I’m not your pimp, Amazon.
Just got an e-mail yesterday afternoon about how much money I could make by convincing y’all to buy Amazon’s DRM-driven pseudo-e-book reader:
Associates are eligible to earn 10% in referral fees on both the Kindle device and content. With Kindle priced at $399 you can earn $39.99 on each Kindle purchase you refer. We do not yet pay referral fees on subscription content such as Kindle newspapers, blogs, or magazines, but we will be announcing that support in the near future.
Here’s the thing: when you “buy” content for Kindle, you’re completely dependent on Amazon’s good graces to keep that content available for you in the years to come. If the recent kerfluffle over digital downloads of baseball games is any indication, however, it’s obvious that you can’t place your trust in a corporation to keep your purchases available to you after you purchased them.
People, that’s what personal property is all about. Sheesh!
So anyway, if the Kindle were more like an MP3 player (in that you could store local, platform-independent copies for backup and convenience purposes) I would support it—despite its ugliness. But it’s not, and I cannot in good conscience try to sell it to you, only to watch your hundreds of dollars’ worth of Kindle content vanish in a poof of digital smoke a few years down the road.
This Christmas, give the gift of real books.
