Shoppers will be in for a rude surprise when they buy Kindles but end up moving on to other readers and can’t transfer their DRMed e-books.
And as hinted by O’Reilly downloading stats, many tech-smart people favor the nonproprietary ePub format rather than a Kindle-related one.
But as shown by my love of the Kindle’s speech synthesis—just the ticket for enjoying books while out walking—the K machine has its own positives.
So I’m not surprised to read that the Kindle DX is out of stock despite the $489 price. Oh, the ironies! Amazon only recently was bragging how, unlike Barnes & Noble, the maker of the Nook, it was keeping up with demand.
Shipping waits for DXes could be between four and six weeks. Now if Amazon will only give unit-numbers sold vs. the number made! Could it actually be about to phase out the DX? Will we soon see a DX with a rugged plastic screen to compete with the Plastic Logic Que machine with the eight-by-eleven screen, as some speculate? I wouldn’t be surprised.
Some e-book deals of possible interest right now: The $259 Kindle with free two-day U.S. shipping and the usual six-inch screen—plus Fictionwise/eReader’s two offers of the $149.95 jetBook Lite LCD reader with $50 in free books and the $259.99 eSlick Reader with $100 in freebies. Check out the pros and cons of these before acting. Some may find, for example, that page-changing on the eSlick isn’t as easy as on the Kindles. Then again, unlike the K machines, the eSlick can read books using the ePub standard.
Refurbed second-gen Kindles are $219. I’m not sure you can currently get even reburb DXes via Amazon.com.
I am still looking at e-readers and still on the fence about which one to choose. But for those who want the out of stock Kindle DX mentioned above, a friend referred us to an interesting tool that alerted us within seconds of when a laptop we were looking for came back in stock, at the REGULAR Amazon price, not the inflated 3rd party seller price. It actually monitors Amazon stock, and alerts you much faster than email. It’s free and I guess people are using it for anything else that’s out of stock (at Amazon). It’s at http://www.azproductsnatcher.com
Remember, just because an ereader allows epub does NOT mean that you can read books from Sony or B&N, as they have proprietary DRM for their books. So, same result as having a Kindle without epub.
Do NOT be sold on epub. Unless it has NO DRM, it is just as restricted as Amazon’s azw format. It is not really more open.
Richard: Totally agree DRMed anything isn’t as good as no DRM. But ePub capability means fun with a greater assortment of public domain books, if nothing else–from Google and other sources. Thanks. David
Sony is using the stand ADEPT DRM from Adobe as are all of the epub vendors with the exception of B&N. I don’t like DRM, but with the exception of B&N all epub files are cross platform/store compatible.
The B&N scheme will be adopted by Adobe as well and incorporated into the next version of ADE for any vendor to incorporate as well.
Thanks Paul, but if nothing else, based on Adobe’s announcement that some past users must update their encrypted books to allow future transfers to other computers–or whatever the details were–I would still consider DRMed books to be a long way from truly ownable. All kinds of unknowns may arise in the future. Appreciated your comments just the same. Good to have different perspectives. Thanks. David