Rich forwarded me this article on Boing Boing regarding “Kindle Books having download caps” on content. That just shattered my enthusiasm.

A kind word of caution to Amazon: If you allow embedded Digital Rights Management content into Kindle media, your product will die. You are selling to early technology adopters, and history has confirmed they don’t tolerate DRM. It’s an anti-buyer technology, and the implementation requires (wrong) assumptions be made as to how a user want to use the device. History has also demonstrated that if you do push DRM with the content, the scheme will be broken, and people will do it just because they can.

If you are worried about getting content, and feel you need DRM to appease content owners of major publishing houses, don’t. This is a very cool device, and content will come from thousands of sources, and people will find ways to use it you never thought possible.

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