Thanks for a well-reasoned first-hand account.

So I guess we agree on most of these points: e-books are great; DRM, not so much. And I think most of what you've said would apply to all of the readers reviewed (not sure about #5).

My lament about the review (and many MANY others I have read) is that it seems to heavily review physical form factor, page turn speed, button design, et cetera. All of which are important to some degree. But I think that degree has been overemphasized and is a distraction.

Whereas really, when you adopt one of these (let's take sideloading, DRM cracking etc. out of the picture for the moment), you adopt at least:

- A physical device (covered extensively)
- A store infrastructure
- Its payment system & trustworthiness, flexibility, etc thereof
- Parental controls and/or spending limits
- The DRM scheme(s) for the content it provides (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Rights_Management#E-books)
- The license(s) under which the content is available
- The format of the content (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-book_formats)
- For periodicals: Access and deletion policies around back issues
- The ability of the provider to give you good prices and a wide range of titles, periodicals, etc.
- Provider policies about content sharing, family usage, et cetera
- The device's ability to integrate with public libraries
- The device's ability to integrate with 3rd party service providers (the review touches on this with respect to Instapaper)
- The set of formats the device will read
- Your ability to get content you paid for on and off of the device

And probably a bunch of other things I don't know about.

So to me, what is under-reviewed is the way in which consumers get to buy, trade, sell, borrow, lend, and use the content. That seems to me to matter much more.

I spent this year buying a lot of $7 Agatha Christie e-books on various e-book stores and reading them on the respective apps on my phone (which is psychotic because each app has its own horrible quirks). I came away wondering if I would have been better off buying the $10 paperbacks, just so that I can physically distribute these books. (Aside: US copyright law is not helping here: "Murder on The Orient Express" will not leave copyright protection until 2046, 112 years after initial publication.)

As others in this thread have mentioned, you don't have to buy books through Amazon. That lets you potentially sidestep the DRM issue depending on the availability of what you like to read.

Two thoughts: First, from a user experience perspective, it basically sucks. I can buy an e-book on the Kindle Store/Nook Store/Kobo Store while sitting on a train, while trying to fall asleep, on the beach, etc. So convenience and immediacy has clear and tangible value.

Second, from a business perspective, lots of people side-loading helps to create incentives for e-book retailers to create exclusive deals either with publishers or authors (clearly, there are other reasons for these deals as well). This happened last year (http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2010/08/agent-ama...) although to a lesser degree than Mr. Wylie would have liked. AFAICT, if I want to read the ebook for "The Naked and the Dead" (Mailer) my sole choice is to get it through the Kindle store.

Sorry for the explosion in length.