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As noted earlier, DRM does nothing to prevent piracy. It’s in place on the Kindle to provide proprietary lock-in for Amazon and a little hand-holding comfort for nervous publishers.  It serves to annoy and alienate potential paying customers. The Kindle has great potential as a device, but as long as Amazon continues to cripple it, readers would be advised to seek alternative e-book solutions.

hree centuries ago, John Locke agreed that we shouldn't base our freedom to read books on the proclaimed good offices of the business itself. "Books seem to me to be pestilent things," he wrote in 1704, "and infect all that trade in them...with something very perverse and brutal. Printers, binders, sellers, and others that make a trade and gain out of them have universally so odd a turn and corruption of mind, that they have a way of dealing peculiar to themselves, and not conformed to the good of society, and that general fairness that cements mankind."

The content is, also, free of editorial interference or commercial pressure. The model, enthusiasts say, has a unique ability to capture “the long tail” — providing useful information on a wide swath of esoteric subjects, like how to make pasta in a paper shredder.