Yeah, but there's also a big difference between "this capability was designed to delete purchases which have been refunded and it was accidentally triggered by deleting the book from the catalog" and "this capability was put in place to delete books we don't like anymore off your device."
They did this because they're lazy: it's easier to design a central delete button than to make sure it has been painstakingly deleted from each device (with confirmation at each step) before the refund is given.
Well, I haven't tried it, but there's no reason to suspect you couldn't do just that - if you had the book saved, it would be trivial to load it back on, and it's tied only to your Kindle - not the account.
Lot's of companies will send a replacement part without demanding the old part back
Sure. Companies that deal in tiny widgets that are worth less than the cost of restocking and repackaging do this all the time. Amazon generally does this too - you want another copy of the same ebook, you (usually) can download one (oddly enough, that dustup was significantly smaller than this one, although it was a great deal more important in terms of rights). I'm not familiar with companies that will give you refunds without getting the thing back.
Publishers want control, and DRM gives it to them.
What does this have to do with DRM? The book could have been revoked in just this manner even if it weren't encrypted at all. Better would be to say that publishers want control, and the law gives them some very large, very heavy-handed remedies to enforce it.
Amazon is a long, long way from being the worst company out there. I'm not willing to pretend it never happened, but let's also not pretend that one incident - however egregious - makes them Sony.
Cost-benefit tradeoffs? It's a middle-of-the-road eInk reader. The Sony offers a touchscreen, but there's no converter to get books out of Sony's format (unlike Mobipocket, which most of the Amazon books are a variant of). The iRex iLiad is horribly expensive, the Foxit Reader does PDF only (although it's incredibly lightweight).
If you never bought a single book from Amazon, the Kindle isn't a bad choice on its own merits as a reader. If you're an anti-DRM purist, it's one of the most open (in terms of crackable DRM) if you plan to buy your books. (If you're going to pirate, it doesn't matter which one you get.)
Still, to each his own. I think their competition is worse than they are on most counts, though - Barnes and Noble's format isn't convertible to anything, for example.
How do you propose that you give back the book, other than having Amazon delete it? Email?
To be honest, this is one thing you could use, and use, and use forever, as long as you never abused it. Buy the book, copy it, get a refund, crack DRM, keep. You'll have to keep it down to a small percentage of your purchases, but...
This was put there for a process - getting a refund - that is triggered by a customer request. What was unanticipated was that deleting a book from the store would ALSO trigger a refund request. The system treated it like every other refund and deleted the book.
Again, my preferred solution - i.e., what I would do if I were Bezos - would be to issue a free copy of the works to everyone affected and have the code rewritten so that deletion from the store doesn't trigger a refund. I'd have done it a week ago, too.
... yes, designed to allow refunds. Which they do.
As I said upthread, they should have given all of these people a legit copy of the book at their own expense when they realized what happened, but it's entirely possible that this was an unforeseen consequence of the system. Personally, I'd rather it just didn't allow refunds, and told you to be careful what you bought, but I'm not Amazon.
Well, yeah, they're probably filtering, or full of fanboys. But there is one reason why they could have included this that's not evil - so they can give refunds if you click the wrong book. (Which they do.) Pulling the book from the store probably triggered this whole cascade.
Nonetheless, I just remain amazed that they didn't put this out earlier, right on top of the news curve, along with giving every person involved a free copy of a legit rendition of the book(s) they had bought. It would not have been terribly expensive, and would have been incredible PR: yes, we screwed up, you already got your refund, here's the book for free anyway.
This was clearly the wrong action in this case, but it's worth remembering why they built this capability in the first place: so people can get refunds if they one-click the wrong book. That's something that they can't do without a remote-deletion capability.
BTW, you know, you don't have to leave the wireless on. And it reads unencrypted Mobipocket books with ease. And there's the Magic Catalog of Project Gutenberg E-books that will allow you to download any Gutenberg ebook directly to your kindle, free, via the wireless web interface.
Kindle books can be bought anonymously by using a throwaway email account with gift certificates (available from any Western Union location aka your nearest gas station, or via those Coinstar coin-counting machines, which don't charge a percentage if you get a gift card), and most of them can have their DRM stripped with ease (mobidedrm is what you're looking for; it's a painful process that works for the Kindle, when you're Googling.)
In general I agree with you, but it's worth noting that carriers give people a lot of hell if they try to go contract-free - even if they pay full price for the phone. After all, AT&T will sell you an iPhone without a contract, but they won't unlock it, and they won't let you buy service without a contract.
Forget the Mason-Dixon, their home coverage only exists from Memphis to Destin, but if you live there it's absolutely heavenly - and you roam nationwide on Verizon's network. And you can get unlimited text, data, web, and in-network mobile-to-mobile for $50/mo (with 400 minutes talk time) or $100/mo (with unlimited talk and MMS). They're supposed to be getting an Android phone some time soon; I'm hoping it's the HTC Hero, because I'll be picking one up.
That said, the other regional carriers like Cricket and MetroPCS also enjoy good reputations.
The text situation here is awful; it's a way to extort $20/mo for unlimited text. But voice is really not bad at all - it just reflects a different philosophy. In the US system, the benefit of being mobile is assumed to belong to the mobile person - and so they pay for the convenience. There is no difference in price for calling a landline or a mobile, from either one. I pay $25/mo to Vonage for unlimited talk time to any US number, period. My cell phone charges the same whether I call a landline or a mobile, regardless of the network. The only exception is an in-network mobile call - for $5-$10/mo most carriers will allow you to have unlimited in-network mobile to mobile.
Not robocalls - any call that is not made by a human being punching in the number 1-555-123-4567 is prohibited to a cell phone. Autodialers are used by telemarketers to place the call, and when you pick up it hands the line to an open operator. I've never once gotten a telemarketing call on my cell phone, and the people I know who have gotten them have simply said "This is a cell phone" which resulted in profuse apology and immediately hanging up and never calling again.
Really? I'm charged for an SMS whether I want it or not. It's the one thing that irritates me the most - I can decline to answer a call if I don't recognize the calling number, and pay nothing at all, but if I get SMS spam I pay for it.
Go to T-Mobile To Go. After you've been a customer for 90 days, and if you've added minutes within the last 30 days, they'll give you the unlock code over the phone. (The phone I got from them isn't pretty or fancy, but its USB interface works and I've customized its background images and ringtones. It was only $40.) It's also really cheap - buy 1000 minutes for $100 once, and for as long as you own the phone you only have to buy minutes once a year.
Typical prepay rates in the US have settled out at 10c/min to any phone nationwide. One distinction between US mobile and everywhere-else mobile service that is often overlooked is that while we pay for all airtime, sent or received, there is no extra charge to call a mobile from a landline, and our per-minute fees are less than elsewhere - the total cost per month is roughly the same no matter where you live. (At least, it was the last time I checked.)
So does Chrome. But they mean Netscape, which was the original Mozilla. (I remember downloading an early Netscape beta - pre 1.0 - and the readme ended with the line "Yes, this is Mozilla.")
The tragedy of the commons is not a market failure. Markets exist to provide prices, nothing more. It's a failure of resource management, and the standard market-oriented approach to management of resources where excluding people from a specific territory is difficult-to-impossible is to have permit-only resource harvesting with closely watched limits. (Because a market will then develop for the permits, and thus they will be most efficiently allocated among potential fishermen.)
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Yeah, but there's also a big difference between "this capability was designed to delete purchases which have been refunded and it was accidentally triggered by deleting the book from the catalog" and "this capability was put in place to delete books we don't like anymore off your device."
They did this because they're lazy: it's easier to design a central delete button than to make sure it has been painstakingly deleted from each device (with confirmation at each step) before the refund is given.
Well, I haven't tried it, but there's no reason to suspect you couldn't do just that - if you had the book saved, it would be trivial to load it back on, and it's tied only to your Kindle - not the account.
Sure. Companies that deal in tiny widgets that are worth less than the cost of restocking and repackaging do this all the time. Amazon generally does this too - you want another copy of the same ebook, you (usually) can download one (oddly enough, that dustup was significantly smaller than this one, although it was a great deal more important in terms of rights). I'm not familiar with companies that will give you refunds without getting the thing back.
What does this have to do with DRM? The book could have been revoked in just this manner even if it weren't encrypted at all. Better would be to say that publishers want control, and the law gives them some very large, very heavy-handed remedies to enforce it.
Amazon is a long, long way from being the worst company out there. I'm not willing to pretend it never happened, but let's also not pretend that one incident - however egregious - makes them Sony.
Cost-benefit tradeoffs? It's a middle-of-the-road eInk reader. The Sony offers a touchscreen, but there's no converter to get books out of Sony's format (unlike Mobipocket, which most of the Amazon books are a variant of). The iRex iLiad is horribly expensive, the Foxit Reader does PDF only (although it's incredibly lightweight).
If you never bought a single book from Amazon, the Kindle isn't a bad choice on its own merits as a reader. If you're an anti-DRM purist, it's one of the most open (in terms of crackable DRM) if you plan to buy your books. (If you're going to pirate, it doesn't matter which one you get.)
Still, to each his own. I think their competition is worse than they are on most counts, though - Barnes and Noble's format isn't convertible to anything, for example.
How do you propose that you give back the book, other than having Amazon delete it? Email?
To be honest, this is one thing you could use, and use, and use forever, as long as you never abused it. Buy the book, copy it, get a refund, crack DRM, keep. You'll have to keep it down to a small percentage of your purchases, but...
Oh, and I know, tacky to reply to oneself, but: kindlepid.py is case-sensitive.
This was put there for a process - getting a refund - that is triggered by a customer request. What was unanticipated was that deleting a book from the store would ALSO trigger a refund request. The system treated it like every other refund and deleted the book.
Again, my preferred solution - i.e., what I would do if I were Bezos - would be to issue a free copy of the works to everyone affected and have the code rewritten so that deletion from the store doesn't trigger a refund. I'd have done it a week ago, too.
Yep, that would be better.
No. You do not sync your Kindle; it shows up to your computer as a flash drive, nothing more. Drag and drop books at will.
USB. It will read txt, html, and Mobipocket (DRM or not) books with ease.
Refunds if you buy the wrong book. They do offer them.
... yes, designed to allow refunds. Which they do.
As I said upthread, they should have given all of these people a legit copy of the book at their own expense when they realized what happened, but it's entirely possible that this was an unforeseen consequence of the system. Personally, I'd rather it just didn't allow refunds, and told you to be careful what you bought, but I'm not Amazon.
Well, yeah, they're probably filtering, or full of fanboys. But there is one reason why they could have included this that's not evil - so they can give refunds if you click the wrong book. (Which they do.) Pulling the book from the store probably triggered this whole cascade.
Nonetheless, I just remain amazed that they didn't put this out earlier, right on top of the news curve, along with giving every person involved a free copy of a legit rendition of the book(s) they had bought. It would not have been terribly expensive, and would have been incredible PR: yes, we screwed up, you already got your refund, here's the book for free anyway.
This was clearly the wrong action in this case, but it's worth remembering why they built this capability in the first place: so people can get refunds if they one-click the wrong book. That's something that they can't do without a remote-deletion capability.
BTW, you know, you don't have to leave the wireless on. And it reads unencrypted Mobipocket books with ease. And there's the Magic Catalog of Project Gutenberg E-books that will allow you to download any Gutenberg ebook directly to your kindle, free, via the wireless web interface.
Kindle books can be bought anonymously by using a throwaway email account with gift certificates (available from any Western Union location aka your nearest gas station, or via those Coinstar coin-counting machines, which don't charge a percentage if you get a gift card), and most of them can have their DRM stripped with ease (mobidedrm is what you're looking for; it's a painful process that works for the Kindle, when you're Googling.)
Heh. Thanks for the f/u.
T-Mobile prepaid, in Mississippi. I suppose I could turn text off altogether, but if you have it you pay whether you read it or not. I just checked.
Incidentally, their rates are a lot lower than others - 5c to receive, I think 10c to send.
In general I agree with you, but it's worth noting that carriers give people a lot of hell if they try to go contract-free - even if they pay full price for the phone. After all, AT&T will sell you an iPhone without a contract, but they won't unlock it, and they won't let you buy service without a contract.
Forget the Mason-Dixon, their home coverage only exists from Memphis to Destin, but if you live there it's absolutely heavenly - and you roam nationwide on Verizon's network. And you can get unlimited text, data, web, and in-network mobile-to-mobile for $50/mo (with 400 minutes talk time) or $100/mo (with unlimited talk and MMS). They're supposed to be getting an Android phone some time soon; I'm hoping it's the HTC Hero, because I'll be picking one up.
That said, the other regional carriers like Cricket and MetroPCS also enjoy good reputations.
The text situation here is awful; it's a way to extort $20/mo for unlimited text. But voice is really not bad at all - it just reflects a different philosophy. In the US system, the benefit of being mobile is assumed to belong to the mobile person - and so they pay for the convenience. There is no difference in price for calling a landline or a mobile, from either one. I pay $25/mo to Vonage for unlimited talk time to any US number, period. My cell phone charges the same whether I call a landline or a mobile, regardless of the network. The only exception is an in-network mobile call - for $5-$10/mo most carriers will allow you to have unlimited in-network mobile to mobile.
Not robocalls - any call that is not made by a human being punching in the number 1-555-123-4567 is prohibited to a cell phone. Autodialers are used by telemarketers to place the call, and when you pick up it hands the line to an open operator. I've never once gotten a telemarketing call on my cell phone, and the people I know who have gotten them have simply said "This is a cell phone" which resulted in profuse apology and immediately hanging up and never calling again.
Really? I'm charged for an SMS whether I want it or not. It's the one thing that irritates me the most - I can decline to answer a call if I don't recognize the calling number, and pay nothing at all, but if I get SMS spam I pay for it.
Go to T-Mobile To Go. After you've been a customer for 90 days, and if you've added minutes within the last 30 days, they'll give you the unlock code over the phone. (The phone I got from them isn't pretty or fancy, but its USB interface works and I've customized its background images and ringtones. It was only $40.) It's also really cheap - buy 1000 minutes for $100 once, and for as long as you own the phone you only have to buy minutes once a year.
Typical prepay rates in the US have settled out at 10c/min to any phone nationwide. One distinction between US mobile and everywhere-else mobile service that is often overlooked is that while we pay for all airtime, sent or received, there is no extra charge to call a mobile from a landline, and our per-minute fees are less than elsewhere - the total cost per month is roughly the same no matter where you live. (At least, it was the last time I checked.)
So does Chrome. But they mean Netscape, which was the original Mozilla. (I remember downloading an early Netscape beta - pre 1.0 - and the readme ended with the line "Yes, this is Mozilla.")
The tragedy of the commons is not a market failure. Markets exist to provide prices, nothing more. It's a failure of resource management, and the standard market-oriented approach to management of resources where excluding people from a specific territory is difficult-to-impossible is to have permit-only resource harvesting with closely watched limits. (Because a market will then develop for the permits, and thus they will be most efficiently allocated among potential fishermen.)