. Plus, for the devices that have wireless-g, going to the library will mean hitting a button on your reader, no matter where you are (home, travel, whatever), and for everything else it will mean hitting the library website with your laptop. Pretty cool I think. Check out Metro Net Online Library to see what all is available - that's just one online consortium library.
Plus, if you're into free, and especially into the classics, there are over a million public domain books available for free from both Google Books and Project Gutenberg - all designed specifically for use in an e-book reader (obviously they also offer them as text files for your computer, but frankly that sucks). I recently got all of Aesop's fables and several obscure classic Greek mythology books. Plus anything you find in PDF will work (except, as I mentioned, large format dense material like technical books/manuals - they work but suck to read).
I wouldn't use it for your school books yet, but I also wouldn't rule it out for pleasure/library reading either if I were you.
A device with an unprotected screen that I don't expect to last a year?
Ever heard of a cover? Jeeze, it's not that hard man. I assume you don't buy laptops either because they'll break in less than a year, that screen is so unprotected!
A device that, should Amazon or Sony decide to get out of the market, will become a paperweight that I can't read my purchased content on anymore, and can't transfer my purchased content anywhere (see Yahoo Music Store, MSN Music, Walmart online music, etc ).
While you are absolutely correct about Amazon (which is why I don't recommend the Kindle), you are completely wrong about Sony and everybody else. Sony now only sells e-books in the ePub format, and has offered to update all of their old readers' firmware, which don't support the format, so that they will. EPub is ubiquitous, there are dozens of e-book stores that sell in that format, the two major online public-domain book sources (Google Books and Project Gutenberg) all use ePub, nearly any device but the Kindle can read it, and anybody can create books in this format. If Sony goes away (which, by the way, will never happen, it's fucking Sony for christ's sake), the ePub books remain, and can still be purchased on your device and moved to another device even if Sony were dust. You can easily move them from one device to another - the DRM simply attempts to ensure that you do not copy it to more than one device at a time (note that this also makes lending possible). This is a function of ePub, not Sony, and like I said it is becoming ubiquitous.
A device that can, at any time, decide that some of my content is no longer "acceptable", and delete it (see Amazon and "1984"/"Animal Farm")?
Again, that's pretty much Amazon and the Kindle that can do that - except for library books (which are possible thanks to ePub's DRM, btw), you download a copy to your hard drive (or directly to the reader, if the device supports it) and the book is yours. All the readers except the Kindle allow you to access the reader as a mass storage device and move the files off it.
In other words, your complaints are entirely against Amazon and the Kindle, and have nothing to do with e-book readers in general.
The concept is great; the current implementations just suck.
You know this from experience right? Oh wait, you don't, since everything you said was incorrect. I do speak from experience, and frankly I won't go back to hard copies (except for technical books until till I get my Que) even though I have a crappy, old e-book reader which has none of the nice features the newer devices have. I've had that reader for about two years now, by the way, and I bought it refurbished.
Even the old implimentations (which have had their problems) were overall far supperior to paper books - the fact that I cary about 150 books in my bag now is proof positive of that, as is the fact that I now have access to millions of public domain books on a device that reads as well as having the paper versions.
Basically everything but the Kindle is opening up. Everyone is switching to at least supporting ePub, and a number of stores sell only ePub now instead of their formerly proprietary format (like Sony). Eventually even the Kindle will have to compete or die as competition grows via the ePub format.
Your requirement of a lack of DRM is, frankly, silly. This is the modern digital age - you will not be able to avoid DRM completely no matter what you do. Do you refuse to watch DVD's because they have copy protection? Because that's all DRM systems are. Plus, aside from the Kindle, they are not a requirement. You can create your own ePub or PDF documents and read them on most ebook readers (again, excluding Kindle), and people can sell non-DRM files if the market demands it. DRM also allows Libraries to lend e-books, soemthing they could not legally do without it. Several readers support this now, and libraries are starting to pick it up. Once again, that excludes the Kindle (can you tell I don't like Kindle's lock-in?).
The cheapest new e-book reader out is $200, which is quite reasonable given the technology. That single purchase alone, thanks to Google Books and Project Gutenberg, puts millions of public domain books in your lap that would have been painful to read previously.
Lastly, your complaint about re-buying books is unavoidable. One is on paper, the other is digital, and it's not easy to go from one to the other without good OCR technology. This would be expensive for home use, but if you already had a nice camera, were really really dedicated to getting your books on PC, and didn't mind chopping up your paper books, you could do this if you wanted to. Personally, I wouldn't. If you really read the book that often then just fork out the few extra bucks to buy it again. If you do incrimentally you will eventually have your entire library, and it won't hurt the pocket book as much as trying to do it all at once.
Last but not least, if the reason you want an e-book reader is for technical books and dense PDFs, then you are going to need to spend some coin. You will be severly disappointed when you try to read a tech manual on a novel-sized screen, it sucks. Right now you're looking at $500+ to get a decent sized screen, and right now most of the really big e-readers are very over-priced. The target for those is a smaller group of people who can spend more money - lower demand but higher willingness to spend = higher prices.
I'm waiting for the Plastic Logic Que (should be out early 2010) for this specific purpose, myself, and keeping my small e-book reader for reading books.
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Actually it's a bit of both - during peak times if an ISP has over-sold their lines, the "hogs" could be what pushes them past the limits of what their routers can handle. One person downloading a 10gb file is generating roughly 1 million packets per second of traffic per second for every router in the path between source and destination. The average web browser with 10mbps, however, will burst 1 million for a few seconds and then stop for 20-30 seconds, even several minutes, before bursting again at 1 million for a few seconds. In this case, a "hog" can generate the same traffic that 10-20 web browsing-only users will, or even more.
If the ISP can only actively handle 40mbps, then 20 people downloading large files at peak times can kill the speed for the other 100 people who are just browsing the web. At off-peak times, however, the bandwidth internal to the network is meaningless.
This has nothing to do with the technical limitations of high bandwidth - there really aren't any if the ISP isn't stupid.
Unfortunately, a lot of ISPs are stupid. But anyways, you are 100% correct for off-peak hours - it's the heavy users who are cutting into the ISP's profits by generating more cross-network costs than average for the ISP.
Your analogy is flawed, a better analogy would be this:
Does traffic in Redmond increase when Microsoft employees get off work? Knowing someone who lived there, I can say yes, yes it does, and very, very badly. Well, your Modem is like Microsoft, and each packet you send is like an employee. When you unleash those packets at a rate of 1.25 million every second (around 10mbps), you can bet your ass it causes more traffic than someone who sends them out at less than 200 thousand every second (around 1.5mbps).
All of those packets must be forwarded by a switch to a router, which must process it and route it to it's next destination - probably another router, which must process it again, maybe this time sending it over a large network trunk, where it gets routed again, and routed again, then forwarded before landing at the destination modem.
100% of the latency you see is caused by the switches, routers, and modems on the net. These devices are extremely fast, but each and every packet must be at least partially read by each and every device between the sender and the reciever, and depending on the type of device it must use more or less processing power to determine the destination.
There is no limit to how much data can move across a wire, be it copper or fiber. There is also virtually no delay between when the data leaves the modem and when it reaches the first node in its journey - regardless of the technology (copper or fiber) the data moves across these wires at the speed of light. But there is definitely a limit to how many packets a router can process at a time (fiber tends to be faster because with optics they can use simpler modulation techniques than with copper), and if you are sending more packets per second than your neighbor is, you are definitely causing more traffic than they are.
Now, whether or not the highways are backed up depends on how well the ISPs have built their infrastructure relative to how many cars they said their highway could handle. They may have told you you'd be able to send out 1.25 million cars per second, but if they told the same thing to 1,000 other people, well at some point they started lying.
What he means by "Tiered Service" is adding another dimension to the tiers:
762kb at 5, 10, and 20gb per month instead of 5gb per month only
2mb at 10, 20, 50, and 100gb per month instead of 10gb per month or unlimited only
5mb at 20, 50, 100, and 150gb per month instead of 20gb per month or unlimited only
Et cetera, et cetera. The bandwidth determines how many people they can have downloading at the same time, and so they should divide it according to the size of the piece of the pipe they are willing to pay for. In my opinion, the throughput should be a reasonable markup from what it costs the ISP. If it costs Verizon $0.50 per gigabyte to access Comcast's network, they should charge $0.75-$1.00 per gigabyte to their customers.
The way I see it an average internet plan would look something like this:
$10 per month for a 10mbps connection
$1 per gigabyte of data consumed.
So, if you download 50 gigs a month, you'll pay $60 a month for your connection. If you download 100 gigs a month, you'll pay $110 a month. If you download 70 gigs one month but don't even access the net the next, you'll pay $80 for the first month and $10 for the second month.
It makes it very flexible, pretty simple, and the consumer has complete control over their broadband costs by simply consuming less or more. Also, heavy users become a non-issue - in fact, because you're marking up the throughput costs as well, your heavy users actually make you MORE money each month. It essentially neutralizes the ISP's complaints while giving the consumer just as much data as they are willing to pay for. You want unlimited? No problem, but it will vary depending on how much you actually use.
For the media company interests, it makes that blue-ray copy of whatever the latest movie is a lot less attractive, because it just cost you $30-50 to download it - though DVDs will only be $5 or so.
The price per gig probably wouldn't be that high if an ISP committed to something like this (as opposed to just "trying it out" at ridiculously high prices, dooming it to failure), it would probably be closer to $0.50 per gig, but I'm only speculating.
I'd buy it if my ISP offered it.
The US lags in broadband because there is simply a hell of a lot more ground to cover. Even our most urban cities are far less dense (and therefore more expensive to lay the infrastructure for) than the average European or Japanes or Korean urban center. Get outside the urban areas for these countries and the picture looks a lot closer to the US broadband situation. Suburban and remote areas get far poorer bandwidth options than the urban center, for precisely the same reason that the US in general has poorer bandwidth than Europe - it's far more expensive to do.
As soon as return on investment drops below a certain point, it isn't worth it for the company to make the upgrade. When the ROI is negative, there is no chance in hell that it will happen. It's a simple fact, and all your whining and conspiracy theories won't change anything.
That's why the only places in the US that are being upgraded are either the very rich communities who will pay the extra cost, or the very dense communities (that are well off enough to buy internet access, obviously).
You know just about all bittorrent clients allow throttling on both the upload and download within the client itself.
Since ACKS require very low bandwidth, you should be able to set your torrent uploads to slightly below your max upload speed and everthing will work fine.
If it doesn't work fine, then either hulu or your ISP are doing something funny, and a higher-bandwidth line won't do you much good anyway.
ACK packets are extremely small, 4 bytes actually, no matter how much you are downloading 5-10kb/s should be more than enough if ACKS are really your problem. Doing some very rough math, a 10kb/s upload can handle the ACKS for a 30mbps connection. There's more handshaking than that, though, so for reliabilities sake you'd want to cut that assumption down to about 5-10mbps. Since you have about a 3mbps upload (400kb/s times 8 to get mbps), you probably have a what, 10mbps download? So set aside 20kb/s in your torrent app and your Hulu and your torrent should both be fine.
If not, like I said, there is some funny business going on, and if Hulu is saturating your 400kb/s upload something is REALLY wrong, there is no reason on earth that it should be. More likely you are simply getting queuing delays, but it should not be drastic unless the torrent is very low priority - which it may be down the line from you, who knows.
I can't tell the difference between the Netflix HD movies and my DVDs (i.e. they come in at DVD quality), and I get that at 3mbit, and voip, RDP, and desktop sharing don't require all that much bandwidth for what they do - the big issue with all of those is latency, not bandwidth (after a certain point, very low bandwidth would be an issue). Video conferencing will use a bit more than those, especially if you have a very high quality video conferencing setup, but I would be extremely surprised if you saturated a 10mbit line with that, and certainly you aren't using more than 20mbit.
Also note that a 100mbit connection can have a latency of 4,000ms just as easily as a 56k line. Latency has absolutely nothing to do with bandwidth, and those applications you mention all require very low latency to achieve high quality results, but except for video they don't require much bandwidth at all. And the video requires a lot less than you think it does. Hell, if your latency is really bad even web pages will load slowly. It would look kind of odd, you'd click a link and wait, and wait, and wait, and wait, and all of a sudden the page would be there, regardless of what it was. You wouldn't get slow page loads, you'd get delayed page loads, which can be even more annoying. You'd be able to send 12 megs per batch of packets, but if it takes 5 seconds to get to the destination it's still going to take 10 seconds to load (5 there 5 back).
You're not dreaming and producing as much as you think you are if you think all of that stuff is saturating your 100mbit connection, either that your you aren't paying attention to what your true throughput is and you're only really getting less than an average 5mbit connection would.
Where a 100mbit connection would be useful is in massive downloads. If you download 30-40 gigs a day, you might find a 100mbit line usefull, as downloads don't care about latency (it just queues up the next packet, any latency just means it starts a few seconds later) and your downloads would be extremely fast. Any packets that drop are simply re-sent later.
Line saturation isn't the issue - if a telco offers 10mbit connections, they generally ensure that their infrastructure is capable of handling the peak usage, which is never going to be even close to 100% of their customers using the full 10mbit connection at the same time, peak would be somewhere around 10-15% of users doing that, depending on how much they sold their lines.
The issue is that for every byte that leaves Verizon's network, they have to pay one of the other large telco's to transmit through their network. If verizon sells you a 10mbit connection for $30 a month, and you saturate that 10mbit connection 10-15 hours a day, chances are it costs Verizon more than $20-30 a month to support your downloading habits. With overhead and maintenance, Verizon could be losing $5-10 a month to sell you internet.
In truth it probably isn't nearly so drastic, but if you destroy their profit margin they don't make money, and if they don't make money they aren't going to have a reason to sell you internet access. They should never have sold you "unlimited" internet if they could not make money off a customer who used it that way.
That's not it at all.
The internet is not free, different large companies (like Verizon, Comcast, Sprint, and AT&T), and for example if Verizon wants to send data across Comcast's network, it has to pay a fraction of a cent for each and every byte.
Obviously, when what your customers use costs you money, the less your customers use the more money you make. It is very possible that their pricing model is such that if a customer uses their 10mbps line for 16-20 hours a day at full capacity that they will not make any money off that customer. In fact they could easily be losing money.
This has nothing to do with the technical limitations of high bandwidth - there really aren't any if the ISP isn't stupid. This is all about business contracts and a customer's internet usage habits causing higher expenses than the profit they bring in.
I love how people make bold advice based on 2-year old information.
There are now about seven or eight manufacturers of ebook readers, and 20 or so models to choose from. The majority of those support ePub format, including anything that has been released in the last year or two, and ePub is quickly becoming the format of choice among ebook retailers.
Except for the Kindle, interoperability is here. Go out and buy an ebook reader - if there is a particular format you want you can hunt down the device that will do it, but really all you need to do is look for ePub and Digital Editions (so you can buy those nasty DRM titles, which are the majority).
It almost looks like Amazon is positioning themselves to be the Macintosh of ebook readers - except since within the next year or so they won't have any great benefits over the other readers, they'll tank. Having access to Amazon's ebook store would be great, as I think they are the largest individual retailer for ebooks.
I definitely agree for any sort of referance material - I tried to load some Cisco pdfs on my PRS-500 and it was completely unusable. Love it for books, hate it for manuals.
That's why I'm getting a Que from Plastic Logic when it comes out - as long as the price isn't too absurd.
Most ebooks support pdfs (though some better than others). It's one of those ubiquitous formats that a reader seller would be stupid to overlook.
I don't know of an e-reader that can't do multiple fonts and illustrations and all that, it makes no difference. I don't see why it's a sticking point for you.
Ripping CDs for personal use is legal in the US. In fact, it's legal to do the same for DVDs and Blue Ray too. Unfortunately, some monkeys in congress pushed through a bill dreamt up by the media industries that makes it illegal to attempt to circumvent copy protection schemes, even if it is legal for you to copy the media.
It's like saying breaking into a car is illegal, even if it's your own car. Stupid.
Most CDs have no copy protection, so ripping to mp3s (again for personal use) is legal. That's not the case for DVDs and BDs though, thanks to that idiotic law.
Like I said, there are a few exceptions.
Supporting a common DRM standard is good, but far from "opening up".
ePub is based on the IBEP open publishing standards, so, yeah it is opening up. It's just not the kind of "opening up" you wanted.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Some people here on Slashdot claim that they don't buy Blu-ray disks at least partially because their DRM hasn't been broken so wide open that it's still inconvenient to do all kinds of things like back them up or work around unskippable content. Since you compare ebook DRM to CSS, are you saying that DRM for text is ridiculously weak anyway (which is true) so no one, including the GP, should worry about it?
That's not what I was saying at all. I was saying publishers won't sell digital copies of their works without some kind of guarantee that it cannot be copied all over the place willy-nilly. They are not unreasonable for wanting this, because selling the books is where all of their income comes from. It is unreasonable to refuse to buy ebooks because all ebooks are not available in a DRM free format. If you don't want to pay for an ebook, that's fine, but why should a publisher make the ebook available to you? If you want to read only free and public domain works, well, you can, ePub is not a DRM only format - the publisher can choose to protect their works in this way or not, it's up to them.
He might also be able to find quite a few of these books already available (illegally) online, and might feel that it is morally OK to just obtain a DRM-free copy from there. I think that a lot of people would agree with him, also.
In all honestly, the only people stuck in this situation are Kindle users - most all other formats can be converted. I also disagree that it is morally ok to obtain new copies of his books illegally. Scanning his own books in and converting them himself I don't see anything wrong with (a-la backup style), but it's an uncommon use for a paper book, and if he wants the convenience with out the effort, he should be willing to pay for it again.
I don't agree that people should not have to pay for books that the author has not offered for free and are still within the original copyright terms, I think it's reprehensible to steal these works. On the other hand, I also think copyright extensions have become a mockery of the original intent of copyright, so as far as that goes, I'm with you.
Baen books are one-offs, generally the first book in a series is free (for the authors who do participate), and the rest you have to buy in print. There are a few exceptions, but I don't think any of the authors who participate in Baen's program offer a large selection of their works for free.
There are, however, some fantastic essays about why authors should be releasing their books for free, especially after the first 6 months after release, which is when books make all their money. It's a great site.
I don't disagree that the Kindle is a great piece of hardware, frankly I was jealous when I saw my first Kindle 2 in person. However, in the long run the lock-in is a serious deal breaker for me, and I think it trumps all of the Kindle's great features.
I was actually worried about this with Sony as well until recently, as they were all .lrf format (though all but the oldest e-readers could do ePub, mine just happens to be the oldest). But they have switched completely to ePub, and I will be sending my reader in to have it upgraded to use ePub on Sony's dime. That right there sold me on Sony, and combined with the fact that you don't need to buy all your ebooks from Sony alone means, for the time being, I'm definitely a Sony guy.
Sony is partnered with Adobe, and Adobe's DRM is designed to be moved around - you can move an ebook to up to 6 devices initially, and it's just a call to customer support to move it to more. I don't think Sony allows lending yet, but ePub supports it and I'd expect to see it in the not too distant future - especially since the B&N Nook is already doing it (I say already, but no Nooks have actually been delivered yet).
You're never going to get non-public domain non-drm books except from a few select authors. I wish it weren't true, because I would prefer non-drm as well, but using that as a requirement for an ebook reader is unrealistic. All ebook readers support non-drm formats, and virtually every ebook reader out there supports more non-drm formats than the Kindle does.
Also, unlike the Kindle's DRM which is Kindle exclusive, the ePub DRM that B&N, Sony, Google Books, and a half dozen other ebook retailers are using is portable from device to device. It is only designed to prevent multiple copies, and even provides functionality for time-limited lending - which makes your ebook unavailable to you after you transfer it to someone else for a set period of time. Once the time limit is up, yours is made available again and theirs is disabled. It is about the only sane way to apply DRM, and they seem to have done a very good job of it.
The lending feature allows libraries to get into the e-book game, opening up the millions of library-donated books out there for lending. They can only lend out copy for copy, just like paper books, so Publishers don't get screwed and neither do consumers.
Like I said, everything is going ePub because it is the most sane format. All of the most popular readers support ePub except for the Kindle, and pretty much all new ebook readers support ePub. In other words, everything is becoming more and more open and available and transferable.
And this isn't to say I'm a Kindle partisan. If I were in the market now I'd be looking at the other options too. I'm just saying that its disingenuous to say you HAVE to use DRM-locked files on the Kindle -- this misinformation has been spread endlessly around the internet.
I don't think anybody ever said you HAVE to use DRM on the Kindle, it's just Amazon doesn't make it easy to use anything else.
The Kindle only supports text and mobi as non-drm formats. While you can get .mobi from a few places (the number is shrinking, btw), most ebook sellers/givers don't offer it in .mobi format. I'll just say right now that plain text is a horrible format for reading a book, especially if it was formatted poorly. For anything that is non-drm and not .txt or .mobi (like .doc, .html, .pdf - though I think the larger kindle can do .pdfs) must be sent to Amazon for conversion and sent back. It's stupid, and slow.
The only one you'll be locked in with any more is the Kindle, which is why I always recommend against it despite some of its really cool features - wireless G in particular. However, a number of e-book readers do Wi-Fi, which is nearly as convenient (though not quite), and a few new readers are doing the wireless G also. Pretty soon Kindle will be the worst choice in almost every way - unless you really, really like buying your books from the Amazon store, and hate checking out library books.
Amazon did the ebook world a great service by shoving ebooks into the limelight, but now they need to shape up and join everybody else to make ebooks more usefull and less divided instead of being the ebook-isolationists that they are now.
Most new ebook readers support DRM ePub files, and the ePub DRM itself supports moving files from one device to another. Also, the ebook readers that don't support DRM made by companies worth their salt are being updated for free to support it, Sony I know for a fact is doing this, and I imagine others will follow suit when eventually the only ebooks being sold will be ePub DRM.
In other words, this new, budding little industry is solving the problem on its own.
I don't think there is anything wrong with concept behind the law per-say, but I do have a problem with the law making formerly legitimate activities illegal for no good reason. In that, I agree there is something wrong with the law as it stands today. The original problem is a legitimate problem for publishers of books and other media, and should be adressed somehow.
I know you can get the public domain Google Books for free via the Sony store, I have no idea why they wouldn't offer them through themselves in the same way, unless it is because of a stupid deal with Sony.
In any case, since Sony is doing ePub now, you don't need a Sony reader to buy (or download for free) ebooks from their store.
There are also writers like Doctorow and Lessig that publish under the GPL and host their books in many formats on their websites. I wish someone would set up a list of these writers with links.
Check out Mobile Read, they have regular uploads of free e-books (non-public domain, about 500 in there now, as I recall) as well as a great community of e-book enthusiasts.
To be clear, and this FUD has been going around since the thing came out, you can use non-DRM formats on the Kindle. TXT and MOBI/PRC files can be read no problem -- the device mounts as a flash drive, you copy them over and they appear readable on the home screen.
Text has been available for everything, and mobi pocket is going the way of the dinosaur. I appologize for not including them, but it's a non-issue as everything else does it too, and text ebooks suck monkey balls. However, anything other than those (like .doc or .pdf, the most common document formats in the world) must be sent to Adobe and, at their grace, sent to your Kindle. Also, books purchased from Amazon for the Kindle are non-transferable, even to another Kindle, and you cannot buy books from another store for use on a kindle (unless they, for some reason, give it to you as a txt file). That's a huge deal-breaker for me.
The lack of ePub could be a frustration if a good DRM-free ePub store appears...
You mean like the Sony Store and Google Books who, combined, are far larger than Amazon's store? Yeah, ePub is already more available, and more transferrable than Kindle books.
...but given that the spec leaves room for any DRM scheme to I expect that it will be just as fractured as anything else.
So far, the exact opposite has happened, and I'll tell you why: who the hell wants to be the publisher of an ebook that nobody else can buy? What sense does that make? Also, you can now check out library books on any e-reader that suports ePub DRM, and like I said there are more ePub books available than there are Kindle books. If you include public domain books available in ePub (which number in the millions, thanks to Google Books and Project Gutenberg), Amazon's kindle is left in the dust.
There is no source that I know of for new, legal novels without DRM.
By the same token, there is no source that I know of for new, legal DVDs without copy protection, and no source of new, legal Blue Ray movies without DRM. What's your point? It's a stupid argument because it will never happen (except on a select, book by book basis), and if we have a ubiquitous technology for managing legal copies, like ePub is fast becoming, it will only be a problem for people who wish to copy the material illegaly.
Frankly, there are already half a dozen ePub stores, and there are more opening up all the time, like the Barnes & Nobel store, which was formerly all proprietary .pdb books, but now offers ePub books as well. I don't know if you know this, but B&N is one of the largest book sellers in the world.
Your information is out of date, just like mine was. Unfortunately, correcting me doesn't make the Kindle look any better, while correcting you just makes it look worse.
The one thing I'll praise the Kindle for is the Wireless-G access - this was a huge boon and a number of ebook readers - including the latest Sony - are emulating it. However, in the long run the Kindle was the wrong horse to bet on, as they are the ones that are going to have all the troubles you describe.
Lastly, it's not FUD if it's true, damnit!
EPub and PDFs are clearly winning the ebook document war, even Sony ditched their proprietary format for it.
I also didn't say DRM was necessary for anything but library books (I don't think it is and I don't like it), but it's also not going to go away. No matter how stupid it is, publishers will always want it.
Basically Amazon is the only holdout for inter-operability. Everybody else is moving to ePub, which seems to be more sanely designed than most DRM out there (it is designed for lending, and removing an ebook from a device for the purposes of moving it to another device).
I love my e-book reader, but I would never recommend it for school books.
Imagine one of your books on a 6" (or smaller) screen - yeah, it sucks. So if you don't read for pleasure don't bother.
The only good ebook reader for technical books and documents is the iRex (I wouldn't touch a Kindle with a 10-foot pole, because of their obscene lock-in), and that would set you back about $800. The Plastic Logic Que should be out early 2010, and it may or may not be cheaper, they have not released pricing yet.
Most of the books I read come from the city library anyway. It's not much use there, either.
The ePub DRM allows libraries to lend books now, and libraries are starting to pick it up. So eventually this will be a big bonus for e-readers, not a down side. Plus, for the devices that have wireless-g, going to the library will mean hitting a button on your reader, no matter where you are (home, travel, whatever), and for everything else it will mean hitting the library website with your laptop. Pretty cool I think. Check out Metro Net Online Library to see what all is available - that's just one online consortium library.
Plus, if you're into free, and especially into the classics, there are over a million public domain books available for free from both Google Books and Project Gutenberg - all designed specifically for use in an e-book reader (obviously they also offer them as text files for your computer, but frankly that sucks). I recently got all of Aesop's fables and several obscure classic Greek mythology books. Plus anything you find in PDF will work (except, as I mentioned, large format dense material like technical books/manuals - they work but suck to read).
I wouldn't use it for your school books yet, but I also wouldn't rule it out for pleasure/library reading either if I were you.
A device with an unprotected screen that I don't expect to last a year?
Ever heard of a cover? Jeeze, it's not that hard man. I assume you don't buy laptops either because they'll break in less than a year, that screen is so unprotected!
A device that, should Amazon or Sony decide to get out of the market, will become a paperweight that I can't read my purchased content on anymore, and can't transfer my purchased content anywhere (see Yahoo Music Store, MSN Music, Walmart online music, etc ).
While you are absolutely correct about Amazon (which is why I don't recommend the Kindle), you are completely wrong about Sony and everybody else. Sony now only sells e-books in the ePub format, and has offered to update all of their old readers' firmware, which don't support the format, so that they will. EPub is ubiquitous, there are dozens of e-book stores that sell in that format, the two major online public-domain book sources (Google Books and Project Gutenberg) all use ePub, nearly any device but the Kindle can read it, and anybody can create books in this format. If Sony goes away (which, by the way, will never happen, it's fucking Sony for christ's sake), the ePub books remain, and can still be purchased on your device and moved to another device even if Sony were dust. You can easily move them from one device to another - the DRM simply attempts to ensure that you do not copy it to more than one device at a time (note that this also makes lending possible). This is a function of ePub, not Sony, and like I said it is becoming ubiquitous.
A device that can, at any time, decide that some of my content is no longer "acceptable", and delete it (see Amazon and "1984"/"Animal Farm")?
Again, that's pretty much Amazon and the Kindle that can do that - except for library books (which are possible thanks to ePub's DRM, btw), you download a copy to your hard drive (or directly to the reader, if the device supports it) and the book is yours. All the readers except the Kindle allow you to access the reader as a mass storage device and move the files off it.
In other words, your complaints are entirely against Amazon and the Kindle, and have nothing to do with e-book readers in general.
The concept is great; the current implementations just suck.
You know this from experience right? Oh wait, you don't, since everything you said was incorrect. I do speak from experience, and frankly I won't go back to hard copies (except for technical books until till I get my Que) even though I have a crappy, old e-book reader which has none of the nice features the newer devices have. I've had that reader for about two years now, by the way, and I bought it refurbished.
Even the old implimentations (which have had their problems) were overall far supperior to paper books - the fact that I cary about 150 books in my bag now is proof positive of that, as is the fact that I now have access to millions of public domain books on a device that reads as well as having the paper versions.
Basically everything but the Kindle is opening up. Everyone is switching to at least supporting ePub, and a number of stores sell only ePub now instead of their formerly proprietary format (like Sony). Eventually even the Kindle will have to compete or die as competition grows via the ePub format.
Your requirement of a lack of DRM is, frankly, silly. This is the modern digital age - you will not be able to avoid DRM completely no matter what you do. Do you refuse to watch DVD's because they have copy protection? Because that's all DRM systems are. Plus, aside from the Kindle, they are not a requirement. You can create your own ePub or PDF documents and read them on most ebook readers (again, excluding Kindle), and people can sell non-DRM files if the market demands it. DRM also allows Libraries to lend e-books, soemthing they could not legally do without it. Several readers support this now, and libraries are starting to pick it up. Once again, that excludes the Kindle (can you tell I don't like Kindle's lock-in?).
The cheapest new e-book reader out is $200, which is quite reasonable given the technology. That single purchase alone, thanks to Google Books and Project Gutenberg, puts millions of public domain books in your lap that would have been painful to read previously.
Lastly, your complaint about re-buying books is unavoidable. One is on paper, the other is digital, and it's not easy to go from one to the other without good OCR technology. This would be expensive for home use, but if you already had a nice camera, were really really dedicated to getting your books on PC, and didn't mind chopping up your paper books, you could do this if you wanted to. Personally, I wouldn't. If you really read the book that often then just fork out the few extra bucks to buy it again. If you do incrimentally you will eventually have your entire library, and it won't hurt the pocket book as much as trying to do it all at once.
Last but not least, if the reason you want an e-book reader is for technical books and dense PDFs, then you are going to need to spend some coin. You will be severly disappointed when you try to read a tech manual on a novel-sized screen, it sucks. Right now you're looking at $500+ to get a decent sized screen, and right now most of the really big e-readers are very over-priced. The target for those is a smaller group of people who can spend more money - lower demand but higher willingness to spend = higher prices.
I'm waiting for the Plastic Logic Que (should be out early 2010) for this specific purpose, myself, and keeping my small e-book reader for reading books.