Not so with the Kindle. At any point they can completely change the terms of your license and stop you from using the books you’ve purchased. And it has nothing to do with a technology being supplanted. If you decide to buy an e-book reader from Sony, essentially the same technology as the Kindle, you have to re-buy all your Kindle books. That’s very different from replacing an lp with an arguably superior cd. You’re replacing apples with apples here, because you’ve bought into a file format that will only work with one company’s product.

The Kindle book purchase is inexorably tied to that device. It means that if you want to continue reading that book, you need to always buy devices from Amazon, even if a superior device comes out from another company. The gist of my column is that what is really needed is an open standard e-book format that can be licensed by anyone. This allows portability and removes the consumer-unfriendly lock-in caused by the monopoly on the file format.

As you note, if the Kindle fails to catch on in the market and Amazon pulls the plug, you’re hosed. No more books for you. Unlike the situation with your cd’s and lp’s, which you own, and will always own, and can always access. Also, since there’s no DRM on them, you’re free to rip either to your iPod. If you try that with your Kindle books, you’re breaking the law.

Ah, technology. You are a harsh mistress!

Second, the music industry is one of the most hated groups on earth. Do publishers really want to generate the same level of resentment from their customers? Should we start suing our best customers as well?

The shoplifting comparison is also something we really shouldn’t reinforce. Theft and copyright infringement are very different crimes with different penalties. Check the penalty for shoplifting a cd versus those for putting that same cd up on a filesharing site. And breaking DRM often has nothing to do with getting free copies of media. Sometimes it’s done for format or timeshifting, something the Supreme Court has ruled as being legal. Am I a “shoplifter” if I buy a cd, then I want to rip it to my hard drive to put it on my iPod? There are cd’s out there with DRM that prevent this.

You can choose to lay blame wherever you’d like, there’s plenty to go around. But if we’re smart, we’ll learn from an industry that has created an entire generation who think music is something you get for free. One way to try to avoid that is to create a product that can compete with “free”, something superior and more useable that’s not crippled and flawed. Something that doesn’t thwart the paying user and make the DRM-broken version more valuable and attractive than the purchased one.

As for libraries, it would be interesting to consider a digital lending library, which could actually be accomplished via the Kindle. I’d love to see if my library had a digital copy of a book available, check it out wirelessly, and know the due date when it would vanish from my device if I didn’t renew it. I think instead of a complaint, this could actually be a really nifty idea. Amazon, are you listening?

Finally, blaming store owners for creating shoplifters strikes me as unfair, as well. Does money create too much lock-in for these people? You can only play innocent for so long. A child impulsively pocketing a caramel at the grocery store is innocent. A user breaking DRM is something else.