I just purchased a book on Amazon to read on my ipad. Unfortunately, I have a number of different email addresses and I ended up using an email address that was different than the one I used to set up the Amazon app on my ipad. So the only way that I can read the book I just bought is to deregister the app with the old email, which will delete all the books that I currently have and then reregister with the new email address that I used. I did that and now have a single book in my ipad app, which is the one I just bought. If I want to get back the others, I have to repeat the process and go back to my old email address.

This is a fine example of why I dislike cloud services so much. If they would just let me download the damn books that I bought and handle saving them myself, I’d be fine. Yes, there’s the possibility that I could accidentally delete a book that I bought. If that happened, I’d be upset with myself for being an idiot, but I could accept that and realize that I’d have to repurchase it if I wanted it again. With cloud services, I never feel like I have the books I bought. I’m just renting them and I don’t like that idea.

Ebook readers are ok, but I’m still not an enormous fan of them. I don’t buy many ebooks on Amazon (which is why I didn’t realize I’d used a different email to register the app) and after this experience, I’m going to be much more wary in doing so. I will say that I buy a large number of ebooks having to do with computers and I fear I’ve become too accustomed to the treatment I’ve received from them. An fine example of a company doing things right is Pragmatic Programmers. There, I can buy an ebook and download a pdf file, which I use on my laptop. I can also download other formats that I can use to put the book on my ipad. It’s really the best of both worlds and I’m a huge fan. Amazon, on the other hand, is someplace I’m planning on avoiding in the future, if possible.