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One long response deserves another =) Yes, you are right that you adopt a lot when you pay for the Kindle: the device, the store, the DRM, the acceptable formats, etc. A realization that helped me overcome by hesitation is that I don't have have to love every aspect of the ecosystem -- I just have to like it enough to value it at $100 for the device and ~$10/book. (And I do value the ecosystem that much). I would rather pay $200+$15/book for DRM free, but I would also rather pay $10 to read a book I don't "own" on the Kindle than pay $5 for a book I physically own because I prefer convenience to ownership. So even if Kindle eBooks were marketed as "You pay the same price as the paper copy, and after you read a book once we automatically delete it," I would still buy eBooks for the convenience and portability(except I'd view the purchases more like renting than buying). So to me, what is under-reviewed is the way in which consumers get to buy, trade, sell, borrow, lend, and use the content. That seems to me to matter much more. I am guessing we both agree that the #1 purpose of the Kindle is to read books. Where we might differ is how important the nonprimary purposes are: lending, trading, etc. I used to think they were important, but at one point I realized I was more interested in the "potential ability" to use those features than actually using them. For example, I wanted to be able to lend books to friends, and it really bothered me that I wouldn't be able to do that with a Kindle. But when I did the math, I realized that while I recommended books frequently, I lent them rarely (due to logistics of living in different cities, forgetting to bring a book when I'm meeting up with someone, etc.) Similarly, I used to resell my used books, and it bothered me that I couldn't resell a Kindle book, which means I could never recoup any monetary value from it. But then I realized that I spent a lot of time listing books on half.com, I rarely recouped more than 20% of their value, and the whole process was a giant pain. The alternative of just buying the eBook at a 5-10% discount no longer seemed like a bad deal -- even if I could not resell it. That said, for me lending and trading are distant seconds to reading. I'm sure there are many people, possible including you, who view those things as a very close second to reading. In that case, maybe the Kindle and other DRM-laden readers are not for you. Finally, regarding your point that circumventing the Amazon store sucks: you're right. But part of the point is to figure out how much you value convenience vs DRM. If you hate DRM, then perhaps you embrace the extra effort required to buy books outside of Amazon. If you don't like it, but don't really care, then you just buy on Amazon. I think it's similar to how most people use Windows, a few people use Linux so that they can have more control/transparency, and then there's RMS who is happy to not use anything that is not GNU, even though 99.99% of the population thinks that would be a miserable (online) existence. |