Why I Will Not Be Buying a Kindle
and as little from Amazon as I can manage.
Well, there's the fact that I dislike reading books on a screen - any screen - and therefore will continue collecting dead trees in preference.
However, setting my personal dislike of e-books aside, there is Amazon's generally appalling behaviour; their attempts to bully legitimate publishers, their attempts to claim everything an author has published before a certain date as theirs to publish unless the author wrote a formal letter to them before their deadline, and the 1984 business. Then there was the Wikileaks problem. Now, it is censorship. Of course, they are attacking through a weak link, which is a specialised form of erotica (in this case incest - not something that particularly interests me, but not a particular squick either. Whatever floats your boat.) Both e-books and dead tree versions of these have been pulled, without notifying the authors and/or publishers (they are mainly either self or very small publishers.) Not only that, but, once again, copies have been pulled from all individual archives in the cloud. People who complained about having a book they have paid good money for taken away from them, and can they have their money back please, have been told they shouldn't have been reading any such thing.
Even if these books were pornographic (and one person's porn is another's erotica) they are legal in the USA (and the UK, come to that) because they are not kiddie porn, and to buy anything from Amazon you have to have a credit or debit card and therefore be legally adult. Amazon need to be told they are not the morality police.
And, even if dead tree books vanished, I would not be buying a Kindle. No, sir.
Thanks to filkertom for posting the link below.
http://theselfpublishingrevolution.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazon-in-book-banning-business.html
Well, there's the fact that I dislike reading books on a screen - any screen - and therefore will continue collecting dead trees in preference.
However, setting my personal dislike of e-books aside, there is Amazon's generally appalling behaviour; their attempts to bully legitimate publishers, their attempts to claim everything an author has published before a certain date as theirs to publish unless the author wrote a formal letter to them before their deadline, and the 1984 business. Then there was the Wikileaks problem. Now, it is censorship. Of course, they are attacking through a weak link, which is a specialised form of erotica (in this case incest - not something that particularly interests me, but not a particular squick either. Whatever floats your boat.) Both e-books and dead tree versions of these have been pulled, without notifying the authors and/or publishers (they are mainly either self or very small publishers.) Not only that, but, once again, copies have been pulled from all individual archives in the cloud. People who complained about having a book they have paid good money for taken away from them, and can they have their money back please, have been told they shouldn't have been reading any such thing.
Even if these books were pornographic (and one person's porn is another's erotica) they are legal in the USA (and the UK, come to that) because they are not kiddie porn, and to buy anything from Amazon you have to have a credit or debit card and therefore be legally adult. Amazon need to be told they are not the morality police.
And, even if dead tree books vanished, I would not be buying a Kindle. No, sir.
Thanks to filkertom for posting the link below.
http://theselfpublishingrevolution.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazon-in-book-banning-business.html