I think the jury’s pretty much agreed on how stupid this thing looks. My favourite twitter comment: “Hey Bezos, 1987 called and they want their style back”. (I love Seinfeld)
But of course it doesn’t quite stop there. The books and content are distributed under DRM. You have to pay $2 per rss feed (!) and there’s more not to like about the Kindle. Good business plan, bad consumer proposition. I’m sure however that Bezos has had to do some sucking up to publishing companies on the DRM front, them being all ‘old media’ and stuff. Daring Fireball has a write up.
★ DUM: “What it comes down to is that when you purchase books in Kindle’s e-book format, they’re wrapped in DRM and are in a format that no other software can read. There are no provisions for sharing books even with other Kindle owners, let alone with everyone.”
via Daring Fireball
What always surprises me in the DRM discussions is that no one ever hates Audible for putting DRM on their files. I guess they’re just a likeable company?
Anyone? I’d love to know why this is.
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2 responses so far ↓
Jim // November 20, 2007 at 7:54 am
Doesn’t Audible allow you to burn their audiobooks on to a CD? As far as I know, you can then rip the CD into an MP3.
hansdekker // November 20, 2007 at 8:03 am
hey Jim,
Yes Audible does allow you to do that, but then so does iTunes and probably all other DRM schemes. So my question remains what makes Audible so special that it’s not subject to the criticisms that iTunes and now Amazon are getting.
Hans
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