As if we needed more evidence that ebooks aren’t ready for prime time, Jim of Georgetown University writes on Dave Farber’s Interesting People mailing list:
Dave, a comical experience. I tried to buy some e-books from Amazon that require the use of Microsoft Reader to access them. The following steps occurred:
— order, pay for books
— get instructions how to download
— following instructions, get interposed page that says that I must download, install, and activate Reader first and that this requires me to use Passport. I had an activated copy of Reader on the machine in question, but I went through the whole rigamarole, twice.
— continue to get unable-to-download messages
— wrangle Amazon support through several frustrating cycles (the kind of tech support that doesn’t listen to what you say, so they tell you repeatedly to do what you’ve already told them repeatedly you’ve done)
— so finally the guy says, well you may be accessing the net through a firewall or a proxy server — you have to turn all that offWell, that didn’t work either, and after complaining for days, Amazon finally refunded my money (all of $18). But what I thought funny and instructive is that in order to protect Microsoft’s intellectual property, which it is against the law for me to do anything to undermine, disable, reverse engineer, *they* require me voluntarily to disable the security devices on *my* system (including any firewall designed to protect me against damage arising out of weaknesses in Microsoft operating systems).
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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