Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Obviously that's your decision, and I completely respect it. I would just note, though, that Amazon don't have any more of a walled garden than any other reader does. You basically have two format choices when it comes to ebooks: Amazon and ePub. With the former, Amazon own the DRM mechanism; with the latter, Adobe do. With an ePub reader, when you buy a commercial eBook you're buying it via Adobe's DRM servers, just as you're buying it from Amazon's when you shop in their store. When you say "jump through their hoops", what specifically are you referring to?
The really big thing about the Kindle is the free 3G. Free virtually everywhere in the world. You say that you travel a lot: there's no other device on the market which gives you that.
But it's your choice at the end of the day, needless to say.
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By jumping through hoops, I mean having to reconfigure the firmware and strip the DRM of my ebooks and then reformat it so I don't just lose it in an incompatibility maze when the device eventually breaks, which is really a lot more work than I should have to do just to have full ownership of my own stuff that I bought with my own money.
How exactly does the ePub format work? I think I've read that there are stores that sell ePud format that has no DRM. Is it sort of like what .mp3 is at this point, in the sense that it's just the universal file and you can save things as ePub files?
The 3G is attractive. I'm just not sure it outweights everything I don't like about it, from the vaguely political to the form factor. You don't have to go far to find free wifi these days.