I have always been interested in Amazon's Kindle. The thought that I could carry around a small tablet to read books and textbooks was relatively intriguing. However the high cost and limited PDF support has left me wary. Ultimately, as a few book readers have found since purchasing the Kindle, those are small costs for owning an ebook reader. The Digital Rights Management on the books sold on Amazon has provided book publishers with a a surprising amount of control over the content AFTER it has been purchased. This provides a huge potential for abuse.

DRM on most software, such as video games, seems mostly content to only prevent copying. DRM on Amazon's proprietary ebook format allows publishers and Amazon itself to change the rights of book purchaser's with very little notice after the book was purchased by the consumer. It largely began with publishers, such as Random House, disabling the text-to-speech features on books as so it will not compete with their audiobook purchases .

This was definitely not a deal breaker, but the next one was. A couple of weeks back, it was discovered that there are a limited number of times one can download a book onto a Kindle device before you need to REPURCHASE the item. Seriously!? Some books can be downloaded a few times, but others maybe only once or twice, but customer service won't tell you how many times a book can be downloaded.

As for the most recent news the publisher Secker and Warburg (I believe) has recently decided that they no longer wish to have a couple of their books on Amazon. They also decided that they did not want ANYONE who had previously purchased the books to have them either. Thus Amazon complied and deleted the books off everyone's Kindle. While they received a refund, I see this as equivalent to theft.

As you can see in the picture, Secker and Warburg publish George Orwell's classics such as "1984" and "Animal Farm". A publisher using rather authoritarian measures in order to control a book on oppression and censorship is rather humorous. It is a rather good symbol on who information providers seem to enjoy alienating their paying customer base. I am going to shake my head, but at the same time enjoy the fact that I did not spend over $400 on a device that will allow you to buy a book for a limited time, either because you run out of downloads or because the publisher decides that you no longer have the right to own a book you purchased.

-Trevor