James Adcock wrote:
Personally I am going to wait till 4.0 and see if its less restrictive then.
The only thing we learn from history is that we never learn from history. When the first Mac came out, I and all my friends were impressed by what the machine could do. It had the revoloutionary Motorola 68000 CPU instead of the crappy Intel 8086 of the IBM PC. Everybody I knew was making expeditions to the Apple store to see the Mac, but in the end nobody bought it, because you needed a keyed screwdriver to even open the case. And then all chips were soldered on the main board. You could not upgrade memory. You could not put in a faster CPU. It had no expansion slots. Today I'm holding an iphone in my hands (courtesy of Apple). It is the most sexy device. It has a touchscreen that is a haptic joy to use, WiFI, 3G, GPS, BT, everything. History repeats itself: all my friends played with one. Nobody bought one. The iphone always makes me think of that pager-gimmick Commander Koenig (Martin Landau) carried on his belt in the Sci-Fi TV series "Space: 1999". He would unclip it from his belt and shout into it: "COMPUTER OPEN THAT DOOR!" and invariably the computer would *not* because it was owned by some alien entity. That's the iphone. A device capable of doing everything but *not* doing it, because some alien entity locked it down. Apple has and always had the most closed business model on earth. Apple is the most hypocritical company on earth. While they want you to think they are giving you freedom http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8 what they really do is: they take all freedom from you. Let's learn from history. Apple is not going to change.
Again, for comparison, laptops and netbooks have always had these capabilities. Maybe what we need is like cellphones the option of buying "unlocked" ebook readers at a higher price!?
We don't *need* the option, we *have* the option. The Sony Reader has no WiFi but has opened every Epub I have thrown at it. It connects to any PC, even to Linux, and shows up as external disk drive. You can use any shell you want to move files onto it. I have a (Linux udev) script that syncs the ebooks to the Sony every time I plug it in. That's not quite as comfortable as WiFi but I gladly pay that price for the freedom to download what I want from everywhere I want. They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary comfort, deserve neither liberty nor comfort. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org