According to an article over at the Consumerist, an Amazon Kindle owner recently found his access to the Kindle service revoked because, unrelated to his Kindle, he had ordered and returned too many books. You know, the dead-tree variety?

The Kindle is specifically designed only to be usable with the Amazon Kindle service (you can't get e-books from other sources without hacking the device), so without this service, you can't get new books, you can't restore books that you've bought to a newer device, and you are basically hosed.

This is on top of last-week's protests over the Kindle's text-to-speech capability being killable at a publisher's whim, leaving vision-impaired Kindle owners in the dark.

Say no to this sort of power-grab. Only buy real, physical books, unless the e-book is DRM-free. Then, apparently, get them from someplace other than Amazon until they get this stuff straightened out. The music industry has finally learned this (and, ironically, Amazon sells DRM-free music), now, apparently, we need to teach the book industry.