I’ve had my Kindle 2 for about a month now and I’m loving it. Granted, I’ve been using it mainly to read PDFs, which have limited functionality on the Kindle, and the navigation is pretty awkward, but I love being able to lug around both War & Peace AND The Golden Notebook with me wherever I go. Better yet, I used my Kindle to search Wikipedia for the plot of “Richard III” when we were out watching Shakespeare in the Park last weekend!
But there have been some interesting legal developments in Kindle Land lately. Back in March, Amazon gave publishers the option to disable Kindle’s “read-to-me” feature after the Authors Guild complained that it infringed on their right to profit from copyrighted audio books. In June, Brigham Young University suspended its plans to circulate Kindles in their library due to ambiguous legal terms that had not been settled yet in writing. Then, just 5 days later, Arizona State University was sued for providing Kindle DXs to incoming freshmen by the National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind, which argue that Kindles cannot be used by the blind.
And just today I read some speculation that Amazon will eventually embed advertisements in their e-books. While this news might be troubling to those who use books to “escape from all that,” others have made the case that advertisements just might make e-books cheaper — a good thing, right??
I’m convinced that E-books are the way of the future, just as we’ve made the switch to digital music, video, mail, T.V., etc. But we still have a lot of questions to answer about how E-book content will be distributed, accessed and controlled. I just hope publishers will handle this a little more gracefully than the recording industry!
Rachel
