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Amazon's new world-beating gadget isn't the savior of the e-book, genre. It's a proprietary, market-protecting anomaly in a world of increasingly open standards and accessible media. Shame on you, Amazon. (...) The thing that e-books need, I'm convinced, is PDF. Secure, reflowable, customizable PDF. The reader devices need to be easy on the eyes, lightweight, and allow users to shunt any PDF to it, whether it's a specially formatted e-book or not. If I am paying $300+ for essentially a document storage device on steroids, I need to be able to put my own junk on it, too. (...)You might be lining your own pockets and making a few sales, Mr. Bezos, but you're also promoting confusion in the marketplace and causing division in the e-book space at a time when everyone else is pushing for convergence and open standards. Thanks for nothing.

Are you tired of constantly being prompted to download proprietary software and plugins to play the videos and listen to the music you want?

This conference has been designed by school leaders and others in the Open Source Schools' community to showcase to school leadership teams the best of educational free and open source software whether used alone or blended with proprietary software.

Time and again, the Author's Guild has shown itself to be the epitome of a venal special interest group, the kind of grasping, foolish posturers that make the public cynically assume that the profession it represents is a racket, not a trade. This is, after all, the same gang of weirdos who opposed the used book trade going online. I think there's plenty not to like about the Kindle -- the DRM, the proprietary file format, both imposed on authors and publishers even if they don't want it -- and about Amazon's real audiobook section, Audible (the DRM -- again, imposed on authors and publishers even if they'd prefer not to use it). But if there's one thing Amazon has demonstrated, it's that it plans on selling several bazillion metric tons of audiobooks. They control something like 90 percent of the market. To accuse them of setting out to destroy it just doesn't pass the giggle-test.

Closely aligned to the DRM issue is that there are a multiplicity of e-book formats, many of which cannot be read on other devices. As with DRM, consumer frustration is bound to arise if readers have to jump through hoops to read legally purchased books. This is perhaps not a problem at the moment, when the bulk of e-reader owners are early adopters, yet it will become more acute when the devices are more widely disseminated among less tech-savvy users. As Kassia Krozser, co-founder of medialoper.com who writes widely on digital entertainment issues, blogs on her publishing site Booksquare.com: "DRM, as implemented now, does not deter piracy. It does deter reading." She later reminds publishers that "your customers (again: the ones who give you money) don't read on one device, on one operating system, in one location. As you move forward with your digital initiatives, think about how real people read books."

Copyrights and Accommodations Although there are numerous technical and financial challenges to making course content accessible, the implications of the restrictive copyright that comes along with the use of proprietary content may present challenges that are frequently overlooked. Various forms of accommodation require the creation and distribution of derivative works, which is a restriction that comes along with the default copyright license. On the up side, the materials in question may include intellectual property created and owned by the faculty member and/or educational organization offering the course, in which case you and the learner may be lucky, relatively speaking. If you had the foresight to create accessible versions of all course media, you are home free. If not, your primary questions may be simply how to find the resources and tools to create accessible versions of these items in a timely fashion, which is a technical and financial issue.

What's really at stake with Kindle is Amazon's desire to re-invent itself as a company where the buying and selling of retail goods is not an end in itself but also a means by which to obtain valuable client data. In a more abstract sense, Amazon.com is actively producing laboring subjects in and around an everyday practice-the reading of books and periodicals-which to my knowledge has never shared as direct a relationship to economically productive activity as it does with Kindle.

All you really need to know about the dangers of digital commodification you learned in kindergarten.\n\nThink back. Remember swapping your baloney sandwich for Jell-o pudding? Now, imagine handing over your sandwich and getting just a spoon.\n\nThat's one trade you'd never make again.\n\nYet that's just what millions of Americans are doing every day when they read "books" on Kindle, Amazon's e-reading device. In our rush to adopt new technologies, we have too readily surrendered ownership in favor of its twisted sister, access.

Unless Amazon embraces open standards, the Kindle's lead will become a very short story.