A while back I read an article about how the DRM restricted titles Amazon sells for the Kindle are non-transferable. When you buy a book to read on your Kindle you don’t get the right of first sale, you can’t loan it to a friend by transferring the rights to them and them transferring them back later, and you can’t sell it as a used book. Amazon is touting their Kindle 2 as being as easy to read as a book, but they have stripped buyers of some of the fundamental rights that have been part of the book experience since humans first started writing on woven papyrus. That is evil.
With the release of the Kindle 2, Amazon has added some really nifty features. Besides the improved display, they have added contractless wireless networking to the Kindle 2. That means you can buy a book and download it when your are miles away from your computer. If you subscribe to a magazine new issues are automagically downloaded. That is so damn cool!
I was just looking at the magazines offered, and I noticed that both Analog and Asimov are available for Kindle 2 subscription. I thought about how cool it would be to have what was considered a sci-fi device when I was in high school automatically download the latest sci-fi for my casual reading. What great times we live in. Too bad such a cool device is made evil by its overly restrictive DRM. Amazon, you could have had me as another customer were it not for stripping me of the right of first sale.
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