a few things. First, you do make good points about the free books but as I've said before the vast majority of the free books out there, including public domain, simply do not interest me. Yes, Shakespeare would be nice, but I've already got the complete works sitting on my bookshelf. Project Gutenberg has made tons of books available for years now and so far I've availed myself of exactly one of them.

I have no interest in cracking someone else's drm to get a book on a Kindle, and the vast majority of the books i read simply can't be purchased in PDF format so even if PDFs do convert beautifully it is an irrelevant fact.

You say I "obviously haven't used a kindle" but I actually have. I haven't owned a kindle, but considering the title that should have been fairly obvious. I have put a lot of thought into what makes a kindle good. I've been jonesing for an e-book reader since I first read about the invention of e-ink years ago. I really want to like it. But, even ignoring the DRM, the kindle 1 had a number of physical & software flaws that would have prevented me from buying it. I'm not sure how well those have been addressed in the 2 but the DRM and economic issues precludes me from particularly caring.

But, you are very mistaken if you think I am "a shill to those people who will mindlessly attack anything with DRM". I have no problem with the iPod even though it supports DRM because I can buy the music I want and put it on one without purchasing DRMd copies of it. I would not, however, buy anything from iTunes in their Pre DRM days, and to suggest that what attacks I do levy against DRM are mindless only implies your ignorance of the problems with DRM. Apple charged people a second time to un-DRM music they'd already bought. Microsoft sold millions of DRM'd songs in a format they then abandoned and will never be supported on a new device. However, there are uses of DRM that I don't mind in the least. For example netflix streaming movies are DRMd. I am not purchasing them. I am only being granted very temporary rights to watch them. Because I don't own it, I feel I have no right to expect to be able to back it up, or even to view it in the first place, so I will let them drm it all they want. If it goes away or is never playable again I've lost nothing.

If I could purchase the books I want to read and put them on the kindle without DRM (like i can songs on the iPod) I would have zero issues with it. BUT the book marketplace is such that there is no reliable way for me to do so. I don't know how many of the .lit books you mention are actually non-drm but I suspect that a small percentage of the ones I would buy. What's worse is that there's frequently no mention of if one has DRM on it or not. Take [this book](http://www.diesel-ebooks.com/cgi-bin/category.cgi?item=14295...) for example. Is it DRMd? Who can say? I can't, and thus I won't buy it.

As for it being a "sensationalized article". It was a post about why I personally won't buy a kindle, and why I think it's a bad idea on a personal blog. If I had of wanted to be sensationalist I could have done a much better job and would have insinuated that Amazon was evil and that we should boycott them and so on and so forth. Instead I gave reasons why I won't buy their product that they will hopefully take to heart when considering the Kindle 3. Also, I happily give them thousands of dollars a year without hesitation even though they make a product I don't happen to like that utilizes a technology I am opposed to.

As for flagging the article I think it's totally out of line for three reasons
1) you started reading it knowing full well what the opinion contained within it would be because it was obvious from the title. If you were offended by that opinion you have no-one to blame but yourself. It's like suggesting you're offended by Muslims and proceeding to read the Koran. Remember the old joke? "Doctor. It hurts when I do this." to which the doctor replies "Well don't do that." It's actually good advice.

2) I'm not the one that posted the article here, so while you may have been offended by my words your actions in flagging the article will have no effect on your perceived offender. Also, I never suggested that my opinion on the kindle was relevant to this site, although the impact that DRM has on purchasing decisions like mine most certainly is, and this article provides a good example of that impact.

3) the fact that you found it "personally offensive" is again entirely your own fault. There was no personal attack against you or against any individual in that article. Nor, were there any implications that any person was bad for purchasing it. I even updated the article early in the day to reiterate a good point one of the commenters left about it being a good economic idea for computer books that would obsolete themselves long before the DRM became an issue. If you are offended by the fact that someone has negative opinions about a device you happen to like you are in for a lifetime of pain, because it's relatively safe to say there's at least one person in the world who will take issue with some aspect of essentially every object you own.