Good PDF books store their stuff as text. That's a part of the PDF format. If I download a book as a PDF, when I move it onto the Kindle using their free conversion that costs me nothing and takes less than a minute, it appears as beautiful formatted text, like magic. Almost like the PDF format is designed to be flexible enough to adjust to other mediums.

First off, never underestimate the public domain. The funniest and greatest books ever written are all public domain. Hell, it's worth it to get the complete Shakespeare in accessible format alone. Meanwhile, most .lit sales come with no DRM whatsoever. Opening my Kindle right now, the following files are on the front page: A Confederacy of Dunces, one of the funniest books ever written; My Man Jeeves, ditto; Infinite Jest, one of the great novels of the 90s; The Woman Who Rides Like A Man, a young adult novel from an author I'm nostalgic for; Ulysses, the greatest novel of all time; 2BRO2B, by Vonnegut; the complete Shakespeare; Neuromancer, The Bible, and It's Not News, It's Fark.

Over half of those books were completely free.

Only one of those books has DRM, and - as I stated elsewhere - that DRM is already crackable. I could email you that book this afternoon and you could read it on your Kindle, if you really felt like reading the Fark book. The other ones are entirely open. I have something that's the size of a paperback book that has more literature on it than the rest of my sizable portable library.

I've defended the Kindle again and again from uninformed commenters here - with all respect to you, you're falling into this category and worse, because you're so over-the-top about it in your blog. I will quickly summarize why the Kindle is more valuable to me than my iPod is. If I want to go to New York City for a day, it's a 4-hour transit round trip. I read extremely quickly. I could carry three books with me, or I could carry my Kindle and have, as was stated, a full library. Furthermore, I can browse the Internet. Check my email. Download books on-the-go. Download samples of books. If I download a sample of The Complete Sherlock Holmes, that includes two books' worth of samples, for free, in 30 seconds, wherever I am, with easily-unlocked DRM.

The free books alone are worth it. I'm going to be elitist here and say that if you don't think getting, completely free, access to the works of Joyce and Yeats and Elliot and Orwell and Melville and Homer and the complete Greek and Egyptian and Norse mythos, is worth the price of 40 paperback books, you are insane. This device has saved me an incredible amount of money and it's given me access to literature I wouldn't have had access to in any other form. I got old books that I'd read decaying at my library onto my Kindle in much more pristine condition. I got a collection of rare Asimov books that are out of print.

You very obviously haven't used a Kindle, and you even more obviously haven't put thought into just what makes the Kindle good - that or, worse, you're ignoring those points just to be a shill to those people who will mindlessly attack anything with DRM. I don't want to offend, because it's really not worth a fight over, but this was a senseless, sensationalized article that attacks something that's brought a lot of joy into my life, and I think that your implications are both personally offensive and entirely irrelevant to this web site, and I'm flagging your article.