Why I will not buy a Kindle

[owlmoose]

Or any other electronic book reader, as long as the issues of DRM and right of first sale and all the other copyright/ownership issues relating to ebooks are this unsettled:

Amazon deletes bought-and-paid for books from Kindles.

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

If I buy a book, I want to know that I own it. Bad enough that I can't sell or lend an ebook, under most terms of use; I can't even be sure that I'll be allowed to keep it? Again from the article:

...it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.

By the way, you'll never guess who the author was: George Orwell. Of course. Life imitating art yet again.