[Web4lib] Amazon's Kindle e-book reader

[Andrew Hankinson]

It's not the form factor, or the price that's a problem for me.  Yes,  
eventually books will go digital, and yes, the price will come down.   
That's inevitable.

It's the DRM that they're putting in there, and the fact that they're  
artificially limiting it.  It's EVDO, which is not WiFi, so expect to  
pay a monthly fee just to have the wireless connection.

Mark Pilgrim has another take on it on his blog post, and I think his  
leading 'act' sums it up best:

"When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell  
that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want.  
Everyone understands this."

	--Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild, 2002

"You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or  
otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of  
it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices  
or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you  
will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass,  
modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the  
Digital Content."

	--Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service, 2007

(http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/11/19/the-future-of-reading)

So, yes, while Jeff Bezos may be a really nice guy, with the direction  
his company is taking with Kindle we're setting ourselves up for  
another RIAA/MPAA DRM nightmare with book publishers now.  That's not  
something that I'm particularly comfortable with encouraging.

-Andrew

On 20-Nov-07, at 11:28 AM, Leo Robert Klein wrote:

> Roy Tennant wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
>> The other reason is more substantive. First Blackberries and now  
>> the iPhone
>> have demonstrated the kind of unification of functions that has been
>> predicted for many years -- you will no longer have a PDA and a  
>> phone and a
>> music player and perhaps even a laptop as separate devices -- they  
>> would be
>> all one. And the fact that the same amount of money will buy you  
>> either a
>> book reading device or a phone and a music player and a web browser  
>> and a
>> ...makes the Kindle a complete non-starter in my book (sorry for  
>> the pun).
>> And to think folks were complaining about the price of the iPhone.
>> Roy
>
> I think this unit makes sense only if you ignore the vastly  
> successfully alternatives now available to people.  People want  
> Nokias and SideKicks.  They use their phones to text-message, take  
> pictures and surf the web.
>
> Amazon has made a single-purpose device and it's pretty obvious from  
> their standpoint why they did it.  It's less obvious why people  
> should suddenly dump their smart phones for this.
>
> It just doesn't make sense.  It's like thinking people are going to  
> dump their color tv's for b&w units because the WWI documentaries  
> look so much better.
>
>
> "Richard Wiggins" <richard.wiggins at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
>>> I think there is no doubt that the purpose-specific e-book will  
>>> come into
>>> its own as well, and I think people who nay-say it without seeing  
>>> it,
>>> touching it, feeling it, and using it will someday look foolish.   
>>> They may
>>> not look foolish with this attempt, but someday they will.
>
> I'm perfectly happy to look foolish!
>
> LEO
>
>
> -- -------------------
> www.leoklein.com (site)
> www.ChicagoLibrarian.com (blog)
>
> aim/msn/yhoo/goog: 'leorobertklein'
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