Actually this wasn’t the Apple model. It was forced on them by the music publishers who wouldn’t allow their music to become downloadable until a DRM was in place. What Apple did was develop a music encoding format that was “arguably” better than mp3 and link that to the iPods and such. Once giant Amazon weighed in and was able to remove DRM from music downloads, Apple was able to remove it also (which they are doing).

>>Less happily, DearAuthor’s Jane notes that the Kindle comes with Big Bro-ish features letting Amazon track your use of the machine.

Well, you might not realize this, but every purchase you make at Amazon goes into a database so that Amazon can make suggestions about what you’d like to read next. It’s their marketing program. They have said, on occasion, they they are keeping this database an Amazon only tool, but that they reserve the right to sell or license it as necessary. Let’s face it. Days of privacy are over. Every credit card purchase is recorded. Your tollway iPass records your travel habits. Your cable company knows what you watch. And on and on…

>>But he warns of some connectivity charges—not immediately apparent to users who don’t scrutinize the paperwork. Amazon even reserves the right to raise the prices of connections. Nothing like freedom to gouge captive buyers, eh?

Hey, remember when PayPal was FREE? That’s right. In the early days PayPal didn’t charge any fees to use the service. They claimed that they would hang on to your money for five days, earn interest, and then pay out. The interest would cover their expenses and allow them to make a profit. Well, know you get charged a fee for business transactions. Changes in pricing is just par for the course.

Well, I didn’t pay a cent for mine personally, and I’m not so much as ecstatic as pleasantly surprised. Despite a number of drawbacks, this is a very well thought out device. The support for non-DRMed Mobi, adequate thought not stellar annotation, nicely implemented search…its the best ebook device I’ve used in this price range, though by no means the best possible such device.

“A question I still don’t quite get: I’m told that Kindle does handle non-DRM Mobipocket files. So if I go to Munsey’s and download David Copperfield, I can read it on the Kindle, right? Can I transfer it via USB to get it on the device, or do I have to pay an Amazon surtax just to move it over? Still trying to sort all these options out.”

A) you can transfer it via USB, either by copying it directly or by using the Mobipocket desktop app which recognizes the Kindle and synchs, or B) you can actually download DRM-less Mobi directly from the web and start reading it wirelessly without any fees to Amazon (although as I mentioned in another post, the license for the Kindle indicates that they can change the free terms if they want to, and I suspect they’re going to do so at some point, since not doing so is going to undercut their business model).

I added a 4gb SD card and have been busying copying over my ebook collection.

One of the other drawbacks of Kindle is there is no categorization system in the list of books…you can either sort the list by author or title and that’s pretty much it. Really needs the option to support categories so I can see top level categories like SciFi, Fantasy, Nonfiction, etc. instead of just one long darn list of hundreds of books.

I think its pretty clear they don’t want people buying DRMed ebooks from competitors like Fictionwise. This is the Apple model — if you want to sell DRMed music for the iPod, you *have* to go through the iTunes store.

The odd thing is that Amazon’s model seems to be the opposite of Apple’s. Apple’s model is to use the content to drive the sales of the hardware. Amazon’s is to use the hardware to drive the sales of the content.

“But maybe not. In the interest of profitability, Amazon said good-bye to PDFed e-books, so anything’s possible–including a Mobi shutdown. (Thanks to Mike Cane for this DA pointer.)”

Maybe, but then why support Mobi at all? If I were Amazon and going to do this, I’d just support AZW and not give users any other option to convert non-DRMed materials to AZW.

Amazon seems to sincerely believe its marketing that downloading books to a PC and then to a device is just never going to attract the masses to ebooks, as opposed to their relatively seamless wireless experience. I imagine they see DRM-free Mobi as a complete non-threat (too hard for users, and no buy in from major publishers).

OTOH, if they do really believe that…why bother with DRM at all? If a few AZW files show up on file sharing networks, who cares — only a small number of geeks and nerds can be bothered to download to the PC and then transfer to the Kindle, right?? Everyone else wants the wireless no-PC experience.

“While independent retailers may love Mobi, it’s Amazon that controls the DRM. Yet another argument against locked-up books? I think so. DRM is more of a protector of problematic business models than of intellectual property.”

Yeah. So we’re back to how people *really* get music for their iPods. In the case of ebooks, I buy from Fictionwise in a DRM format I know I can rip, then convert to non-DRM Mobipocket.

A question I still don’t quite get: I’m told that Kindle does handle non-DRM Mobipocket files. So if I go to Munsey’s and download David Copperfield, I can read it on the Kindle, right? Can I transfer it via USB to get it on the device, or do I have to pay an Amazon surtax just to move it over? Still trying to sort all these options out.

I am still hoping, that many books will get released to mobipocket aswell, once the publishers get it done.