To Kindle, or to Nook: THAT is the eQuestion

The Better-Than-Kindle Nook? But only one (dodgy) online retailer selling it in the UK.

I have a love-hate relationship with books as physical objects. 

Or to be more precise: a love-sadness relationship. Having had to "let go" of thousands of books at certain times in my somewhat peripatetic life, I am keenly aware that whilst books do furnish a room, they can also become (en-masse) a Sisyphean boulder requiring constant pushing up ramps into removal vans, and paying of monthly storage fees to house them.

When I'm considering buying a book, my first thought (after "I want you-oo", crooned Elvis-Costello-like in the direction of the tome) is how many kilos it's going to add to a suitcase or a cardboard box marked "BOOKS" being hoiked up a ladder into someone's loft. A good part of my motivation to gift a first edition of Infinite Jest to a friend for his birthday recently, was carrying that 3.25 kg mass in a shoulder bag on my daily commute, noticing the musculo-skeletal wear and tear of this devotion after a month or so.

Thus, perhaps more than anyone I know, I am socially, economically, demographically, and most importantly psychologically primed to have/be an eReader. Yes, I love the feel and look of books, but the sheer unburdened freedom of being able to carry a whopper (or hundreds of whoppers) around with me on an object that weighs less than a couple of Mars bars, is an almost incontrovertible selling point.

So why haven't I bought one yet?

Well, I am worried about giving Amazon lock, key and sole proprietorship of all the texts I choose to purchase from them hereon in. You've probably heard Amazon Agnostics already espousing on the subject in a similar anti-monopolistic vein. Why should Amazon become, as they are threatening to become, the main purveyors of the entirety of our lexical culture?

But mainly I'm worried about Amazon's Kindle and its AZW format in which all its books are encoded. I am worried that Kindle may truly become "the only show in town", as one publisher recently described the lightweight Über Object to me. Once upon a time VHS was the only show in town, but where is it now? 

Maybe I'm just not getting it, but I simply can't understand why readers would choose to lock themselves into an Amazon eStockade, when one day they might like to read all their books off something other than a Kindle: maybe the palm of their hands, or on a piece of toast. 

If you buy Amazon, you are enslaved to Amazon. If you buy your books as generic ePubs (which can be read on any other eReader, apart from Kindle), you are "free". Free to convert the files to whatever format you need for whatever reader you have, free to share files with friends, the way you might share books with friends, not in anyway enslaved to a huge multinational corporation which is fast becoming, Walmart-like, a one stop shop for everything and anything and sod anyone else who might like a slice of the pie.

So why aren't more people/retailers expressing interest in the just-as-good-if-not-better-than-Kindle Nook or Kobo eReaders (I've had a nightmare buying a Nook off the awful Purely Gadgets, the only UK distributor of the device so far)? And why are most of the small publishers I approach spinning the Kindle-Is-The-Only-Show-In-Town yarn, when it clearly isn't, or shouldn't be?

Could this have anything to do with Amazon's loss-leading push of their reading devices, their gargantuan advertising budgets promoting their eReader as the only eReader you'll ever need, the way the God Marines sold Christianity to the "natives" in the 16th century?

I am genuinely surprised that the zeitgeist (especially from publishers I've talked to) seems to be one of completely swallowing the hype and signing on to become a Lifelong Vassal of Amazon Inc.

Borges' Infinite Book is almost within our grasp, and it is probably in the shape of an eReader. But do we want our sole access to it to be dependent on one man with a slightly unsettling laugh? 

Not me.