Comment by EdwardCoffin
7 years ago
This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened, either. Amazon, before they introduced the Kindle, used Adobe DRM for ebooks. I lost a book I'd bought through them when they switched to Kindle.
The thing that really gets me is I had to register my book to buy it, with my email address. They had my address, and couldn't even be bothered to send me an alert, telling me that the DRM servers were being decommissioned, so if I wanted to license any new computers to use the book I should do so then.
I've not been able to replace that book either, so it's not like the refund they finally begrudgingly gave me could be put towards a replacement - that book has never been republished in any form that I have been able to find (Vinge's annotated version of his book A Fire Upon the Deep).
I have 300+ books purchased and read on iOS Kindle, after buying Neal Stephenson's latest recently I discovered it has an obnoxious popover Audible ad on the page browse screen which must be re-dismissed each time you open the book. I was shocked how quickly it totally ruined the experience of reading a book. I haven't read more than about 10 pages on Kindle since, and I can't bear to buy another kindle book knowing this could happen at any time. It has been a couple weeks, it is probable at this point I will never read another book on Kindle (the only device I care about is iOS). I had sort of the opposite reaction, if there is some other entity mediating my experience with the text, I genuinely don't care what happens to my "library". Luckily these are mass produced and distributed books that are essentially immutable, so it isn't like I've lost anything that isn't available elsewhere.
Wait... you bought the book and still got ads? That's unacceptable.
Ask for a full refund and never ever buy anything from that company again.
Yeah, I mean for context this is what it looks like: https://imgur.com/a/Ngcsa3q
It isn't uncommon for books to promote other books before/after the content, but something about having it in the page movement is so distracting. And it is slow to load in, meanwhile it is just a big white square blocking the book title with an animated spinner.
There isn't any company I would "trust" to provide an uniformly excellent experience so I don't really hold it against Amazon in toto, I still think their ability to do the long tail of retail is excellent. I didn't refund the book because I still borrowed it and read it, and I feel that the author and publisher still deserve their share since they've done nothing wrong.
You can now pay $200/mo for cable and still be forced to watch un-skippable ads for on-demand programming.
2 replies →
You have my sympathy. I have been searching for the annotated version for years now. Any readable versions seem to have disappeared.
This is a good reminder for me to make backups of the ebooks I do have.
Is this the version you have been searching for? It is "A Fire Upon the Deep" and it looks annotated.
[0] https://i.imgur.com/260sH2V.png
That might be it. The annotations look like the kind of thing I remember.
5 replies →
And for rare, out of print books, you can put them on libgen if you want to save someone else the time
Note that I probably have a backup of this book (I'm sure it is on one of my old decommissioned backup drives), it's unlocking it that is the problem.
...This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened, either...
This is technically the 3rd time, with just Microsoft alone.
They turned off eBook authentication servers for "Microsoft Reader" (.LIT) format years ago... (2012?) Then, after they launched their also-now-dead store on Windows Phone which had some eBooks, well... that went away too...
Next - how many subscription/Music services has Microsoft launched and then abandoned? More than one, but I remember: PlaysForSure" - DRM servers turned off 11 years ago...
So - unless it is Xbox, don't think Microsoft is going to be a reliable source for your digital media.
Principle of the thing aside, is the annotated version worth reading? I read the book and it was quite good, curious what the annotations add to it.
I am interested in how authors actually work, and the annotated version gives some insight into how he works. You can get an idea of how he works by reading this interview with him [1]. I also got some of this from another interview I cannot find at the moment, but basically he writes in Emacs, just a plain text file, but with some markup conventions that let him distinguish between the text itself and various comments to himself about the text.
The interview I linked to includes a screenshot of Children in the Sky whilst he was writing it. The character of the draft you see there is much like I remember this annotated edition of A Fire Upon the Deep was - in other words, it was really the text of the book itself but including all of the notes to himself that he put in to help himself correlate bits of the story that should be correlated, help him make sure that the first time various things are introduced he actually introduces them properly, includes feedback from his early readers, etc.
I would not actually read the annotated version when I wanted to read the book, but would read it to see his thought process at various points, how he decided to do things, etc.
[1] http://www.norwescon.org/archives/norwescon33/vingeinterview...
I am also very curious! A Fire Upon the Deep, in my opinion, is one of the best books ever written. The idea of the "zones" really fascinates me, I wish Vinge did more with it.
I wouldn't rank it among the best ever written, but fascinating enough in its own right. I've read it several times, and loaned/given it to friends too. Now I'm wondering about the annotated edition!