Why I Will Not Be Buying a Kindle

[lil_shepherd]

and as little from Amazon as I can manage

Comments

[louisedennis]

Concerns like this are why I bought a Sony ebook reader. I don't want my reading tied to the whims and preferences of one particular company.

[lil_shepherd]

I've heard decent reports of the Sony. The iPad may also affect Amazon's dominance of this market.

[louisedennis]

I'm still getting used to it, to be honest. My main interest was something that would be light to take with me to conferences and which I could also read on the many ten minute time spaces I seem to spend on station platforms and I already think it's going to be very good for that. Not so sure about bed time reading though

[lil_shepherd]

Louise, I don't know what software you are using, but another person on this page has just mentioned Calibre as her choice for the Sony.

[louisedennis]

Yup! It's Callibre. It's pretty nice, and impressive for an open source piece of software but not without its niggles.

[ellarien]

I love my Sony Pocket Edition; it's fairly basic, but it does the job and has kept me supplied with reading material while my dead trees wend their way across the Atlantic and through the snowdrifts. (Calibre is the answer to the lousy provided software, at least for DRM-free publications. Though being on limited bandwidth at the moment I'm not too keen on their almost daily 30Mb updates!)

[philmophlegm]

Apple's iTunes is probably the inspiration for Amazon's Kindle business model - make the tied-in approach easy and most people will use it. Ironic given that Amazon's music download service takes the opposite approach - very anti-DRM.