On Christmas Day, for the first time ever, customers purchased more Kindle books than physical books.
This is being echoed back incorrectly on many sites making it sound like
This Christmas season eBooks outsold print books.
Wrong! It was one single day. Christmas Day! The day many people opened their new Kindle and not unexpectedly, purchased an eBook. It's still impressive, but get it right.
It shocks me that so many people are willing to give up their consumer purchasing rights. Don't get me wrong. I want a Kindle. I just want to own what I spend my money on. As we've seen in the past, Amazon has control of the eBooks you purchase and at any time can remove them from your device.
Because they are copy protected, you give up your right as a consumer to ever switch to a different eBook reader without losing all of the eBooks you've purchased. Imagine if all the music CD's you bought over the years only played on one manufacturers CD player. Would you have invested in so many CD's if you knew they wouldn't play on a different brand of player?
When I buy a book and I'm done with it, I can resell it on Ebay or at my garage sale, I can lend it to a friend, I can donate it to a library. With an eBook? It sits on my device so I can brag, "I have 300 books right here in my hand." In other words, I have no ownership rights. The Barnes and Noble device, The Nook allows you to lend the eBook to someone with the same device for 2 weeks. A step in the right direction.
These issues have to be addressed. Don't be so quick to give up your rights of ownership.
