The problem as I see it is two-fold: first, the sudden presence of about a zillion just-as-good-as-the-original digital media files up for resale would collapse the market and put publishers out of business.

Second, and more importantly, there's no way to prevent people from cracking the DRM on their e-books and backing them up before selling the DRM-locked original. You can crack the DRM on library books now just as easily as you can the ones you buy from Amazon. I don't see that changing.

Unfortunately, the only way to get this content is either to pay for it legitimately and then have to illegally crack it, or to pirate it which is illegal from the outset. If you want the content, you have to make a deal with some kind of devil.At least if you do buy it, the people who originally made it get paid something.

You'd think so, wouldn't you. But the DMCA anti-circumvention clause doesn't make any exceptions for fair use. It's "thou shalt not" all the way down.

Thank you. I appreciate the compliment even more than the link. :)

You're quite welcome. :)

I said much the same thing on TeleRead. There are many, many devices and things that haven't "advanced" in decades but are a such a quiet everyday part of our lives that we couldn't imagine doing without them. Smartphones (and their close relations tablets and e-readers) are becoming just like that. Not everything in our lives has to be replaced by something shiny and new every couple of years.

It's going to be open-source, and letting people who buy it upgrade to a later version of Android is explicitly given as a reason for that on the Indiegogo page.

In any event, for the kinds of simple e-reading tasks the device is meant for, 4.0.4 should still run pretty much any e-reading app on the market. With only 4 GB of internal storage and a slow-updating e-ink screen, it's not really meant to be a media tablet.

Amazon actually sold very few of its books below cost. Even of the $9.99 titles, most were at or slightly above cost. And all the backlist titles were definitely above cost. Amazon representatives testified to that under oath, and the DoJ investigated them and found no wrongdoing. Amazon wasn't losing money to force competitors out of business; its ebook business was "consistently profitable" overall.

It's not that the DoJ was too cowardly to file criminal charges, per se, it's that criminal antitrust charges are usually reserved for when the collusion involved other crimes than just the antitrust violation. For example, out-and-out bribery, bid-rigging, forgery, or other skullduggery. But everything the publishers did would have been legal if Apple hadn't coordinated it, so it only merited a civil penalty.