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Angry Apple makes hollow threat to bar Kindle, other ebook apps...

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That makes it sound as if Ford operated beyond the boundaries that is regulation. They're success was, and always will be, in part due to regulations which ensure that they don't do stupid things that are thought to be wise through the lens of greed.
The other car manufactures managed to do stupid things that were thought to be wise through the lens of greed, despite those regulations which "saved" Ford. I don't buy that those regulations saved them. Ford did some serious restructuring prior to the financial collapse to mitigate the impending damage without any guidance from the government.
The issue here is you are creating a binary in which you have no regulation on one hand and excessive regulation on the other.
But I don't want more than a minimum of regulation. If I asked for excessive regulation at some point previously, it was a typo.
And warnings/regulations have never saved anyone from something? You're making a tenuous logical link between the presence of warning labels and personal ignorance. So, is the answer to simply remove all labels? That's a risky game to play that leads to nothing beneficial.
Survival of the fittest. It worked pretty darn well for the past, say, 4.5 billion years. You really think we have somehow developed something in the last few thousand years that somehow trumps the work being done by cold, cruel mother nature over all that time. Sympathy only gets in the way of progress. Perfect example: Wolves do not suffer from hip dysplasia. Can you say that about man's best friend? Another example: AIDS resistance in humans is now being documented in northern Africa (less because of sympathy, than because the sympathetic outpouring couldn't treat the disease. Either way, same end result.).

Yes, warnings have saved some people, right up until the next generation grows up and expects warning labels to tell them everything to be careful of... common sense no longer necessary. Have you read the first few pages of a lawnmower's instruction manual? "Caution, blades sharp." "Caution, do not put fingers or toes under mower deck when mower running." "Caution, ..." It's ridiculous, and that's the way everything the government gets a hold of goes. Taxe code? Ha!

Last example... people running red lights. 10-15 years ago when north/southbound traffice got a red light the east/westbound traffic immediately got a green light. This worked fine for quite a while, until people began running red lights. So the length of yellow lights was increased in an effort to increase safety. This worked for a while, then people began running red lights again so a delay was instituted between the change of one direction to red and the counter-direction to green. This again worked for a while, until people realized the delay was present and that they could enter the intersection even just after the light changed and make it through. Now they've increased the delay between light changes even more, and again it worked for a while, until people realized the delay was longer so they'd be even more brazen about running the red light. It's already illegal to enter the intersection after the light has turned red, so what more regulation is needed to fix that problem? Maybe instill more common sense in drivers? Maybe shorten the lights back to how they were and let some people learn a proper lesson? We cannot regulate people into intelligence.
You were talking about the federal credit rating and I responded by talking about financial institutions. It was entirely relevant.
We can keep taking these hop, skips, and jumps to see where we end up, but I'm guessing it'd be a long way from Apple and Amazon by the time we got done! lol I managed to bring up evolution in my reply. I can't wait to see where you take it now.
 
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I think it was pretty well known that Amazon was losing several dollars on every new bestseller eBook they sold (Article from '09 touching on Amazon's losses.) (dead link removed).

Yes, which is why I said they sell "some" ebooks at a loss. Thing is, the general public (myself included until recently) thinks they sell ALL ebooks at a loss because of statements like "...Amazon was selling books at a loss to stifle competition." As it turns out, that's not true. They just have some loss leaders that seems to be a pretty common practice.

Ok, I'll correct you. You're wrong. You can open any book in Safari and transfer it to iBooks, Marvin, Kindle, or whatever eBook reader you want to use. And even if Apple did restrict such a thing, let the demand drive their choices. Poor business practice = fewer purchases = lost revenue = changed business practices. (Look at the recent Microsoft XBox One announcement for examples of that!)

Fair enough, I was wrong then. I thought everything was sandboxed to the point you couldn't move downloads around like that. I've never really tried, although now that I think about it, I use a 3rd party browser (Mercury) instead of Safari, so maybe Mercury is what's hobbled? Or maybe it's just that I don't download anything via a browser on my iPad. I definitely don't do ebooks yet. Yeah yeah... I don't actually have a pony in this fight, but I'm arguing against Apple more on the principle of how I want to be able to use my iPad.
 
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Yes, which is why I said they sell "some" ebooks at a loss. Thing is, the general public (myself included until recently) thinks they sell ALL ebooks at a loss because of statements like "...Amazon was selling books at a loss to stifle competition." As it turns out, that's not true. They just have some loss leaders that seems to be a pretty common practice.
My statement was true, and I stand behind it. I didn't say they were selling all books at a loss. In fact, it was never disclosed how many books they were losing money on, but it was AT LEAST the bestsellers (And what books do people most commonly buy? The ones that are selling the best!). They were creating an ecosystem and expectation of bestsellers having a price-point that was not sustainable to new companies trying to enter the market, or even to compete. This stifled new competition because who would buy a book for $15 when you could, with a couple mouse clicks and key taps, buy it for $10. This is very different from Best Buy or some other brick and mortar store having a Black Friday sale with a couple loss leaders, and then only having a couple of those inventory items in stock - "while supplies last." Amazon was selling, at minimum, all books in a market with very high sales volumes (definition of "bestsellers") with no limit on inventory. This would be akin to Best Buy selling every Sony TV in stock at below their price, and not limiting it to stock on hand. Who could compete with that?

Fair enough, I was wrong then. I thought everything was sandboxed to the point you couldn't move downloads around like that. I've never really tried, although now that I think about it, I use a 3rd party browser (Mercury) instead of Safari, so maybe Mercury is what's hobbled? Or maybe it's just that I don't download anything via a browser on my iPad. I definitely don't do ebooks yet. Yeah yeah... I don't actually have a pony in this fight, but I'm arguing against Apple more on the principle of how I want to be able to use my iPad.
I've never used Mercury, but my guess is that it's a limitation of the programming of Mercury to not include API's for opening the files in other apps.

Nothing wrong with arguing for what you want/believe in. :)
 

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Ok, I'll correct you. You're wrong. You can open any book in Safari and transfer it to iBooks, Marvin, Kindle, or whatever eBook reader you want to use. ....

Ok, would really like to know how to open an ebook bought from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, etc. or an online ebook rental from your local Library in Safari without using their specified app and then move it to whichever reader app you want to use and without circumventing the DRM contained in each of those formats.
 

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I want to interject a slightly off-topic plug here

Baen Ebooks

Baen Books (SF Publishing House) sells all their eBooks DRM free, and they allow you to redownload if you need to change reader format.
I have no connection with them, but they are my first choice for buying eBooks. They also have an extensive free library worth looking at.
 

bobtomay

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Baen - Great Sci-Fi house
 
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I want to interject a slightly off-topic plug here

Baen Ebooks

Baen Books (SF Publishing House) sells all their eBooks DRM free, and they allow you to redownload if you need to change reader format.
I have no connection with them, but they are my first choice for buying eBooks. They also have an extensive free library worth looking at.

Baen - Great Sci-Fi house

Now you guys have my attention! I've been considering getting a Kobo ereader (the Aura HD) and I've always been partial to science fiction. I will definitely have to keep this place in mind. Much appreciated for the heads up!
 

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Definitely try their free library. Lots of older Dave Weber titles there.
 
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Ok, would really like to know how to open an ebook bought from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, etc. or an online ebook rental from your local Library in Safari without using their specified app and then move it to whichever reader app you want to use and without circumventing the DRM contained in each of those formats.
Circumvent DRM? No. Purchase non-DRM titles in Safari on the iPad and open them in your e-reader of choice? Absolutely. Circumventing DRM is an entirely different discussion that you can't do on ANY tablet at this point, so that's not really relevant to this discussion. And RavingMac beat me to it... Baen Ebooks sells DRM-free titles which you can simply purchase in Safari on the iPad and then open up in your e-reader. The whole point of DRM is to stop that from happening, so good luck seeing a big manufacturer having a way to do that baked right in to their OS.

I want to interject a slightly off-topic plug here

Baen Ebooks

Baen Books (SF Publishing House) sells all their eBooks DRM free, and they allow you to redownload if you need to change reader format.
I have no connection with them, but they are my first choice for buying eBooks. They also have an extensive free library worth looking at.
I do love David Weber's work. I'm just a few books from finishing the entire Honor Harrington universe, and I'm patiently waiting for the next Safehold book (due out in January I believe).
 

bobtomay

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Circumvent DRM? No. Purchase non-DRM titles in Safari on the iPad and open them in your e-reader of choice? Absolutely. Circumventing DRM is an entirely different discussion that you can't do on ANY tablet at this point, so that's not really relevant to this discussion. And RavingMac beat me to it... Baen Ebooks sells DRM-free titles which you can simply purchase in Safari on the iPad and then open up in your e-reader. The whole point of DRM is to stop that from happening, so good luck seeing a big manufacturer having a way to do that baked right in to their OS.


I do love David Weber's work. I'm just a few books from finishing the entire Honor Harrington universe, and I'm patiently waiting for the next Safehold book (due out in January I believe).

It is totally relevant to this discussion, as there is no ebook "sold" by Apple that does not have DRM. While you may have decided to only buy books that are DRM free,not all of us have. And making the statement that "any book can be opened in Safari" is just wrong. If you have found a legal internet site (one that pays the publishers, not a russian or ukrainian site that pays nothing to the publishers/authors) that sells all the books the major suppliers carry without DRM, I'd like to know.

We can agree on one thing though, David Webers books.
Finished the Harrington series about a year ago.
Like John Ringo's books better after working with Weber.
Check out The Lost Fleet series by Jack Campbell - sadly, unavailable on Baen.
 
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I want to interject a slightly off-topic plug here

Baen Ebooks

Baen Books (SF Publishing House) sells all their eBooks DRM free, and they allow you to redownload if you need to change reader format.
I have no connection with them, but they are my first choice for buying eBooks. They also have an extensive free library worth looking at.


Thanks for that link mate. Love looking through and have got a couple of Weber's books, and love that i can download them and put them in either Kindle or iBooks App. I chose Kindle and leave iBooks for all my iTunes purchase . . . .
Lot of authors i have never heard of including Weber but im trusting you blokes on that one :)
 
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Circumvent DRM? No. Purchase non-DRM titles in Safari on the iPad and open them in your e-reader of choice? Absolutely.

Hold the phone here! Earlier you said, and I quote:
"Ok, I'll correct you. You're wrong. You can open any book in Safari and transfer it to iBooks, Marvin, Kindle, or whatever eBook reader you want to use."

So by "any book", you meant "any book that doesn't have DRM"? That's horribly misleading and I wasn't wrong. Not entirely anyway. I did a short test with a PDF file and while Mercury didn't have the option to kick it to one of the PDF readers I had, Safari did. But that was a DRM-free file that Safari had to access/open first. My takeaway here is that if Safari can't read it (i.e. the file has DRM), then Safari can't kick it to another app, AND it can only do so once it has fully downloaded it first.

In other news, I ordered the Kobo Aura HD and it shipped today. Definitely looking forward to it and perusing Baen Books' catalogue.
 
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John Scalzi's stuff is pretty good, too: Old Man's War, The Ghost Brigade. On the Baen front, Baen and Amazon have some sort of business deal now where Baen books are available on Amazon. I generally buy from Baen directly, have them email to my Kindle account and read on my iPad with the Kindle app. Sometimes the conversion to .mobi fails, so when that happens I download .epub and either put the book under iBooks or use Calibre to convert to .mobi and use the OSX application Send to Kindle to get it to my iPad.
 
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It is totally relevant to this discussion, as there is no ebook "sold" by Apple that does not have DRM. While you may have decided to only buy books that are DRM free,not all of us have. And making the statement that "any book can be opened in Safari" is just wrong. If you have found a legal internet site (one that pays the publishers, not a russian or ukrainian site that pays nothing to the publishers/authors) that sells all the books the major suppliers carry without DRM, I'd like to know.
I think I'm confused about what the original question even was. I thought the original question was concerning the ability to open an ebook in safari and transfer to another app for reading. Isn't that feasible, or am I wrong?

We can agree on one thing though, David Webers books.
Finished the Harrington series about a year ago.
Like John Ringo's books better after working with Weber.
Check out The Lost Fleet series by Jack Campbell - sadly, unavailable on Baen.
I will definitely give The Lost Fleet a look. Thanks for the recommendation.
 

bobtomay

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Another one where a female character takes the lead in a space adventure is the Kris Longknife series by Mike Shepherd. I'm awaiting #11 later this year.

Any sci-fi nut that hasn't read The Saga of Seven Suns by Kevin J Anderson needs to check out that series.

And yeah, we're waaaaayyyy off topic now, but that's ok.
Especially if we all get some new reading material out of it. ;)

edit:
liab - give us run down of that Aura HD after you've had some time with it.
 

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At the moment I'm rereading an oldie SF classic by Eric Frank Russell, 'Wasp'. It's one of my favorites
 
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liab - give us run down of that Aura HD after you've had some time with it.

Will do. It's my first ereader, so my perspective will be rather limited. I'll point you to a review that compared it to the Kindle Paperwhite. I had read a number of reviews and comparisons, but this one cinched it for me. These guys did a really great, in-depth review and comparison.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPFfw2sNQ_c

One thing that almost put me off of it was the unusual way Kobo formats their ebooks. They put a full blank line in between every paragraph, rather than just indenting the first line. The net effect is you don't actually get much more text on screen. But I found instructions on how to reformat their ebooks to get around that (requires stripping Kobo's DRM) so I decided to let that slide.
 

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