Rob's Rants

I normally hate re-posting other blog content, but this is directly related to some of my previous e-reader posts.

TechCrunch reports today that a hacker may have solved one of my major gripes about the Amazon Kindle. He’s apparently come up with a way to strip the DRM from Kindle books so they can be turned into a PDF and read on other readers.

I can only hope that Amazon and the publishing industry doesn’t go all RIAA on this and lose their mind. If Amazon has any ability to think out of the box, they might realize that they could leverage their position as the dominant bookstore and actually sell to Sony and other e-reader customers. Because the Sony bookstore certainly doesn’t have the depth that Amazon has. And it’s not nearly as easy to shop, ever after the latest 3.1 update to the software.

So bravo Labba …

Or at least your content …

As reported in many places recently, including the New York Times, Amazon decided that it was perfectly acceptable to delete copies of e-books purchased from Amazon right off of people’s Kindles without notice, warning, or apology. Although a refund was issued, that hardly negates the impact of knowing that your purchase of content through Amazon is a meaningless, hollow contract and Amazon can simply take your stuff back whenever they feel like it. How creepy is that?

And the ultimate irony? This practice was brought to light after mass deletions of Animal Farm and 1984 by George Orwell! How perfect!

As the Times said,

Retailers of physical goods cannot, of course, force their way into a customer’s home to take back a purchase, no matter how bootlegged it turns out to be. Yet Amazon appears to maintain a unique tether to the digital content it sells for the Kindle.

One more reason to value the Sony e-reader system … no one’s going to hack into it in the middle of the night and make your legally purchased stuff disappear down the “memory hole.”

Perhaps the worst part is that Amazon didn’t just steal back their own content … they stole (and presumably destroyed) stuff that wasn’t theirs. Also reported in the Times:

Justin Gawronski, a 17-year-old from the Detroit area, was reading “1984” on his Kindle for a summer assignment and lost all his notes and annotations when the file vanished. “They didn’t just take a book back, they stole my work,” he said.

Can you say class-action lawsuit? It serves them right if they lose a bundle for this one…

Apology!

As reported in the New York Times, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos issued an apology today (7/24/2009). Read about it here…