Kindle?

Jun 14, 2012 by Lona

I love Amazon.com. I really do. I’m a Prime member, and I probably buy a lot more there than I should. With Prime free shipping and my hatred of leaving my desk because I know when I come back I’ll have completely lost my place and will have no idea what I was doing when I left, I do quite a bit of Amazon shopping. I like their DRM-Free MP3s, I like their streaming service, I like their cloud storage, I use their wish list plugin for my browser kind of constantly.

But I will never own a Kindle.

The thing about Amazon’s Kindle system is that you never actually own your books. You don’t download them, you can’t really back them up – I’ve heard rumors that they’ve basically/mostly fixed that problem, but it’s already too late, really. Too many problems with people’s accounts frozen and with it, hundreds of dollars’ worth of books gone. Not recoverable, and no, you can’t port them to a new account. So you’re essentially renting your books for the life of your amazon account.

With a service where everything is so integrated, that seems like it’d make sense and be fine. I’ve had the same Amazon account since 1999, and I’m careful to make sure I keep it in good standing. But should something happen, I really feel that’d be devastating enough without also losing a ton of books, into which I often go for an escape. I love reading, if my profession wasn’t an indication, and the idea of the books I love just gone, along with my purchase history, my wish lists and my gift-idea lists, I think I might lose my mind as well.

And you know, I just don’t have much of a mind left here, I don’t think I can afford to lose any more of it.