Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Annotating is disabled for sample content

You fail me again, Amazon.com.  You fail me again.  Here I am, trying to be good.  Sampling a real book.  Thinking about buying.  Reading the first chapter.  Enjoying it.  Then I want to highlight a good passage.  There's a good chance I'll buy this book.  I'm a potential customer.  What am I greeted with:

Annotating is disabled for sample content

This is not the way to treat people.  I could spread awareness about the book by tweeting out a quote.  I could be well served as a customer by being able to annotate the first chapter and then transfer my annotations to a paid version of the book.  Why?  Why, Amazon.com, must you allow the foolish publishers to block access to the very tools that make e-reading the future?  Why must you allow them to stand in the way?  Why treat your users like this?  There is no DRM on pirated content.  Why must you continue to make paid content inferior?