by Jared Goralnick
Your technology is brilliant. You do exactly what I’ve longed for, and so gracefully. But your DRM and subscription model are more limiting than iTunes and more ill conceived than the Zune. Oh Amazon Kindle, why must you tantalize me so?
My book clubs and Amazon Prime addiction lead me to buying altogether too many books to find a place on the shelf. I hate having to decide which reading I can comfortably carry on the Metro or a plane. My laptop is too bulky for a lot of activities. And I’ve long complained that I’ve needed a higher resolution electronic screen than my laptop’s for reading.
But you want to charge me money for my RSS? For my Washington Post access? To read a PDF? Why can’t I just ‘sync up’ like I do with all the rest of my electronics? I’d rather pay for EVDO access than get taxed to download blogs.
I’m spellbound by the ability to download books in mere seconds, to full-text search (say, the names of characters), to mark up pages and highlight. It was a caring touch to add free Wikipedia access. And the display, while perhaps not the most attractive of consumer electronics, seems easy on the eyes, light, and functional.
I’m going to wait on the Kindle experiencefor now.
I’m curious to see how people get around some of the Kindle’s difficulties synchronizing. A tool that could seamlessly export RSS feeds from into organized HTML file tree would alleviate many of the fees and take some of the sting out of the process. Or better yet, maybe hackers will find a way around the EVDO limitations and open it up for better browsing or content synchronization–after all, it’s a practical piece of hardware that could benefit from some software tweaking.
I’m curious how this will play out in the coming months. Perhaps I’ll jump on the bandwagon in due time, but in the mean time I’ll just enjoy watching Amazon get a little bad press on their DRM for a change… They’ve done such a good job for a long time, and they continue to here, but this time the price and terms are just a bit frustrating.
You should really subscribe to Technotheory via 
email or rss.
