[apetrovic]

What exactly is a "problem"?

I don't live in US. Ordering books online and shipping them to my house used to be slow and expensive process. Now I can buy books from Amazon, for a half the price than printed books (3x the price if I account the shipping). Yeah, I can't read that book on anything except Kindle (device or Kindle app). But I know what I'm buying, and I'm ok with that. I enjoy the option to have my books synchronized over my Kindle, iPhone and iPad. It's fantastic when I'm on vacation, in some other country, and I can buy the e-book immediately, instead of dragging around lots of paper books (as I used to do).

And I pay for all of that with DRM. I'm ok with that. If the book is such important to me I'll buy the paper version.

That's the problem with Stallman, and all radicals. Everything is black and white for them. Without DRM e-readers e-books would never exists. Stallman thinks that it's ok, it's better to not have e-books if there's DRM. I don't think so. I like to have an option. I don't have any "problems" Stallman predicted.

[bjelkeman-again]

> Without DRM e-readers e-books would never exists

That is a strawman. Three are certsinly booksellers who never went near DRM and argue strongly against DRM.

Exempel: http://www.baenebooks.com

[apetrovic]

No, singling out one sentence from my answer and attacking it is a strawman.

But ok, to correct myself: without DRM ebooks would never exists at this scale and people would never buy ebooks readers at this scale and read ebooks at this scale.

Ten years ago ebook reader was a niche, used only by geeks. Today, thanks to aggressive Amazon pricing and (DRM-ed) ebooks, it's a common item. And popularity of ebook readers (namely - Kindle) started some new things: I love SF, and last year I bought a lot $1.99 books from self-publishing authors who would probably never find a place to publish their books without widely available ebook readers (read: Kindle). So, to return to original question - what are such a burning "problems" that Stallman predicted?

[bjelkeman-again]

Agree, that is a better argument. But I think devices such as the iPad would have been released regardless of whether it contained iBooks with DRM or not. Answering your question, I think that Stallman is partially right, but not always, but then who is?

[msabalau]

And such sellers and their customers can leverage the well designed e-readers that exist because Kobu and Amazon have business models supported mostly by the sales of DRM'd books.

[paulsecwhatt]

This. Exactly.

I'm sure Stallman absolutely HATES services such as Spotify. However the as I mentioned in the parent comment, the world is not black and white, and thus viable solutions will always be in a middle-ground.

Nothing he could ever say would bring me from playing music with ridiculous ease in Spotify to downloading "free" ogg files and playing them in GNU Mediagoblin, or something similar.

As a side note: the FSF complains liberally about different "evil" products using javascript on their "giving guide". Stallman himself asks us not to "mistreat" family by giving them non-free gifts. Yet they themselves use javascript for analytics. Proving how ridiculous some of these practices are.

https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/2014/

[dllthomas]

They complain there about proprietary javascript. The FSF has no beef with JS - it's just another kind of software. The FSF has a beef with proprietary software, which shouldn't be surprising. For analytics they use non-proprietary javascript (piwik). They elsewhere recommend precisely that, if you're going to be gathering analytics - they talk about their use of it here: https://www.fsf.org/about/free-software-foundation-privacy-p...

[cozzyd]

Instead of Spotify, I just listen to http://www.gnu.org/music/free-software-song.ogg on repeat

[hnnewguy]

>But I know what I'm buying, and I'm ok with that.

Apparently you don't, because you aren't really buying anything. You're licensing it. You don't own a thing in your Amazon library. They can, and have, taken books "back" based on user-agreement violations.

Yes, it's convenient for you to have all your books, synced, in one place. But there are negative implications of having all that information controlled.

[apetrovic]

Ok, I know what I'm renting and I'm ok with that. I pay less money to have quick access to books I like. If in some time in future Amazon suddenly became evil and deletes all my books from my library (let's for the sake of the argument forget that I actually have a backup for all these books), I'll... I actually will not give a fuck. I'll just stop using Amazon for anything. And buy (or rent) these books I want to read again on some other place.

*

Yeah, I understand that Stallman and his flock is greatly concerned with possible "negative implications" of DRM-ed ebooks, mobile phones, non-GPL software and whatnot. But I'm 44 years old, I don't need help to decide what is good for me and what is not, and I actually enjoy living in the future, with mobile phones, ebooks and everything else. I enjoy having (and making) a choice instead of avoiding everything that can have "negative implications" or isn't "free" (by Stallman's standards).

[dandelion_lover]

Thank you for the presenting your opinion in details. I see your point. What I do not like in this approach is that I find it to be similar with "I have nothing to hide" argument (see also the comments below).

You personally may not have any (unexpected) bad consequences because of such choice. But please look at the analogy. Giving to a three-letter agency a possibility to collect and store all private information about you, gives them an incredible power over the population as a whole, taking away the democracy from all the people. Looks like a tragedy of commons, by the way.

Giving to a commercial company a possibility to own all your books, gives them a power to do whatever they want including censorship and maybe manipulating people.

tl;dr: you personally may not have any side effects, but the community as a whole will.

[apetrovic]

Well, no, I'm not in "I have nothing to hide" bandwagon. But I'm trying to have some balance in my life. I'm not using Facebook, I don't use Google+, but I'm using gmail. From the desktop client, not from browser, so I'm not always logged in in Google services, for example.

I'm also trying to have some balance in ebook story. Is DRM bad? Yes. But for me it's necessary evil. My understanding is that between having vibrant ebooks/ereaders ecosystem with DRM and not having ebooks at all (or having it in some geek niche), Stallman and co would choose the niche part. I strongly disagree with that.

The whole discussion started with a comment about Stallman "being right about ebooks and DRM". I still can't see where Stallman is actually right and where is the problems. Even you talk about some possible power to enforce censorship and manipulate people. Yeah, it's possible. But there's also a possibility where that scenario doesn't happen (because Amazon have very strong financial incentive to prevent that scenario)

And about some three letter agency... You don't fight three letter agency by not buying DRM-ed books. You fight these agencies by changing the system. There's very little difference between having some ebook in the cloud and buying plain old non-DRMed dead tree book online (or even in the book store) with your credit card. You have and use credit cards, right? Or you use only paper money, in brick and mortar stores, to avoid any chance of collecting and storing private information about you?