This is one of many reasons why I won’t buy an Amazon Kindle.
A couple of days a go, my friend Linn sent me an e-mail, being very frustrated: Amazon just closed her account and wiped her Kindle. Without notice. Without explanation. This is DRM at it’s worst.
Linn travels a lot and therefore has, or should I say had, a lot of books on her Kindle, purchased from Amazon. Suddenly, her Kindle was wiped and her account was closed. Being convinced that something wrong had happened, she sent an e-mail to Amazon, asking for help. This was the answer:
The Kindle is a fine e-reader, as long as you strip the DRM from your purchases first. I buy via my PC, run the file through Caliber with a DRM stripping plug-in, then load to my Kindle.
Kindle is great for sharing books, especially over email. We have parents, cousins and kids with Kindles that allow us to email them books, so we can share what we buy.
Now the evil amazon ecosystem is bad, but no worse than Apple, Kobo or B&N. Amazon and B&N appear to have the easiest to remove DRM, so we go with them. People shouldn’t have to do that, or know the programming tricks, but our corporate copyright masters have forced us into that corner, at least most of the time. I do try to spend my money with authors and publishers that do not act stupidly, Tor and Cory Doctorow are there, we can only hope others catch up.