by I used to be a big fan of the Kindle — until the betraying release of the Kindle DX by Amazon a couple of months after my purchase of the Kindle 2.
What great news it was to read this week that Plastic Logic teamed up with Barnes and Noble and at&t to bring their eReader to life.
Amazon is insufferable because they feel invincible. Amazon needs a hard competitor in the marketplace to humble them, abuse them, and force them to play better with their dedicated customers.
Tempting disgruntled users away from Amazon should be Plastic Logic’s first fireball. Let us send you our Kindles in exchange for a free device. Let us have a transparent way to preserve our electronic libraries across competing devices. Plastic Logic will have to help us make the transition before Amazon plays dirty and locks us down and in for the long run.
When I wrote in February of this year that Amazon could delete books from your Kindle at will, I had no idea they’d actually have the gall to do such a thing so publicly and so clumsily.
We are imprisoned in a proprietary Kindle world — unlock us, Plastic Logic — and set us free to once again roam the worldly wilds of the web without being stuck forever to one company that takes us for granted even as we line their pockets with gold.
I’d send in mine, certainly. Remote deletion is going too far. It’s like if a bookstore owner came to your door and asked for a book back. Horrible!
Gordon —
Oh, I’d send all my Kindles back in favor of just one Plastic Logic device. I hope this eReader niche matures quickly. We desperately need color and “foldability” built in, too.
You’re right about taking the book back! It isn’t about the money! It’s about ownership. I read a story that one student had made lots of notations on an Orwell book on the Kindle and when Amazon deleted the book, he lost all his course notes, too! That is just plain horrible.