Outlawed by Amazon DRM

A vast majority of people read one book at a time. Two max. Given this, the idea that there is a massive benefit in portability is completely overstated - few people (outside of students) were carrying ten pounds of books around with them to support their reading habits.

This same line of thinking holds true with purchasing. There is most certainly a convenience in not having to visit a store (or even order online), but most people read at a pace that is fully supportive of being able to find their next read in the traditional manner.

That being said, I recognize these are both advantages. What I'm saying though is that there are very few people where this "advantage" makes any form of economic sense. Assuming your usage, this advantage is costing you $200-$500 a year. And your purchase isn't one of ownership.

The argument for e-books right now is like leasing a car for $50 more a month than you can buy it for. Sure there are advantages to leasing, but logically, they don't come close to outweighing the costs.

Definitely is a highly regulated (gov't, media co.'s) industry. Without knowing anything else about it - how hard is it to create a web application to serve e-book content? Not very. Yet how many good ones exist? One? Two? That alone should tell you there's a ton of baggage that goes with the market.

Now I can't speak to the truth of these claims. I have no inside knowledge but I will say this: be skeptical of such stories. I have seen other stories like this on HN where I have had some inside knowledge and I can tell you that there have definitely been cases that vary between being one side of the story to being a distortion of facts and events to being outright lies.

It's a common theme to have a post of "[BigCo] shut down my account for no reason". I describe such stories as "unverifiable stories in which the poster is a victim".

Like I said, this could all be exactly as the poster claims but it might not be as well. It could be as simple as the person having the same name as someone who got blocked in the US. Who knows? Amazon needs to be extremely careful to be right in situations like this or they risk undermining the ecosystem they've spent so long to create.

I don't mind buying Kindle novels because I tend to only ever read them once. And if they were $6 (like the paperbacks often are) I'd view them as a throwaway purchase.

But when it comes to technical books--books I'll often refer back to and that can cost much more--I'll have to make sure I either only buy the PDF version or I buy the PDF+mobi+epub upgrade from the publisher after buying the Kindle book (2 thumbs up to publishers who do this BTW).

My experience, as a Canadian, is that Amazon encourages use of amazon.ca (your local version of their site) and you have to go through some tricks to use Amazon.com.

Many of my friends did because that was the only way to get a kindle and books for years. Are they all at risk of this?

Moreover, I think consumers who have purchased a legal copy of a physical or DRM'd book have the moral authority to torrent a matching non-DRM copy, legal technicalities be damned.

Please don't try to paint everyone with the same brush, or resort to name-calling. Techies usually understand the trade-offs and risks, and non-techies simply need to be educated.