If you didn’t notice, Amazon and Macmillan Publishing have been having a hissy fit over the price of books. Because of this argument, Amazon pulled all the books published by Macmillan off of their virtual shelves, with no announcement or reason made public.

I’d recommend you read John Scalzi’s most excellent post for the details. Since he lays this weekend’s events much better than I can, I’ll take it up a level and talk about the e-reader in general.

If the arguments against the e-reader sound familiar, it’s because they are. Everyone is trying to do with books what Apple did with music. Create a great device, put up a walled garden, and control all rights and access to that product from the inside. It was a bad idea with music, and even worse with books.

What can happen when you “buy in” to a Monopoly?

1) Your purchases can be revoked, at any time, without your permission. Overly dramatic? Nope. Amazon did this with – of all books – 1984 by George Orwell in July of last year.

2) You are locked into one store. - So Kindle owners starting this weekend, and continuing at the time of writing this, cannot buy any books from Macmillan Publishing, or subsidiaries. If you want to read anything from them on your e-reader, you are trapped. You paid upwards of $250.00 and still have to buy a big chunk of pulp to read what you want.

3) You are subject to being “released from support” – There will come a day when every e-reader out there reaches an end of life. What happens to your e-books when that happens? Will you have to repurchase them all? will you have to do an “upgrade conversion” to the next iteration of hardware? What if the company you contract with for the e-reader pulls an Enron and implodes? Since they are no longer around to manage the books’ digital rights, your unit just might become a doorstop.

4) Monopolies create price inflation – Your e-reader can only get books from one source. What’s stopping the e-book distributor for charging over fair market value for your book? What’s stopping them from keep raising that price?

Artist's rendering of Jeff Bezos

I’m not trying to pick on Amazon. It’s just that they are working their way down this list of hypotheticals and turning them into realities. They’ve completed items one and two. They are working on four, and three is yet to be seen.

An e-reader is an idea who’s time has come, but this device has to come from a third party, and has to be able to accept and read e-books from multiple different stores, and in a standard format. It must work with libraries and allow for lending. Until that device happens, which is looking less and less likely, I’m staying away.