I Want an E-Reader - But Not Yet - Or Ever???

I have a wall full of books - mostly science fiction but lots of marketing and computer books as well. My wife and I have a lot more books and magazines scattered throughout the house - to the point where our sons are accusing us of being hoarders (the used and broken computers, tools, pieces of this and that and a LOT of cooking utensils are involved too - it's not just books.

All the talk about a new crop of E-readers at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this week has me almost drooling, almost but not quite.

The one I like the best - at least from the pictures and descriptions - is the Plastic Logic Que. This 1/3 inch thick, 8.5x11 touch screen unit is about the right size for my aging eyes and both light enough and durable enough that I expect it will stand up to the kind of abuse a household use would put it to. The Skiff Reader also looks like a winner to me - but the expected cost of this machine puts me off.

But more than price is putting me off. Virtually all these machines come bundled with proprietary agreements with publishers of one sort or another. I've completely lost my appetite for such products since Amazon removed purchased books from their Kindle after their customers had bought and paid for them. Yes, Amazon credited the accounts, but that's not the point. The point is that any E-reader I purchase will be MINE! I'll own it, I'll control it, and I'll put whatever I want (and presumably have paid for or written myself or found in the public domain) and no company will be able to affect what I have on my E-reader without a court order, just as with my physical book library!

There is in law (here in Canada and in many other countries) called First Sale Doctrine, which, although applied a lot to copyright items, applies to hardware and other physical items as well. It says that I, as the "first purchaser" (at retail) of an item, have complete control over what I may do with that item. I can take it apart, repurpose it, modify it, sell it, lend it, etc. The caveat here is that with some (many/all) computer items there are aspects of the "system" I purchase that I don't actually own - I license. These might include the operating system (Windows or some other), some proprietary software - the stuff that powers the E-reader touch screen for example, or some communications software and setup, the stuff that allows my E-reader to connect to a Cell Phone company's service.

This extra stuff is why I probably won't own an E-reader any time soon.

You see all of the interesting ones I've found, and most of the ones that have not yet been actually released to the public, will only be sold bundled with service agreements from some publisher or phone company or other business - and these businesses want 100% control over what I put on "their" machine - to the point where many such E-readers simply won't allow you to put your own stuff on them - and most won't allow you to purchase from other book vendors. And more - they won't allow you to move a purchased book off the E-reader to your PC or another E-reader!

Nope, I'm simply not playing that game and I urge you not to too.

richard