http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/04/kindle-readers.html
What's the right price for an e-book? No more than $10, says a group of Amazon Kindle e-book owners — and they have found a novel way to make themselves heard.
Some 250 Kindle readers are using Amazon's own book-tagging system to mark e-books priced more than $10 with the tag '9 99 boycott'. Their argument: A Kindle book is more restricted in its use than a paper book and therefore should not cost as much.
"It just doesn't seem right," says Crystal O'Brien, a Connecticut librarian who bought a Kindle last year.
For the last few days, O'Brien has spent a few minutes every day in the Kindle book store tagging the more expensive digital books with the '9 99 boycott' tag and removing it once the price drops below the threshold. (((Why not .99 cents, or, even, get paid to read the book. I fail to see why a 9.99 price point is remotely stable – especially if, thanks to electronic global financing, the *currency itself* is radically destabilized.)))
"You are not getting something you can lend out to other people, you are not getting a physical item," says O'Brien. "So you shouldn't have to pay so much for a digital copy." (((People with Kindles aren't "readers" any more than people demanding their own email on Prodigy, and eventually wrecking it, were "viewers." Wait till they start organizing online as "Kindlers" and building their own hardware-cracking manuals and broken-open-source piracy dumps.)))
The protesters are the latest in a long line of consumers to rebel against restrictive copy-protection technologies. Music lovers have been circumventing copy protection for decades, leading some labels to begin removing digital rights management (DRM) technology entirely. Film studios and consumers have clashed over copy protection in DVDs. Even iPhone apps are not immune from DRM-busting pirates.
As e-book sales have taken off, they may become the next copy-protection battleground. Last year, sales of e-books rose 68.4 percent from the year before to $113.2 million, even as overall book sales fell 2.8 percent, according to the Association of American Publishers. Much of that growth has been driven by the Kindle's popularity.
The Kindle reader revolt is likely to be little more than a minor annoyance for the fledgling e-book reader.... (((I wouldn't bet on that.)))
