Lies about Kindle

Standard

I just saw this article from the Financial Times.

With the Kindle and its sizeable e-book store, Amazon has established itself as the early market leader in the digital reader industry. Yet, it keeps the Kindle system “closed” – it only works with e-books bought from Amazon, and those e-books cannot be read on other e-readers. (emphasis mine)

This is utterly, totally, false, and it’s a lie I see all over the internet whenever people are trash-talking the Kindle.

You can get books from Amazon, you can get books from manybooks or feedbooks. You can read any unencrypted MOBI files. There are all sorts of free utilities available so you can convert from unsupported formats into supported formats.

You can even email a PDF book to amazon, and they’ll send it back to you in Kindle format for free.

I have had my Kindle for about a year and half. I’ve read maybe 40-50 books on it. Less than half of those have come from Amazon. The idea that Amazon is the only place you can get books for Kindle is ridiculous. If the people at FT had spend 5 minutes on google, they could have spared themselves the embarrassment of publishing idiotic rubbish as news.

4 thoughts on “Lies about Kindle

  1. Tomas

    Early market leader? Leader only in price.
    Functionality-wise best product is still the one from iRextechnologies.
    And I wouldn’t like anybody else to read my PDF before “converting” it to readable format for me. What if I’ve just created a PDF from confidential business documentation to read while on plane? Why should I send it via unencrypted public network to some company for unknown person to review?

  2. If you want to convert a PDF on your own computer, the MOBI tools can do that. I do that sometimes.

    From what I understand, the new Kindle DX lets your copy your PDFs over the USB interface and doesn’t require any conversion at all.

    I have heard good things about the iRex product, but I’ve never actually used one, so I can’t really speak intelligently about it. All the iRex models cost more than any Kindle, at least according to the prices on http://www.irexshop.com.

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