In the meantime, people who don’t care about DRM don’t care about it because it hasn’t inconvenienced them yet. Given that DRM makes it hard for honest users to use their books, it will inconvenience them at some point–at that point the legions of people lured into e-books by the Kindle will start voting against DRM with their dollars. By not accepting non-Amazon DRM the Kindle will (I expect) actually increase the market for DRM-free e-books in the long run.

On top of that, you couldn’t take your DVDs over to your friends house because she has a Toshiba brand DVD player and it won’t play your Sony DVDs? Conversely, her Toshiba DVDs won’t play on your Sony player.

Now consider that your Sony DVD player broke and Sony no longer made DVD players, because they want to push Bluray players? Since you can’t play your DVD collection on another brand, you’re faced with buying everything all over again, either on DVD (which you already have), or on the new Bluray format.

You wouldn’t be too happy about this situation, would you? I don’t think your 90 year old grandmother would be either.

If you think that this type of thing can’t happen, it has happened several times in recent years with ebooks, music and videos when various companies decided to stop supporting certain online stores that they had created.

The other article that was discussing HTML was not aimed at the mass market user. The person asking about epub and HTML (Bill) is an author and content producer. No one indicated that the end user should know HTML or epub internals.

I do agree that for the moment, Amazon has a product that appeals to the non computer owner, as well as some computer owners. The seamless delivery method is a good thing. What is not a good thing is the monopolistic practices and lockin that Amazon and the Kindle represent.

Yes, there really are some people that don’t care that they have to buy all of their ebooks from Amazon; that they may loose access to these ebooks if Amazon decides to change policies (they have done it before with encrypted PDF ebooks); that if later you buy a new ebook reader from someone else, you can’t transfer your ebooks to it – you will have to buy them all over again.

Some folks are not concerned with these issues. If they are fully aware of the consequences upfront, then they have made an informed choice. However, I believe that the majority of people buying Kindles don’t fully understand these issues and wouldn’t be so pleased with their purchase if they did. In fact, there is a discussion over at MobileRead about a recent Amazon action that is making quite a few former Kindle lovers very unhappy.

I’m not picking on Amazon and the Kindle specifically. There are others in the ebook world who are also guilty of practices that are non-consumer friendly.

Ebooks are still a relatively new phenomenon. Things are bound to change and develop. Personally, I’d like to see an ebook reader that had the convenience of the Kindle, supported an open standard like epub (and TXT, HTML, Mobi, PDF, etc. would be nice), allowed me to buy ebooks from anyone I wanted, and allowed me to add my own content without charging me 10 cents each (color would be nice, too). No one has this yet. I’m still waiting.

You can howl about DRM until the cows come home and it’s not going to make the average ebook user care. They want simple and and easy to use. They know Amazon, they’re used to getting books from them, and when this Kindle dies they’ll just get another Kindle.

There’s a note upstream advocating using HTML as the ebook standard because we all have computers and can deal with HTML.

The potential mass market for PCs 25+ years ago was not the people who knew how to use DOS and edlin.

Here and now, the potential mass market for ebooks is not the people who know hyper text markup language.