Yesterday Mat Honan wrote a blog post for Gizmodo asking if Amazon (AMZN) was “letting publishers ruin the Kindle.” The blogger had trouble reading Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 across his array of mobile devices, and decided it was probably because the publisher of the book, Knopf, had decided to ruin the Kindle and restrict books to a single device. He failed to place a phone call to Knopf to see if the synching problem wasn’t due to some lightning storm in the humid Amazonian data cloud.
We suspected that publishing was probably not trying to sabotage its largest online retailer but we double-checked in case Gizmodo was actually on to something. “There seems to be some content in the post that’s wrong,” Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for Knopf, told us last night after we e-mailed him a link to the Gizmodo complaint. “It’s a problem with Amazon not with Random House.”
This is what the Gizmodo post looked like yesterday:
Now, I get it. This was mostly likely a publisher restriction. Amazon has been working so hard to push features into the Kindle, it would be foolish to kill that added value. But shame on you, Amazon, for going along with this. And double super secret shame on you for not better warning me that you were quashing my ability to easily read this book on multiple devices when I bought it. Look, Amazon, if some idiot at Knopf (and make no mistake: this is idiotic) wants to shit on your customers, you have a duty to tell us there is a turd on the way.
This is what it looks like now (it’s all crossed out, for those of you whose web browsers aren’t picking it up):
Now, I get it. This was mostly likely a publisher restriction. Amazon has been working so hard to push features into the Kindle, it would be foolish to kill that added value. But shame on you, Amazon, for going along with this. And double super secret shame on you for not better warning me that you were quashing my ability to easily read this book on multiple devices when I bought it. Look, Amazon, if some idiot at Knopf (and make no mistake: this is idiotic) wants to shit on your customers, you have a duty to tell us there is a turd on the way.
Conclusion: publishers do not want to ruin the Kindle.
