Amazon’s ebook license a scam, says Doctorow
14 January 2010 = Moby Lives

The very cool new blog at Mediabistro.com, eBookNewser, points us to an interesting piece by Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing about buying ebooks from Amazon.

Says Doctorow:

When Amazon “sells” you a Kindle ebook, they don’t really sell it to you. If you read the fine-print, you’ll see that they’re waving their hands furiously and declaring that you aren’t “buying” the book, but rather “taking a license to a limited set of uses” for the book. Whereas a book that you buy comes with all kinds of rights, such as the right to sell or give the book away (Jeff Bezos: “[W]hen someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.“) a book that you license from Amazon comes with a very small subset of those rights, as defined by a lengthy and difficult-to-grasp “license agreement.”

Except, says Doctorow, “most of us know that this is a scam… It’s such a silly notion that even Amazon can’t keep its story straight. Take this press-release in which Amazon trumpets that its ‘customers purchased more Kindle books than physical books.’ Purchased, not ‘licensed.’”
n short, “It’s a rip-off, pure and simple,” says Doctorow. “I won’t buy any of Amazon’s digital offerings until they clean up their act and deliver the same customer rights to e-goods buyers as they do to hard-goods buyers.”