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Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo posted on Saturday about the apparent death of his Kindle.

Although I have been thinking on and off about getting a Kindle myself, my knee-jerk response was “See, that would never be a problem with a *real* book.” That’s a stupid reply, though. “Real” books can get lost, left in airports and coffee shops, and damaged to the point of unreadability, and there are plenty of other bits of technology that we carry around and rely upon which can break. Sure, it’s annoying when my phone stops working, but I don’t point my finger at it and start yelling about how it was all so much better when we had telegraphs.

I have read plenty of critiques of the Kindle and other e-book readers that complain about its form factor, or how these devices will never manage to replicate the mystical relationship people seem to have with ink on paper. I fail to find these objections compelling. During the last few trips I have taken, I would have been more than happy to be carrying around a light-weight e-reader instead of an 800-page paperback.

The question that came to my mind a few minutes after reading Josh’s post was, “What happens to all his books now?” My guess/hope is that he replaces his broken Kindle, connects the new one to his Amazon account, and hey presto! Everything is there, just like it was before. Still, that question is what troubles me about the Kindle—the lock-in to Amazon’s service. I buy a bunch of Kindle-edition books from them, and then I’m dependent upon them maintaining support for the service and for my device. While that might sound like a good bet, I’m sure all the people stuck with unusable media due to abandoned DRM schemes or vendors who have gone out of business might say otherwise.