I am a gadget guy so it is with great restraint that I have up to this point not purchased one of Amazon's new ebook readers the Kindle. Now I am a big fan of Amazon I order books and music from them all of the time. I am even an Amazon Prime member so that I get two day shipping.

That being said when the Kindle was announced I was uncomfortable with the vendor lock in and copy protection schemes that are built in to the device. For one if you purchase a paper real world book you can read it then resell the book, loan it to a friend, or even donate it to a library or school. With the Kindle that is not allowed you can neither loan the purchased ebook, resell it, nor donate it. Also the only vendor you can purchase ebooks from for the Kindle is Amazon so you are 100% locked in to Amazon as your ebook vendor and that is never a good thing as competition is necessary to keep any company on their toes. So it is for these reasons that as a gadget lover I have avoided picking one of these up.

It turns out it is actually worse than I had imagined. The copy protection schemes and powers given to the publishers via the Kindle is quite draconian. They have the ability to remotely turn off certain features for certain books. For example one of the features of the Kindle is it's ability to read the book aloud to you as in text to speech which might come in handy in the car or if you have vision problems. The LA Times blog reports that Amazon have allowed publishers to turn this feature off for certain books. Presumably the publishers are interested in protecting their audio book sales.

Well today it is being reported that Amazon has allowed a publisher to take away ebooks from people that had already bought them. The publisher in this case decided they did not want to have these particular books in the ebook format after all and so Amazon remotely deleted these books from peoples devices and credited their accounts. The books in question are George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm the irony is unbelievable.

The problems with so called digital rights management or DRM is that inevitably the publishers can't help but to abuse their new found powers and it is always we the consumer that pays the price.Be it not being able to play your legally purchased music from the iTunes store on a non Apple device. Or an online music store closes and you lose access to your purchased music files. Inevitably it is only the honest consumer that is hassled while the pirates are still happily trading illicit files on bit torrent. And yet the publishers are still trying to devise ways to gain even more control over the way we consume media. The way to prevent these sorts of shenanigans is to not play until they learn to play fair avoid these DRM schemes whenever possible.