Reviews for the Kindle seem to pop up from some of the most unexpected people. One new response to the Kindle DX comes from David Byrne, the front man of the legendary Talking Heads (and one half of the duo responsible for last years phenomenal Everything That Happens Will Happen Today). It might seem a little odd to hear gadget commentary from Byrne, but when you’re a world famous performer you do a lot of traveling. The Kindle DX simply seemed like the ideal traveler’s accessory.
His review is for the most part positive. Byrne likens the Kindle’s screen to the same quality as a black and white newspaper and perfectly suited for reading. He raves about magazines on the device and how he can read the New Yorker without ads and with the latest issue wirelessly appearing on his Kindle. Byrne does have a few gripes about Amazon’s proprietary format, however, and takes some time in his review to decry how closed off the platform is and his overall disapproval of DRM.
More interesting is his speculation for the Kindle’s future. Byrne predicts that it won’t be long before the format is broken open and future of digital book publishing will involve formats with less DRM restrictions or none at all just as it happened with digital music market with Apple, Microsoft and Amazon selling DRM-free MP3 files.
Something rarely mentioned about Amazon’s supposedly closed shop is that the Kindle will display non-drm documents in great profusion. Mobi, prc, txt are all displayed natively and documents can be either obtained in these formats or easily converted to a format the Kindle can display. I have over 1000 books and with the exception of the free books at the Amazon store I have paid for less than 20 of them from Amazon. I have purchased from others who offer drm free books, mainly Baen, feedbooks and SteveJordanBooks. I suggest one not throw out the baby with the bath water, if you don’t like DRM then don’t buy them. You can still be kept reading for the rest of your life without it.