Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Disclaimer: I was on the fence on buying a Kindle and decided against it, here's my reasoning. The Amazon Kindle is a spiffy device. It has a great look, a great interface and fulfills a great function. I've wanted to get one of them for the last year or so but there have been a number of events that have prevented me from jumping on board. 1. Text to speech. When the Kindle 2.0 was released, it had a fantastic text-to-speech application included. If I had a kindle, I probably wouldn't use it much, but I could see myself using it from time to time (like if I were driving or falling asleep to a book). The writer's guild was worried that this would kill their books-on-tape sales, so they told Amazon.com to kill the functionality. Amazon.com complied. In fact, they didn't just pull the functionality from Kindles they had in their warehouse, they killed the functionality on all of the Kindles they had sold. People who had purchased the device, maybe even because it had text-to-speech, woke up one morning and found out that Amazon killed it from afar. Lesson 1: Amazon.com can sell a Kindle claiming it does something, and then decide to remove that feature. 2. If you lose your Amazon.com account, your Kindle becomes a brick. Users who have lost their Amazon.com account have turned on their Kindles to find they they can no longer read the books associated with their account and can no longer download any new content to their device. I don't plan on losing my Amazon.com account, but this is enough to keep me away. Lesson 2: If you have a fallout with Amazon.com, your device is a brick. You do not own the device, even though you paid for it. 3. Takesie-backsies. If you buy a book and that publisher decides to stop publishing that book, it typically has no effect on you. I have a number of out-of-print books on my bookshelf and I'm entirely confident that they will remain there until I disturb them. This is not the case with the Amazon Kindle. If a publisher decides to stop offering a book, Amazon.com removes it from your device on behalf of the publisher. Its as if they decided not to offer a book anymore so they came into your house and took it off of your bookshelf. Lesson 3: You don't own what you pay for. All of your content and the associated rights are still owned by Amazon and the Publisher. If they decide to alter the agreement or remove the rights they've bestowed upon you, they can do it at any time and with zero notice. As much as I like the idea of the Kindle, I could never buy one having learned these things. If I get an e-reader, I think I'll go with a sony. It doesn't have the content delivery system that the Kindle has, but its a slicker device and there's no question as to whether you own the device and the data on it.