It bothers me...
that I want a kindle. The last thing I want to see in the world is the general acceptance of "licensing" books. As a copyright holder, and one who has studied and continues to study it pretty extensively, I've come to believe that we've let copyright and other forms of intellectual "property" go too far. The Kindle may do for books what the music
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Also, if you like SciFi, Baen Books sells all their books in multiple formats with no DRM. Tor will be using their services when they get their head out of their ass. Fictionwise (now owned by Barnes and Noble) also has thousands of DRM Free books, and the rest come in Mobipocket format, which is the same format amazon uses, and my new app can DRM strip them. :)
Libraries have been doing the "lending" thing recently too, some of them do it with Adobe ePub format (which is really just packaged html), supported by the Sony, and others do it with Mobipocket, which with a "KindleFix" script, are supported by the Kindle. They allow reading for a certain length of time and then expire.
Me, I refuse to buy books that I can't move to other readers later, so I routinely strip the DRM off any DRM laden books I buy, and I attempt to buy mostly DRM Free books in the first place.
DRM doesn't do a damn thing to stop Piracy. Most of the Pirated ebooks out there are not versions of the sold ebook, they're OCR'd scans of the paper book. And with mob computing*, that becomes easier to do with more accuracy every day.
* Mob Computing: What they used to convert the most recent Harry Potter book. A web site doled out page numbers to willing participants, who typed it in from their copy. A second user then proofread it, after which it got incorporated into the completed work. As a result, a proofread, good quality version of the book was on torrents within hours of the release. What with the author refusing to allow ebooks, citing "piracy" issues, I find this amusing, since anyone who wanted an ebook version could get one, they just couldn't pay for it.
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It's a great way to omit publishers, even one's like Lulu.com.
My other sweetie has a few of his indipendant books on the Kindle. If you get one, look up Nathan Crowder's "Greatings from Buena Rosa" and have yourself an indipendant experience in a mediated context :) (Sorry I've been discussing this stuff at work for weeks, we actually do an expiring e-Book type reader for Libraries, so it's come up a couple of times.)
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I loved everything else about my friend's Kindle (1.0, in case in matters) but the thing I most want to bring with me everwhere are my heavy duty reference books (like building codes, and house design and septic system regulations) and they are not as useful without easy flip to book marks, highlighting and annotations about same.
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