This is a decent summary of the situation, but the editorial comment at the end is tone-deaf: Somewhat regrettably, I think, Amazon has pledged to stop doing w

This is a decent summary of the situation, but the editorial comment at the end is tone-deaf: Somewhat regrettably, I think, Amazon has pledged to stop doing what it did in this case--which was, I think exactly the right thing to do... Amazon's action may have served the narrow interests of justice [1], and may even have been necessary to avoid big legal penalties, but it was terrible marketing. The last thing Amazon wants to do is to remind people that a Kindle is not a tool for reading books that you own. It's best viewed as a tool for renting books for an indefinite period. (I actually like the Kindle, and am still thinking of getting one someday, but I have no confidence that a DRM-protected Kindle book will outlive the hardware it lives on. To me, the Kindle would merely be a way to streamline the process of buying a book, reading it, and then selling it again. If I want to keep a book I'll stick with the paper version.) The problem is that rental has lower profit margins. People's mental model of book rental is based on the library, where the apparent price is "free". A Kindle book's big profit margin is dependent on the illusion that buying the book actually makes you the owner of the book and that it will behave as real books do. And, of course, there's no tradition of people banning cars they don't like, then having the police drag those cars away. But there is a long tradition of book-banning and book-burning that Amazon is unwise to evoke. I'm a little bit hopeful that this debacle will help accelerate the decline of ebook prices. --- [1] If you define current copyright law, which effectively ensures that everything invented after Mickey Mouse will remain under copyright forever, as "justice".