For me, it's because I own physical books, but I lease eBooks. A fact still lost on many people; there was an erroneous post about Bruce Willis suing Apple over digital property, which then spawned several posts saying "TIL (Today I Learned) I don't actually own my music". It worries me that so many people don't realize this.

DRM means that if I buy an ebook, it's mine to read. If I want to loan it to my girlfriend, things get complicated.

It seems I have three options. We can share one account, which means that if we break up, legally one of us will "lose" all our books. I can give her my device to read it, so I lose all my books while she's reading. I can buy an extra Kindle (or other device, but Kindle seems to have the most mindshare) just for sharing, which seems needlessly expensive.

It sort of seems like everyone should own two Kindles. One is for you to do whatever you like with. The second is for sharing. By this, I mean that this second Kindle is to receive a book, not lend it out. The lending Kindle can be loaded with your friend's account (n.b. this assumes you can lock it so the lendee can't buy books on the lenders account; I don't know enough about it to say), you can read one lent book at a time, then purge the account and data and start from scratch the next time.

Compare this to physical books, where lending just means handing over an object and saying "get it back to me when you're done. Or, in the case of my copy of Watchmen, "forget you still have it when you move". :)

I don't like digital media. Full stop. It's too new, and too much a moving target, for me to feel comfortable with it. Even without DRM, things are still legally uncomfortable.

Again, if I bought an album and, sans-DRM, loaded it on my girlfriend's device, I now have a copy which is potentially traceable to me (iTunes used to watermark and/or ID3-tag certain songs, but that could be a thing of the past now), that I don't control. Likewise, just ripping a CD is currently legal, but still seems a potential grey area, and if I lost/sold the CD, wouldn't I have to delete the file? So now I have to keep track of physical objects to manage my digital files.

This is all very "letter of the law" and an unnecessarily strict view of this. In reality, the way most people would handle this would be to buy the music, distribute it to appropriate people, and just forget the whole thing. People also break the DRM on Kindle books to make them usable.

My view is that if you're going to do things of questionable legality after legally buying an object, how is that really different from just grabbing the files from TPB?

Until digital media grows up, and old media companies adapt their models, I'll stick to radio/internet-radio-streams, physical books, and DVDs.

(That turned into a rant. Apologies all around.)

That's basically (a) time saved on shipping + (b) money saved since those books are in the public domain + (c) no trees were cut for me to read those books + (d) storage efficiency.

That or some sort of company library for tech docs.

It depends on your motivation. If you buy them to Follow The Law™, then yes, it's mostly the same, but if you buy them to reward the people who made the thing, then it's not.

In any case, there are still 40 000 ebooks that don't suffer from such problems, and in my opinion they're still worth getting a reader: http://www.gutenberg.org/

My point was that people are used to a certain type of "property" and, before digital media, that view wasn't inaccurate. Yes, there were licenses and you weren't allowed to make copies of tapes or CDs, but there was still the physical property of the cassette, videotape, CD, DVD, what have you that was your property that you could lend, sell, destroy as you wanted. Digital media doesn't follow this model, but a lot of people don't realize that. I do, and it's not a model that really appeals to me for those types of products, so I hang onto the "old ways" and continue to buy the physical products.

I buy physical books, I buy DVDs (I never got on the Blu-ray bandwagon for a number of reasons), and music.. well, I have an odd relationship with music such that radio tends to be good enough for me most of the time anyway. Also, music is the media product furthest into digital territory to the point that it's unavoidable in some ways.

As for Gutenburg, I suppose I should clarify that I'm not anti-Kindle. The device itself seems useful and Gutenberg fits nicely with it. I think Safari Books works with Kindle as well, and most (if not all) public libraries can lend you digital copies of books to your Kindle. My rant wasn't directed at a device, but at the sales model of digital media. I just feel there are some growing pains left to work though. I'm not much of an early adopter for anything, and it still feels like that's the phase we're in to a certain extent.

I hope that made some sense.

Now, with Netflix for movies and Spotify (I think that's what it's called, it's not in Canada yet) for music, there could be a trend away from traditional ownership and towards subscription content. How that plays out will be interesting.

My point was that there's some transitional/growing pains going on, and hard questions that still need to be answered. I just don't like how things are right now, speaking only for myself.

'Necrophiliac bestiality, of course! How else am I to screw my food while I eat it?'

If these people mean something to you, then you should be able to find the time to have adequate direct person to person communication with them instead of broadcasting to them and your closest 600 best buds. If they don't— then why care?

I certainly believe that you find Facebook useful, but don't overstate it. People have had friendships long before there was a friend button.

Sure, if I really, really, really cared about my friends, I would practice calligraphy, hand-make my own paper, and train a flock of messenger birds to deliver them.

But there's a lot I want to get done, and a lot of people I'd like to keep in touch with, so if there is a decent way to do so that is more efficient than the 14th-century technology that I could use, then I'm going to use it.

If you have aesthetic objections to new-fangled things like the telegraph, the horseless carriage, and Facebook, by all means don't use 'em. But don't go pissing in other people's soup just because you don't approve of the dish they ordered.

No doubt it indeed has replaced email and IM for some people, but I would think it is just because "well, everyone else is on facebook so I'll just use that too"...

It's better than e-mail because I don't have to sift through spam in my private message box. I don't even have to sift through messages from companies that I technically have a business relationship with. I only get actual personal contacts.

It's better than various forms of IM software because (1) most of my relatives actually use it and (2) it's in the browser rather than a standalone client.

Of course, YMMV.

Mind, I don't use FB, or trust it, for this.

For my tech-savvy parents and non-tech-savvy grandparents, it provides an easy way to share/view photos. Using email/IM means having to come up with some sort of filing system for photos, whereas Facebook just provides it, along with captions which can be useful for travel albums.

It's a broadcast system with less urgency than email. If there's some photos or a story from daily life you want to share, emails like that will get lost in an overload of tasks and requests. IMs are easy to ignore and hard to dig up. Facebook provides a way to find out that hey, something interesting happened, and when I get around to it I can browse what's up with people I care about.

  Necrophiliac bestiality

Not my personal opinion, just a translation of what I think he's saying.

As an aside, there's the famous line from Woody Allen's What's Up Tiger Lilly? : "I'd call him a sadistic, hippophilic necrophile, but that would be beating a dead horse."

"My helo-elephant is the _only_ peanut powered mode of transportation with automatic mouse avoidance!" True, perhaps, but when someone asks why you need a helo-elephant it's often not informative to just say what it does with more words... they're often looking for you to justify why you need to do those things (or do those things at once).

How many times in your life have you moved house to somewhere far away? What you wrote here makes it sound like it probably wasn't very much.

My whole family uses Facebook for keeping up with people we don't live near anymore. I use it for keeping up with college friends whom I don't live near anymore (moving across the state will do that, let alone moving halfway across the world).

You might ask, why am I keeping up with college friends? The answer is: because I'm 23, so they're still a large fraction of all the friends I have.

As I recall, there was a rather frightening New York Times article once posted to HN on how even decades after college, most people still haven't made that many new friends to replace their friends from adolescence.

Scary stuff, hence: Facebook.

Facebook is not endowed with some unique magical distance busting power. Telephone, Email, IM, public websites, and postal mail all work over long distances just as well.

No, what Facebook does have is broadcasting capabilities. Rather than going through 13 tedious phone calls, I can post one status update. Unlike email, I don't have to specifically include or exclude various relations from the list of people I'm writing to. It contains its own IM service (though my fiancee and I use Skype together). It's far faster than postal mail (like everything else electronic). It costs far less than a personal website with forum software running.

It's a local optimum. Not supremely perfect, not magical, but good at what it does.

Since then I've bought about 200 e-books and about 5 physical books. I simply don't have the space. I have boxes and boxes of books in storage and I'm now glad that I'm not adding to that.

Playing with some rough numbers into I get about 9 ft^3 for 200 paperback books, it's even worse with hardbacks.

Given the amount of people I see reading on a Kindle in the subway, I wonder how many took the leap just due to size constraints.

At the moment, I'm fine having a copy of all of them (with the DRM and identifier stripped) stored as a compressed archive in Amazon S3.

Reading Stephen King's 11/22/63 in hardcover on the bus was kind of brutal.

As someone used to moving around a lot, I carry around much of my book collection and a selection of important research papers on my Kindle. It's damned useful to lug one Kindle instead of 20 kg of physical paper.