[French]

I bought an Astak reader because it supported so many formats, but ePub being the main interest. It is capable of DRM ePub (library), and I guess because of that the Sony bookstore is also an option. I'm still unclear on Barnes & Noble. What the Astak can't do is OTA downloads. So every single book I ever read has to be sideloaded or "adapated" in some way. It gets old, especially since when you start messing with that stuff you lose page breaks and all kinds of other things.

So I've watched with interest this craze over the Kindle. I am intrigued...I like the idea of OTA downloads and I'm assuming that if I buy a book from Amazon, it's going to be formatted right (or they will refund me). I assume I'll finally be able to tell where I am in a book...whether I have half the book left, or just a few pages. That is a major downfall of the Astak...you convert books and you have no idea where you are in the overall size of the book. It drastically changes the reading experience to not know how much more is left.

I'm almost sold on Kindle because I love Amazon as a company, have an Amazon credit card....I've already justified in my mind spending the money on the books because I get so much cash back on the credit card. I think one of my main concerns is that by going Kindle I'll finally have the ease of the OTA downloads and properly formatted books I want, but if I want anything other than a book from Amazon I'm back to wrestling with formats, etc.

So let's say I put it aside and say, "I resign myself to forever only buying books from Amazon (or free books from Amazon)". Does anyone ever worry about 3 or 4 or 5 years from now, if all the money they've spent on a "proprietary" format will just be wasted money because they will no longer be able to access those books?

Has anyone ever desperately wanted to read a book and they couldn't find it on Amazon? What did you do?

I love the idea of the simplicity of it, but I'm scared about locking myself out of all the other formats available.

And I am truly disgusted with how sloppy the ebook industry is as a whole. Maybe I'm alone in this...but I would rather see ONE ebook format with only ONE DRM scheme, but I would gladly pay a LOT more money for the reader itself. I would be more than happy to let the company make money off the cost of the reader, and then all the books end up on a fair game field. And as for pricing on ebooks...they should be at the very least the same as paper back, but really less than paperback, and honestly that's a fair price to me. Everyone should still be making money off that price point.

Why does it have to be so difficult?

Thanks for listening to my rambling. I look forward to any responses...as I'm really looking for some other thoughts/opinions/ideas on the subject from somewhere other than my own brain.