Kindle – Article in the New Yorker

One of my favorite things to love to hate is Amazon’s Kindle.  From the ever-present advert that appears whenever I log into Amazon to the complete corporate ownership of future reading material.  I hate it because I want to love it.  What a great idea – only it’s been ruined by corporate greed.   I’ve ranted about the Kindle in a few posts, but in this article in the New Yorker by Nicholson Baker, you get a much more eloquent presentation of why the Kindle sucks.

I am struck by two things  as I continue to think about the Kindle and, more importantly, it’s licensing scheme in which users are tied to Amazon forever.

1. I use iTunes and iPod.  I am stuck using them because of Apple’s propriety format.  This doesn’t bother me though – I think because I don’t have to pay a monthly fee (unlike the Kindle) otherwise I might feel the same about iPod/iTunes technology.  I also can share my music by burning to audio CD and handing the gift over to my wife if I want to make her a romantic mix – or if I want to send a friend some cool new music to check out.  Yeah – a licensing violation but a restriction that I don’t feel ethically bound to uphold.   What’s a handful of songs between friends? I know from experience that if I like shared music, I’ll often end up buying several other pieces from the band or similar bands.

2. Despite Kindle’s licensing scheme (you can’t share, you can’t own and you must continue to pay) which fundamentally changes the way books are handled in the current marketplace – books will go this way.  People want digital media.  People want instant access to new information.  People don’t care about licensing restrictions (until they end up in court for violating them).  And, most importantly, corporations want to make tons of money  – and this method of licensing will generate more capital more consistently than any other method of selling books.  With the weight of the entire market on one side of the issue (against consumers) who can resist?  Eventually, we will have to pay to read and soon there will be no “used books.”

There are free (or nearly free) ebook readers out there (I downloaded Stanza to my iPod Touch) and plenty of free books on Google’s Online Library not to mention the Gutenberg Project so there are options right now.  However, the next bunch of e-format textbooks, you can bet will require Amazon’s hardware to read Amazon’s format and if you own any other type of reader you’ll be without a book in class.  Oh, and you’ll still have to pony up that $20 a month just to read your assignments.

(Side note – in a move typical of Microsoft, Amazon has acquired Stanza.)

I could rant for hours, but please, read the New Yorker article and think before you buy.
Really, when was the last time you needed a thousand or even a hundred books at your fingertips?