Business Tools Blog

I’m thinking about buying a Kindle - Amazon’s wireless ebook reader.  It also has an MP3 player and an audio book player.

First, my favorite early adopter Ike Elliot made me think that asking for a Kindle for Christmas was a good idea.  Unfortunately - my family thinks that I read too much already, so the Kindle didn’t make an appearance at the May’s household in December.

Then, Lee LeFever at Common Craft blogged about getting a Kindle for his birthday.  Lee’s blog is pretty compelling.  After watching him open the box with the bright new shiny object, it’s all I can do to contain myself.

And so I sit … My cheap finance geek side, says … WAIT,  the price will drop.  Remember how expensive your first iPod was.  My cool early adopter geek side says … GO FOR IT!  This is device is purported to be the technology that will change the publishing industry forever.  You need to understand how it works, and the price dropped to $359.

I Googled and found The Laboratorium: Don’t buy that Kindle.  James Grimmelmann writes,

The Kindle’s DRM (an acronym for “digital rights management”) is technology designed to stop you from making unauthorized copies of the e-books you buy. That sounds innocuous enough, until you realize how much is “unauthorized.” You can’t lend an e-book with DRM to a friend, sell it to a used book store, or tear out pages for a collage. One e-book edition of Alice in Wonderland told users they weren’t allowed to read it aloud.

In order to enforce these restrictions, devices with DRM demand explicit authorization for even the simplest actions. The Kindle won’t show you so much as one page of an e-book with DRM unless it gets a go-ahead from Amazon. The complicated back-and-forth of authorization also creates its own problems. When a key Microsoft server crashed, DRM caused thousands of copies of Windows to be falsely marked as counterfeit.

Yuck!!!

I turned to the Technology Evangelist for a little more info.   Benjamin Higginbotham was kind enough to do a video review. 

So I’ve concluded that I will wait … for now.   When the design kinks get worked out and price drops a bit, I will probably buy a Kindle or another e-book reader.  Until then, I will keep using audible for  audio books via iPod (new releases cost about $9 each with a membership) and  Half.com for paper books (most books can be purchased new at very deep discounts).

The finance geek wins another round!