Amazon’s Kindle has been selling out repeatedly since it launched a year ago, which is a genuine consumer success by any measure, and it is worth being honest about what buying a book for it actually gets you, because it is not quite what buying a paperback gets you.
A physical book, once bought, is simply yours. You can lend it, sell it, give it away, read it on a device with no battery at all, and it will still be readable in fifty years regardless of what happens to the shop that sold it to you.
A Kindle book is a license, wrapped in a file format that only Amazon’s own devices can open, protected by restrictions that prevent you from lending it to a friend the way you would hand over a paperback, from reselling it once you are finished, or from reading it on a competitor’s device should you ever want to switch. What you have paid for is permission to read it on hardware Amazon controls, for as long as Amazon continues supporting that hardware and that format, which is not a promise anyone has made in writing.
I do not think this makes the Kindle a bad product. The reading experience, by every account, is genuinely good; the wireless delivery is close to magical compared to anything that came before it; and for a certain kind of reader who buys a great many books and does not particularly care about lending or reselling them, the restrictions are close to invisible in daily use.
What I do think is that the industry is quietly redefining what buying a book means, without most customers noticing, because the interface still says buy and the transaction still feels like the one you have been making at a bookshop your entire life.
The honest label would be something closer to license than buy, and I don’t expect any retailer selling this way to volunteer that word, because it would slow down the purchase they are trying to make feel as familiar and frictionless as picking a paperback off a shelf.