The problem is I don’t really own my content on the Kindle, as I own a paper book. At some point – a point to be reached much sooner than a paper book, I think – my Kindle will cease functioning and then what happens to all my books? My daughter isn’t going to read her books off my Kindle – she’ll have her own device, whatever that may be, but I’d like to give her my files, just as I’ll give her my paper books (or at least let her borrow them!). That’s going to be a lot easier / possible if there is a universal e-book format. Or at least if there is no DRM.

If Bezos really wants to give the people what they want, then he’ll look to the music industry and see what happened to them when they tried to keep their content locked up. There’s plenty of other competition coming online. There may not be as many book readers as music listeners, but you can bet they’ll feel the same way about content. Bezos may just come to see the light. If he does, he’ll avoid being a Gates – although MSN for all its troubles is still ruling the roost, and if that’s enough for the Bill Gateses of the world, it may be enough for the Jeff Bezoses.

Going to be very curious to see what sort of response you get from Amazon’s PR people. If it’s just some canned corporate jargon, I hope you post it anyway: it shows where their (Bezos’s?) heart is.

Even if it’s killing publishers, authors, other booksellers, and literature in general.

Gates succeeded because he’s never been troubled by a fascination with technology. He’s always seen technology as something to be turned into money. You see that in the first instance in which he made news–his fury that someone had stolen a punched tape with the code for his Basic interpreter. That was in an era when that sort of thing was freely passed around. Or read books by Microsoft insiders. They tell a tale of corporate decisions that valued establishing market dominance over quality or innovation. Only now has Microsoft begun to pay the price for that. Only now is the PC market beginning to smarten up.

Bezos has a similar attitude toward books, regarding them as mere tools in the pursuit of money and power. That shapes his attitudes toward book creation and distribution, as well as his championing of ebooks. Notice that his interest in ebooks centers on books purchased at Amazon and running on the Kindle. He values technology only when he can monetize it. As Oscar Wilde put it, he’s the sort of person who “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

Bezos doesn’t understand writing and what motivates it. He doesn’t understand readers who might regard a book as more than a temporary store of bytes on their latest gadget from Amazon. That explains his cluelessness about the impact of proprietary formats or DRM. His only interest in books is his desire to dominate their marketing. The human-centered aspects escape him.

In short, Bezos wants a Kindle in every hand for the same reason Gates wanted a Windows computer on every desktop. And that isn’t good for those who write, those who publisher, or those who read.

I spent all of yesterday evening rescuing my email between 1999 and 2005 from the evil clutches of a proprietary Microsoft Entourage format, a task made all the more difficult by a bug in how Entourage writes files. I did it because those emails encapsulate the relationships I had back then. We also have relationships with books that are similarly personal, changing our lives in subtle but important ways. Even now, I can leave my desk and, within a few seconds be reading from one of the very three volumes of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings that I read bouncing across the Sinai in a Bedouin pickup in the late 1970s. There is meaning in that.

In the process of rescuing that email, I learned something about ebooks that’s important. In the shifting and changing world of operating systems, hardware and software. I’ve apparently lost forever all my email before 1999. Busy with other things, I simply forgot to preserve it. I’d hate to see that happen to books I might buy in whatever form or format. Books are more than bytes. They’re an extension of the personalities of those who write them and those who read them.