Kindle, iPad, MacMillan, and the Death of a Business Model
Oh, I think it will be a long time before physical books disappear — if ever. And the DRM problem is an interesting one — we remember Amazon deleting 1984 from the Kindles, forget that it was because that edition wasn’t licensed by Orwell’s estate. Being a writer, making sure that the writer’s royalties are getting paid is dear to my heart. But looking around my place, which looks a lot more like disorganized book storage than an apartment, a whole lot of the books are really essentially transient. The four or five year old AppleScript manual could go away, should go away; it would be a lot better if it had been an ebook if there had been a convenient ebook reader.
Some of the issues about DRM are being overstated, though — for example, your Kindle doesn’t need to talk to Amazon to let you open it once delivered.
Falconsword, this is a story about the fight between the Apple model and the Amazon model; a list of the other readers wouldn’t have added anything. Thanks for mentioning them though.
