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Yeah, I’m locked in. So what?

04.29.08 | No Comments

Kindle with a hundred books behind it

I walked past my neighborhood Barnes & Noble store today and realized I have very few reasons to go into it anymore, except to buy magazines (which are still far too underrepresented on the Kindle store). It would simply be a waste of money to buy a physical book if it’s available for less on my Kindle. Talk about being locked into an ecosystem! It’s iTunes all over again.

But as with iTunes, instead of being bothered by it I felt oddly liberated. As I felt with Apple and music, I feel Amazon is disinterested in trying to control how I “own” the written word. They simply want me to buy more books, and their DRM scheme is (I hope) a way to entice publishers to play along until the market is healthier.

Even with the DRM shackles, I no longer feel stuck with all these extra costs for shipping, warehousing, printing, and disposing of physical objects. The prices for ebooks don’t feel fair yet, and I’m not ready to cave in to publishers’ greedy demands without a fight. But $9-10 for a Kindle edition is still less than $12-30 for a trade or hardcover edition.

What excites me even more is the instant availability of content. I can buy a book at 2 a.m. and read it immediately, without leaving my bed or sofa, and without interacting at all with a computer. Whispernet is Amazon’s ultimate secret weapon for book shopping.

And regarding that stupid DRM nonsense–I remain optimistic that technology will prevail over shortsighted business types who don’t understand the New World, and that the DRM will go away eventually, or just be broken by some random stranger in the marketplace.

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Saturday, September 4th

“Darkness on the Edge of Town” by Brian Keene
Price: $0.00
“One morning the residents of Walden, Virginia, woke to find themselves cut off from the rest of the world by an impenetrable wall of darkness.” Amazon reviewers compare it to Stephen King’s “Under the Dome” and “The Mist,” but say in general Keene is darker and more fatalistic.


Friday, September 3rd

“A Touch of Deceit” by Gary Ponzo
Price: $1.99
“FBI agent Nick Bracco can’t stop a Kurdish terrorist from firing missiles at random homes across the country. The police can’t stand watch over every household, so Bracco recruits his cousin Tommy to help track down this terrorist. Tommy is in the Mafia. Oh yeah, it gets messy fast.” One Amazon reviewer describes it as “sort of like a Kindle version of [TV shows] NCIS or NCIS LA.”


Thursday, September 2nd

“The Burnt House” by Faye Kellerman
Price: $1.99
“At 8:15 in the morning, a small commuter plane carrying forty-seven passengers crashes into an apartment building in Granada Hills, California. Shock waves ripple through Los Angeles, as L.A.P.D. Lieutenant Peter Decker works overtime to calm rampant fears of a 9/11-type terror attack. But a grisly mystery lives inside the plane’s charred and twisted wreckage: the unidentified bodies of four extra travelers. And there is no sign of an airline employee who was supposedly on the catastrophic flight.”


Wednesday, September 1st

“Bake Sale Murder” by Leslie Meier
Price: $0.00 expired
“Ever since local developer Fred Stanton and his wife, Mimi, built five modular homes next door to Lucy Stone’s farmhouse, life just hasn’t been the same. With Mimi complaining about everything from the state of Lucy’s lawn to another neighbor’s lovable dog, quaint Tinker’s Cove, Maine, is now entangled in cul-de-sac politics and backstabbing. And when Mimi doesn’t show up for her shift at The Hat and Mitten Fund bake sale, the scent of burnt sugar leads Lucy to a shocking discovery: Mimi, face down on her kitchen floor–with a knife in her back.”


Tuesday, August 31st

“Black Widow” by Cliff Ryder
Price: $1.24
“Agents recruited for the clandestine organization known as Room 59 play for keeps, or die trying. But now new Room 59 agent Ajza Manaev, a top MI6 operative, discovers just how high the stakes really are when she goes undercover inside Chechnya’s terrorist training camps, where bitter young widows harness their hate as suicide bombers. Ajza doesn’t know she’s being manipulated by many sides — and in a game where the ground is always shifting, Ajza is inducted by hellfire into Room 59′s harsh reality: she’s on her own.”


Monday, August 30th

“Billy Boyle” by James R. Benn
Price: $0.00
“What’s a 22-year-old Irish-American cop who’s never been out of Massachusetts before doing at Beardsley Hall, an English country house, having lunch with King Haakon of Norway? Billy Boyle himself wonders. Back home in Southie, he’d barely made detective when war was declared. Unwilling to fight—and perhaps die—for England, he was relieved when his mother wangled a job for him on the staff of a general married to her distant cousin. But the general turns out to be Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose headquarters are in London, which is undergoing the Blitz. And Uncle Ike wants Billy to be his personal investigator.”

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