One item removed from my wish list

Bye, bye, Amazon Kindle. I’ve been lusting after the Kindle DX for months now. I’d planned a purchase this fall as a birthday gift to myself, but no more. Amazon, a company whom I had generally trusted, has really disappointed me with this one

1. Publishers publish Kindle books.
2. Kindle users buy Kindle books.
3. Publishers feel flip-floppy and decide to stop selling certain ebooks.
4. Amazon reverses the sale of those ebooks, refunding the purchase price and deleting them from users’ Kindles and account archives without any warning or explanation.

Now, are you ready for a killer dose of irony? The books were George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm.

One could keep whispernet turned off at all times and download content via internet to the computer for transfer via USB – this is something I planned to do anyway due to the general wisdom of maintaining fair use backups of all my digital content. However, I have already overlooked a great deal of DRM nonsense from Amazon, in the hope that it would soon go the way of the dodo like DRM on iTunes did once the sheeple finally figured out why it was bad. Worst of all is that Amazon (according to a phone call I had with one of their reps when Kindle 2 first came out) does not allow Indie authors the option of selling their titles via Kindle Store without DRM.

Amazon, I understand that the big publishing houses don’t have their acts together, but this has gotten out of hand. Big media has cried apocalypse every time content delivery has taken another step. They fought public libraries, radio, cassette tapes, photocopiers, VCRs, CDs and DVDs, digital music, DVRs, online media streaming, and now ebooks. They will adjust, the market will grow, and the world will continue spinning. Learn to stand up for your customers, or lose my business and the business of anyone whom I can persuade.