Hey Dudes!
There has been some hub-bub going around about people rushing to 'download' their ebooks before amazon removes the 'download for usb' option. You can see an example here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mVGqNqowT0
But at the end of the day - amazon's move to remove this 'feature' is basically pointless. People are stating 'hey your taking away my ability to 'own' a the book.
Well first of all like all digital media, our government has teamed up with big business to make sure you can never really 'own' any media (physical or otherwise). The media belongs to the person who made it and all they do is sell you the 'license' to access it. This has been law for close to 30 years.
But where this gets interesting is there really is no such thing as 'cloud storage' at least not in the sense that the books are in the 'cloud' and therefore you can't get your own copy.
Once you access an electronic document, the application (or web browser) needs to download a copy of that document in order for you to access it. Now this download might be temporary, it might automatically erase itself, but it still has to download it, and thus you now have your copy.
Removing the 'usb transfer' option doesn't prevent anything in terms of you having a copy, it seems means the delivery method of that copy is via the application over the network. It also does not prevent you from transferring non DRM books to your kindle device via USB.
So you never really lost anything, because that would imply that you had something to loose in the first place.
Comments