Readers are catching on with book lovers. One woman says her iPod with a Kindle app is “so much easier to carry than a regular book.” She’s reading much more than she used to because it’s so much easier get the books. USA Today cites Forrester to say 4 million of us have e-book readers already, and 29 million will likely have them in 5 years. (via Literary Saloon)
Have you been following Cory Doctorow and his discussion of the dangerous eroding of rights the shift to ebook sales has precipitated? When I buy a regular book, I get to loan it, read it whereever I want (platform shift), and sell it when I’m done with it. Kindle allows none of those things.
Full disclosure, I have a kindle, though I’ve yet to actually buy a kindle book for it.
I don’t see why that’s a problem. We can borrow e-books through libraries, I’m told, but even if I can’t sell e-books or loan them, why should I worry about it?
Actually, with a Nook (I purchased one recently), you can lend books to other Nook users.
Good point, Roy. I came by the Kindle in a roundabout way that didn’t involve me buying it. :/
Phil, the problem has to do with the sneaky shifting of common property rights. The tradition for the way our culture uses books has been, for as long as we’ve had them, that when you buy it, it’s yours. With the Kindle and other similar DRM license schemes (Audible.com, for instance), the purchase isn’t of a book, but a very limited set of uses, not including shifting to another e-reader. This serves to lock in people and authors.
I highly recommend Cory Doctorow’s _Content_, which you can download as a free e-book from craphound.com.