Amazon Puts Your $1000 Kindle Library 'On Hold,' Apologizes, Shrugs

Paging all e-book sellers, this is a chance to get great publicity for the one-time-only price of $1,000.

Buying DRM-ed content is a contradiction in terms. Period.

It should be made illegal for sellers to pretend this constitutes the purchase of the content itself. Call it a lease, call it a service, but stop scamming consumers.

I just received a Barnes & Noble "Nook SimpleTouch" (the basic, e-ink screen one), and while I like it, this sort of thing has me very worried about using most of its (limited set of) features. That is, while the Nook has something like 1 gb of internal storage for books, about 75% is reserved for content you have to purchase through Barnes & Noble. That leaves about 230 mb for your own files. (The Nook does feature expandable storage via microSD, but these don't get placed into your "Library" on the device in the same way files on the internal storage do). I'm sure many of these same concerns apply to the Kindle. (And more, since Nook books are EPUB format, while Kindle seems to use a variety of formats, including some proprietary formats & DRM).

I really like the convenience of an e-reader, and the e-ink screen really is fantastic, but so far I've only loaded files from Project Gutenberg and some e-books from Manning (who provides free pdf and sometimes EPUB format e-books when you buy the hardcopy). I'm already bumping up against the (artificial) 230 mb-or-so limit for books not purchased directly from B&N.

I'd be more open to buying e-books from B&N if I wasn't afraid of a scenario similar to what's described in the article. As far as I can tell, B&N ships their Nook books with DRM, what guarantees do I have that I can still read those books if B&N goes under, or my account gets screwed up in some mix-up?

Edit: I must have phrased something in a confusing way. The Nook allows you to load 3rd party, non-DRM'd EPUB and PDF's (although as I mentioned, you only get about a quarter of the device's internal storage to use for 3rd-party content). My concern re: DRM was the books you buy directly from Barnes & Noble.

This, of course, is the difference between ownership and permission-to-use.

So we've definitely arrived in Stallman's Right to Read future: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html