[protomyth]

"And iBooks dropped all metadata at some point"

The worst part of that is that there is no way to manually export that data and back it up yourself.

Its worse now because Apple is only providing some information as ebooks and not pdfs. So, I get something that can loose my notes and I cannot print out (sorry, I sometimes like to read on something without an LCD).

[wahsd]

I really hope to see in my lifetime a move back to user owned data and a distributed internet again. This whole centralization and proprietary nature of things is really not to my taste. If anyone is going to lose my stuff, I want it to be me or at the very least allow me to back up all my own data to my own backup.

Maybe I'm totally wrong, but I just don't like this whole move to cloud computing and centralized data store.

[pjc50]

If anyone is going to lose my stuff, I want it to be me

Tragically, the modal user has no backups and is more likely to lose their stuff than the cloud providers, at least in the medium term. This and the security issue lead to what Schneier calls the "feudal system": pick a provider, trust them with everything, hope for the best.

[aidos]

You can have it both ways though. Apple tends to make it difficult for users to be able to have a choice in the matter so you're forced to commit to their services. They do it for commercial reasons (platform lock in = good) - but then they're not great at services so consumers are left with a lot of risk.