I want my l—k and f—l

Two Issues With Ebooks

They boil down to one issue: DRM.

• I do not want my bookshelf to depend on a specific company or piece of software to actually be usable. This is the same reason I bought CDs when iTunes was still selling DRMed AAC files.
• Content stores tend to be pretty bad software companies. I would rather they just give me content in an open format and let me choose where to read it.

In context with Kindle:

• If Amazon dies and I do not have all my Kindle books on a Kindle, they are gone. I can’t read them anywhere other than a Kindle or on Kindle apps, presuming they are already downloaded and that platforms do not evolve in a way that breaks the apps.
• The Kindle app, while remarkable for a content provider, is not a remarkable app, and I would much rather use another reader, but I can’t.

This is not an argument limited to Kindle; this applies to most e-bookstores out there even the iBookstore. Licensed DRM schemes like Adobe Digital Editions are no better; you depend on Adobe, and the last thing anyone wants to do is depend on fucking Adobe.

This mostly applies to e-books as we know them today (dumb digital facsimiles of paper books) and not multimedia books as the richer the feature set gets, the harder it becomes to standardize and implement in a consistent manner.

(I have purchased un-DRMed epub ebooks from O’Reilly and they are marvellous. These guys get it.)