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I am not against any particular vendor. I've seen a lot of griping about Kobo, B&N, and about Sony's reader store when it existed. I've seen a lot of negative things about Amazon and Google, too. People don't usually post about their positive experiences. As long as the books get to me in a way that allows me to read them and back them up, I really don't care about many of the things people have complained about. I like buying directly from the publishers and authors if I can, but most of the time I can't.
The vendors are just merchants brokering the books that the publishers put out. There are a lot of problems with the publishing business that we as consumers and readers don't really see. I can't comment on the validity of the Kobo rep's statements about the problem having to do with the way the books are uploaded to their site by the publishers or about the sneakier ways that vendors try to lock in customers to their own devices. My main interest is getting the authors' works into my hands in a way that will allow me to still be able to read the books in years to come.
I did not buy a kindle because I did not want to be locked into Amazon, the kindle devices just weren't as good as my Sony at the time, and there were not a lot of other options readily available to me at the time. While I am not particularly interested in supporting Jeff Bezos's empire, mostly I avoid Amazon because I find it to be a painfully slow and difficult site to navigate, so I don't shop for books there. Those webpages take many times longer than any other bookstore's pages to load! So far, I have purchased 2 short stories from Amazon that were not available from any other source (and still aren't, per the author). I found out where they are located on my computer, imported them to calibre, and converted them to epub. As for stripping DRM, the only reason I ever looked into it had to do with an absolute lack of interest on the part of the sellers/publishers in fixing some faulty character encoding that caused some of my books to be almost unreadable. Otherwise, I never would have learned about stripping DRM. If I understand the law, since I am playing around with the books only for my personal use, without intent to violate the rights of the copyright holders, it is no more illegal for me to 'damage' the files I've purchased than it is for me to do something to change the physical books that I own, perhaps by putting on a new cover so they look prettier on the shelf.
The thing is, the people who should have the most interest in rights protection and control are the authors and artists who produce the products that I want to buy. I'm not sure the whole DRM system works to protect their rights at all. How does having no download options on B&N profit and protect the authors? Unless the authors want to be part of trying to force us to buy more copies of their books just because someone in the chain of custody decides to be a butthead by making it difficult to access the previously purchased material...
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