Simple example: My wife wants to consume certain Austrian/German content in Canada which are not available on any streaming service here. The streaming services there (Germany/Austria) do not support Canada. She was gifted DVDs of them, but that means she can't watch them on her phone or tablet (or laptop without a usb dvd drive that's region coded to Europe). Options are to:
- rip the DVDs (pain in the butt unless you have a specific setup for doing it en-masse. Some shows end up with episodes out of order, etc)
- download the shows
And this is when she's lucky enough the show/movie had a DVD release.
Similar problems exist for local content that doesn't exist on streaming sites altogether (bunch of things I grew up watching that I'd like to revisit).
re: availability, try emailing the author of that book series as it is likely a mistake on the publisher's side. I was reading a trilogy on the Kindle, only to find the last book unavailable in my region; I emailed the author asking why that is, and got a reply the next day saying it was a mistake, and the final book became available two days later.
As for DRM, I just use Calibre to strip the DRM off my Kindle purchases. Annoying that I would have to do that, but its better than not having the option at all.
As for value-added from Amazon, I love the free international 3G access for the browser. It is amazing if you travel a lot and the money saved from data roaming fees has already paid for the Kindle itself.
Would you have them continue to use their time developing for the iOS platform despite the changes being accepted or rejected is a function of who they get to review their application and how strictly they follow their own rules? Didn't Apple post the guidelines to avoid this exact situation?
And what if they are small? How many companies had a large user-base from the beginning? Also, while small companies may not be of much interest to the readers of HN, they make up a decent chunk of the world's economy.
Honestly, it feels like they are trying to add to the pressure on Apple to drop this ridiculous cash-grab. If in the process they get some free publicity, all the better for them.