I have no specific reason to believe that much beyond the general suspicion of DRM and all connected to it.
Can anybody suggest more concrete reasons why putting this particular app on a personal machine might not be a good idea?
Or is the consensus on the matter that suspicions are unwarranted?
If I wanted it, I would use it, regardless of DRM (which has never bothered me in the slightest).
I have no idea what DRM is, but I am LOVING my Kindle app as well as my Nook app. I will however have to give in and actually get a Kindle or Nook because my laptop is not very snuggly for comfy chair or bed reading.
My nearest bookstore is 2 hrs away and I have run out of room for more books. I am in danger of dying in a book avalanche. These apps have pulled me back from the brink of chaos and misery. Plus I can’t get over all the free books available. Now the kids can have shoes and I can read. Wonders never cease.
I have Kindle for PC on both my computers.
I also have strong firewall software on my PCs, and I can tell you for certain that Kindle only sends information to Amazon when you allow it to sync; the rest of the time it is silent, so it definitley isn’t spying on you. When you sync, it sends a few bytes; it definitley isn’t sending copies of your DRM-free books to Amazon for investigation.
DRM = Digital Rights Management, AKA copy protection.
Buy a Kindle, you will not regret it. No more piles of books, you can carry hundreds of books in your pocket, and they’re simply the best thing since typesetting was invented. And e-ink screens are much better than computer screens for prolonged reading.
<Singing off key, badly> I know what I want for Mother’s Day!
Tell your family that some random guy on the internet insisted on it. 
Amazon can and has* erased books from their customer’s Kindles without their permission. Remember; you do not actually own the books on your Kindle. you just have access rights. Unlike a book on your shelf that you actually own, they can and have revoked those rights if they decide to. And I can’t help but wonder what will happen to that access if Amazon goes under, or with companies using similar versions of DRM. The RIAA for example has taken the position that customers have no right to expect permanent access to creative works; as far as they are concerned if the store you bought from goes out of business and your library goes dead, tough luck.
Under the circumstances, I’m sticking with paper books that will remain mine unless someone knocks down my door and burns them personally.
*Orwell books they discovered they didn’t have a right to, and books mentioning incest - that’s what they’ve been caught at, who knows what they’ve done that they haven’t been caught at.
I strip the DRM from all my ebooks, because that way I can back them up, convert into any format I wish, and own them in the same way I own my dead-tree books. DRM is a legitimate concern, but it’s also easily fixed, nothing to freak out over.
As I said above, I’ve monitored the Kindle app, it does not send information back to Amazon beyond (as far as I can tell) a list of titles. Certainly the upload is a matter of a few kilobytes, no more than a paragraph of text’s worth. They certainly haven’t interfered with my many ebooks, all of which are stripped of DRM and converted to MOBI.
While they could delete books they sold you, they can only do it if you leave the DRM on and don’t have backups. They can’t delete my books; even if they could send a self-destruct message to my Kindle, I have DRM-free backups stored in several different locations, along with the rest of my backups of data I don’t wish to lose.
I’ll say it again: both my actual Kindle and my copies of Kindle for PC are full of DRM-free books, and Amazon hasn’t touched them and can’t delete them. Once the DRM is gone, the books are just as much yours as any print copy. More so, since you can’t have multiple backups of a dead-tree book without buying multiple copies.
I wouldn’t get a Kindle or a nook. The lone exception being a nook Color. Devices that are specialized and do one thing are going to die out. You’re better off with your phone, a laptop, a netbook, or a tablet.
For things that I want to have forever, I buy paper. When Modernist Cuisine is available again, I’m sure as hell not going to license electrons. On the other hand, for things that I pay for that I don’t give a crap about, but yet want to keep access to, I pirate or strip DRM. Probably not legal, but I don’t care. I’ll use it how I want to use it, and that’s tough.
That was an unusual circumstance when it turned out that Amazon didn’t have the right to sell the items in the first place. And it only happened the one time.
No it didn’t; I point out at least two examples in the very quote you posted.
Then life will not be worth living.
The only book that Amazon pulled from the Kindle device was 1984 – they have since apologized for their actions and stated their policy not to do this again. The other books to which you refer were pulled from sale by Amazon, meaning that you can no longer purchase them. They were not pulled from anyone’s Kindle.
Not only that, but the second book is back up for sale on Amazon.
I go one step further. I buy the paper books, and then download an online copy in a format I know doesn’t contain viruses. As far as I’m concerned, I’m just converting the book into a format more convenient for my personal use, just like I would with music from a CD or whatever. I’m still using my implied license to the content.
At some point, I hope that real books will usually come with digital (and perhaps audio) versions. I think the current DVD/Blu-Ray model is brilliant. (Although using a single disk would be better.)
I believe what it’s sending is your position in the e-books you’re reading. So if you start reading a Kindle book (that you bought from Amazon) on one device, you can pick up where you started on a different device.
What does this even mean? With a book on your shelf, you own the paper and ink it’s made of, but the words aren’t yours to do whatever you want with. With an e-book, you own the… electrons? magnetic blips? it’s made of.
And your contention that they can and would revoke access rights that you legitimately have is just wrong. Other posters have already pointed out what’s wrong with the examples you cite.
This just sounds paranoid. How could they have done something like this without anyone noticing?
Yeah, that’s why you shouldn’t buy a corkscrew when you can get a Swiss army knife.
That’s why you can no longer buy a dishwasher that doesn’t also open cans and make smoothies, and why toothbrushes that only brush teeth have been superceded by ones that also pluck nose hairs.
Not if you want to do a lot of reading, you’re not. Dedicated e-readers have two advantages over the devices you mention—advantages that some people find huge and other people find insignificant: (1) A screen that some people find much easier to read text on, especially for long periods of time, and (2) a much longer battery life.