“3) As a result, Amazon, Sony, and a host of others have not made a sale.”

And I, along with hundreds of thousands of others, have decided that the advantages & tradeoffs of purchasing books for our respective readers are acceptable. Not ideal mind you, but acceptable.

To each his own eh.

One of these decades, someone will wise up and I’ll buy one of their readers. Until then, paper is a fine option, and I’m $250-$500 richer.

Regards,
Jack Tingle

And it’s not really to do with DRM. It’s to do with privacy.

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As for the fiction being about privacy, not drm; I’d beg to differ. As structured, the joke (I assume it is intended humorously) is about how use of DRM invariably leads to policing DRM which invariably leads to invasion of privacy. I disagree with the proposition and I disagree with the approach.

I also doubt that anybody reading this exchange truly has any real privacy in their life.
Do you buy only with cash? Or do you have checking accounts, credit cards, a credit history?
Do you buy anything from the Sony ebook store?
Or any online stone?
If any of those are true, there are data miners and aggregators that have you in their banks. And they know way more about you than you’d be comfortable with.

THe reason I focused on Amazon is because they *are* the whipping boys dujour (used to be Microsoft) and because they (very openly) do datamine everything their customers do. If you don’t want them to know about you, the only way to avoid it is not to do business with them.

I do.
And I long ago know they know more about my tastes in music, movies, and books than my mother does. So does my bank, my credit-card issuer, my insurance company, and the federal government.

What those organizations and entities *use* that information for is what matters. The government uses it to make sure I pay my taxes. The insurer uses it to set my rates. The credit card people to constantly raise my limit hoping I’ll actually carry a balance. (Yeah, right!)

And Amazon uses it to try to sell me stuff.

That’s life in the age of the internet.
If it wasn’t comfortable with it, I’d live in a rural shack in upstate Montana.
The DRM debate is a whole ‘nother can of worms, of course.
But the simple reality is everything has a price on you don’t always see it upfront. But its there. TINSTAAFL!
Life is a Red Queen’s race; we adapt or we perish.

——————————————–

Which is exactly how things were before there was a Kindle and exactly how they will be *after* there ceases to be one.
Kindle is an option, not a mandate.

Look, my point isn’t that DRM can’t be debated, but that it matters *how* its debated. Inventing fanciful scenarios presenting extreme situations as parables may be great for amusement purposes but they can be counterproductive to the “Cause”.
I’m not in the publishing business so none of this hits me personally any further than impacting what I can buy and how I can buy it. But I have been around the block a time or two and I remember similar debates and crusades and in every case the true believers ended up poisoning the well among the mainstream precisely by exagerating and over-emphasizing the benefits/evils of what they were promoting/countering. All ended up losing, not because of the merits of the cause but because of their absolutist arguments and the tactics they used to promote them.
Demonizing the opposition is extremely high-risk because all they have to do is act halfway-reasonable to deflect the attacks. If the debbate over ebook DRM is going to devolve into pretending that the promoters are either stupid or evil or both, the cause is already lost because they are neither.
If the debate is going to be “zero DRM or bust” then the debate is over; DRM is *not* going away. There will always be a very real, very rational use for DRM’ed ebooks.
The proper terms of debate is what kind of DRM and when.
Anything else is sound and fury and very very dangerous to the cause itself.
Think on it.
“Moderation in all things.”

And it’s not really to do with DRM. It’s to do with privacy.

I’m not saying that they /are/ doing this. Just that they could if they wanted to.