an update on amazon’s kindle
November 25, 2007 9:52 pm UncategorizedEarlier in the semester, I wrote a post about Google books (which seems to be a hot topic right now!) and Amazon.com’s new electronic book reader, Kindle. I thought I would do a little update post because the Kindle was just released. The new device is being lauded as the iPod of books, and it’s interesting to look at all the commentary surrounding it. Newsweek’s cover story this past week was all about the Kindle and how it will change the way we read, but it also addresses the copyright aspect of it.
Obviously, the books you purchase for use on the Kindle need some sort of copy protection so you can’t just pass the book out to whoever you want or profit from it yourself. With the Kindle, you can buy books and store them, but (unlike conventional books), it’s impossible to print a page, copy any portion, or share the book with a friend. As the author of the Newsweek article puts it,
Though the copy protection doesn’t affect book-reading, it is limiting, and annoying. You can’t print out a passage, e-mail it to a friend or copy it into a document. You can’t lend a book to someone, or sell it after you’re finished.
You can learn more about the Kindle from Amazon here.
Amazon Kindle: Bloggers Keep Writing - Pocket.Info - Mobile 2.0 :
Date: November 25, 2007 @ 10:50 pm
[…] Copyright in a Digital Age […]
Cat Faber :
Date: November 26, 2007 @ 1:52 pm
Actually, the Newsweek article doesn’t have that quite right. According to the manual you can save a portion of the e-book text as a “clipping” in .txt format, which you can then export to your computer via the USB cable.
Luning :
Date: December 4, 2007 @ 4:36 am
I personally don’t like it. It seems that the only thing it can do is viewing ebooks. I don’t want to bring this machine, and a PDA, a cell phone, a GPS, an iPod…I expect an all-in-one thing, like the UMPC.