‘Welcome to the Mutually Incompatible, Silo-Based, Platform-Dependent and User-Unfriendly Future of Books.’

Mathew Ingram on the e-book landscape:

As we’ve described before, Apple and Amazon come at the e-book market from different perspectives: Apple sees books as just another form of content that it can use to sell iPads and other devices, whereas Amazon sees devices like the Kindle and the Kindle Fire as ways it can lock people into its content ecosystem and sell them more books, movies and so on. But both are dependent on having users locked into their products, and so they make it as difficult as possible to move from one to the other.

This is pretty much why I was so down on DRM e-books all along, and why I like Nick Carr’s idea to bundle e-books as downloads that accompany good old-fashioned printed books.

★ Friday, 2 March 2012