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Originally Posted by nekokami
But I think there's another reason they've locked Kindle books so tightly to the Kindle. I think it comes back to the publishers, wanting "tough" DRM to prevent those awful evil pirates from stealing their IP. I think the publishers who were never willing to go with ebooks before were talked into it by Amazon in part due to promises made about how hard it would be to crack the DRM on these books. I think everyone involved was looking at the iTunes model and trying to figure out how to emulate it as closely as possible... just as Apple itself was moving away from DRM.
Personally, I think this was misguided at best. Amazon's use of a variant of Mobipocket was, in my mind, what finally drove the cracking of the Mobi format.  It would not surprise me at all if someone eventually either provides a common, simple workaround to purchasing Kindle books without a Kindle, or goes to court to force Amazon to open their Kindle book sales to non-kindle owners. |
I've suspected this myself. It's silly since you don't need a lot of people figuring out how to get content off the Kindle and breaking the DRM. You just need one. Once the knowledge is out there, you still may not have a ton of people using it, but even if a few hundred of them started uploading their books, it could do a lot of damage. It may look reassuring to publishers on the surface, but as well all know here, it's just punishing honest users. Here we are with that knowledge. It's been out there for months. The world has still somehow failed to spin off its axis. I'm sure Bezos and Amazon know this, too. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. They're trying to lead a dinosaur. I think if it weren't for this, we likely would see Amazon licensing other hardware for the Kindle store. Heck, they'd probably go DRM-free if they could get the dinosaur moving.
However, If they keep doing the exclusive book thing, like with Goodkind, I wouldn't be surprised if more people start uploading. Sadly, if that happens the publishers likely won't see it as being connected to the issue of fairness. They'll probably think it was because they weren't restrictive enough.