Reason #2811 I’m lukewarm about the Kindle:
That’s pretty ballsy. Like the article states, it’s like Borders or Barnes & Noble sending someone to break into your house, take a book you purchased from them off the shelf, and leave a check on your coffee table.
I’m a confirmed gadget hound, but I think I’ll buy my books on dead tree until the whole DRM issue no longer pits consumers against companies…and until content distribution companies stop seeing the end user as the opposition.
(Via BoingBoing.)
What the hell?
I like how Baen does it, you buy it, it’s yours in a few differnt formats to be read on whatever device you feel like using.
The Kindle has always seemed funky to me. I can buy a perfectly good smart phone for the same money, and hey look, it browses the web AND makes phone calls.
Amazon’s almost total content control is just the icing on the digital cake
That’s beyond hideous. Their choice of doubleplus unsold book (full of truethink, not goodthink) is so ironic it deflects compasses a mile away.
Just to point out the obvious, my Palm has a bunch of e-books in it that nobody is going to be able to remove – unless they really want to discuss the issue in person with someone who works in tech support, has a chronic intolerance for bullshit and owns an AK.
This was a failure of Kindle and Amazon, not e-books in general. Not all of them come with DRM.
Tony, my many Palms (From III to LifeDrive), two WinCE palmtops and my iPhone agree with you.
Interesting choice of titles to be retroactively unsold.
That was my first thought, too.
The only way it could have been more ironic would have been if “Fahrenheit 451” had been one of the titles as well…
From what I understand, whoever originally uploaded it for publishing on Amazon didn’t own the rights to the book, so Amazon pulled it and refunded everyone’s purchase. This sort of thing has actually happened before. There’s a legitimate copy of 1984 for Kindle available on Amazon now, for three times the price of the one they pulled.
Still a problem when Amazon doesn’t vet the copyright before offering the book (and taking their cut of the cover price).
I completely agree, but it wasn’t a decision made entirely at the whim of our evil corporate masters, as some articles implied.
That’s why I have a Sony reader and buy books from BAEN.
*Shrug*. I dunno. I’m a gadget hound as well, but I’m always going to buy dead tree. I just like to hold the real book in my hands. I’m off like that.
Sort of tangential to the topic: There’s been a running debate at the Mises.org blog about the legitimacy of intellectual property. Depending on one’s point of view, one might find oneself somewhat intrigued in an abstract sort of way, or really steamed.