Comments on: Sorry, Evil Genius, but the Kindle IS closed

By: Dave Slusher

Dave Slusher — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 02:16:49 +0000

Hi David, sorry first contact in years is a squabble but that’s the way the Nookie crumbles.

The Kindle STORE is closed as in Amazon is the only game there. The Kindle DEVICE is not closed because I can put arbitrary files on there. I wrote my post because people keep saying that you MUST buy books from Amazon to put them on the Kindle which is factually incorrect. I have hundreds of books on mine, I paid Amazon for 5, I paid Book View Cafe for 1, I paid Pragmatic Programmers for 1, I paid Fictionwise for ~100 of them, I got a few dozen for free from Gutenberg.org. A couple are freely available from the writers’ websites (Doctorow, Stross). The balance are either self-generated, or have been emailed to me by writers or publicists.

My post is factually correct. You are not required to pay Amazon to get readable books on a Kindle. You can criticize the store and the DRM and all of that criticism is valid and useful but outside of the scope of my very focused statement of fact.

By: Ben

Ben — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:07:23 +0000

I couldn’t care less about the kindle itself. I just want to buy ebooks from amazon and use them on other devices (and not iphone). So, as far as i’m concerned “Amazon e-books” is a closed system, whether the kindle itself is or not.

(with respect to just the kindle, i side with evil genius because he’s right–you can get kindle books, especially free ones, from places other than amazon.)

By: John Hagewood

John Hagewood — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:55:38 +0000

blah blah blah, more Kindle-bashing from David. What else is new?

LOL

I love you anyway David!

By: ryber

ryber — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:50:32 +0000

And this is why everyone who wants to keep their content and use it the way they want strip the DRM out of the books they buy. No TTS blocking, and no way for the company to remote delete a purchase.