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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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