I have not yet bought a Kindle, though I’d like one. However, this bit of news gives me pause. It’s exactly the worry that has kept me from sinking money into a proprietary format. Here’s Dan Cohen, explaining what he learned from an Amazon customer service rep, after some of the books he purchased failed to transfer from his online account to his iPhone:
You can buy a book and it can only be downloaded numerous times or
you can buy a book and only then discover that it can be downloaded
only once. (The rep even put it this way!) There is no way to know.
In the meantime, Amazon wants us to upgrade our
Kindles every year or two. Apple wants us to upgrade our iPhone or iPod
touch every year or two. This means that although the books remain in
your Kindle library online you may not be able to download them once
you upgrade your hardware. And there is no way to know — at least according to what the customer service rep told me. — Gear Diary
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Okay, there's an update to the DRM Kindlegate that makes me breathe just a little easier, because it makes Amazon look more clueless than evil. As Gear Diary puts it:
"Any one time the books can be on a finite number of devices. In most cases that means you can have the same book on six different devices."
Amazon can, if requested, release all those licenses, wiping the book from all your devices, and letting you download them to whichever devices you really want them, but at present there's no way for a potential customer to know in advance what limits are in place.
I'm satisfied if I have a PDF, or even a plain-text version.
And by the way... now I get it. "Gear Diary." (Good one!)
As much as I hate the bother, if it's something i really want to keep, I need a dead-tree version (or at the very least, my own hard copy CD/DVD or something). DRM is annoying - ever since cassette tapes...