Here’s what you buy when you buy a Kindle book. You buy the right to display a grouping of words in front of your eyes for your private use with the aid of an electronic display device approved by Amazon. You can’t read a Kindle book on a Sony machine, or on the Ectaco jetBook, the BeBook, the iRex iLiad, the Cybook, the Hanlin V2, or the Foxit eSlick. Kindle books aren’t transferrable. You can’t give them away or lend them or sell them. You can’t print them. They are closed clumps of digital code that only one purchaser can own. A copy of a Kindle book dies with its possessor.
From The New Yorker, a thorough overview of the flaws and advantages of the Kindle. It’s refreshing to read a review that actually talks about the troublesome aspects in detail, like how diagrams and illustrations translate horribly to the Kindle and how the font “had a way of reducing everything to arbitrary heaps of words.”
