So much buzz surrounding the announcement that Amazon’s Kindle is now available in Canada – but why?
I’m an avid reader, and as discussed before, I love eBooks: for the space they save and the portability factor. So, you might think that this announcement by Amazon would fill my heart with glee. Nothing could be further from the truth. And what’s dampening my enthusiasm? Not the cost of the eReader itself: It’s Amazon’s proprietary stranglehold once they nab me as a customer.
Here’s the thing: If you buy a Kindle, you will be forced to buy all your eBooks from Amazon. Yes, they boast about 300,000 titles available for download. So what? Sony has teamed up with both Google and Smashwords to make more than twice that number of eBooks available. And you won’t be forced to buy a Sony reader to access these books.
This makes Kindle and their eBooks comparable to Apple’s iTunes. If you own any MP3 player other than an Apple iPod, transferring your purchased iTunes to it is a hassle and results in a degradation of song quality. That’s why I stopped purchasing iTunes. I prefer to buy my music from emusic – the music they sell will work on any MP3 player.
Then there’s the controversy over Amazon’s remote content removal, when customers saw purchased copied of 1984 and Animal Farm disappear from their Kindles. I’m not interested in supporting a company that practises what amounts to “digital” theft of books I’ve bought.
The eReader market is still in early days. I think the best solution is: wait and see. The number of formats alone is mind-boggling, but one thing seems clear: ePub is the format to watch, and it’s a format not currently available with Kindle. Commenter eReaderPlanet, agrees that where eReaders are concerned we should all play a waiting game, saying:
“I’d suggest whatever device you decide on, make sure it reads the ePub format since that is the most open and widely-used format. That way if you move to another device, you can take all of your books with you.”
That sounds like great advice to me, so I’ll practice a little patience here. And who knows? Maybe next year Google will launch its own eReader, turning the battle into an “all-out war.”
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