Ever since Amazon released the Kindle, many people have asked me why I am not buying it in spite of being a geek who plays around with new shiny toys. My reasoning is simple. I just won’t trust Amazon Kindle with my books. For me, my books are a lifelong companion. If I have to move from the traditional world of books to ebooks, it should offer me the same kind of experience like the paper based books. When I talk about same kind of experience, I am not talking about formatting and the impact of fonts to my eyes etc.. I should be able to carry my ebooks to wherever I go. I should be able to read on any device I want like my Laptop, My mobile phone, my ebook reader, etc.. To do this, I want my books to be published in one of the open formats and I should be able to store the books on a local storage along with a cloud based storage as it is the case with Amazon Kindle. Amazon only offers a proprietary format for the books and the books can only be stored on Amazon servers. I basically buy the books but I don’t own them because Amazon exerts complete control on my books. If my Amazon Kindle breaks, I have no way to access my books except buy a new Kindle or buy an iPhone and use their Kindle application. Books are very important to me and I wouldn’t trust a proprietary format and complete Amazon control of the books.

Well, it appears my fears are with some merit. (more…)