chrismeadows2Chris Meadows, our new editor, spoke out on e-books, DRM, TeleRead and lots else this week, as a guest on The Kindle Chronicles podcast.

Hosted by Len Edgerly, TKC is one of my favorite podcasts. Editor-in-Chief Juli Monroe has been on twice (here and here).

A veteran e-booker, Chris goes back to the days of reading on Palm PDAs, and he started at TeleRead around 2007. During the podcast, he nicely summed up our approach to e-book coverage. E-books are a core topic, yes. But we look beyond—especially to  mobile-tech-related developments  that might help or hurt e-book-lovers. For example, how about security threats to the Android phone that may store hundreds and perhaps thousands of your e-books?

About DRM, Chris told Len: “Even if all the publishers remove DRM from every e-book  they sell tomorrow, I would bet the vast majority of Amazon Kindle customers would go right on being Amazon Kindle customers, just because it’s so easy to tap the button and start reading the book.”

Exactly. What keeps so many e-book-lovers in the Amazon fold, as I see it, would be low prices of some well-promoted books, along with a huge selection. Not to mention at least a very minor factor: Amazon’s DRM being easier to crack for personal use than the “protection” offered by rival e-stores. Of course, if Amazon really wants to cut to the chase, it’ll aggressively learn on publishers to cut out DRM entirely or rely on other techniques such as social DRM.

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