Um, maybe it's not time for a Kindle after all.

Unfortunately the publishers decide how many licenses, that is devices, a book can be on at any one time. While most of the time that will be five or six different devices there will be times when it’s only one device.

At the present time there is no way to know how many devices can be licensed prior to buying the book.

In other words, if his information was accurate, and the runaround I got this afternoon does make me continue to wonder, once you purchase a book you will have access to it going forward...

You just may have some hoops to go through along the way.

Realistically, getting a Kindle isn't a high priority for me, especially not now that I've got my computer working again after jumping through a few hoops myself. At first I was impressed by Dell technical support, because a technician delivered and installed a new hard drive Tuesday afternoon, which seems pretty prompt. By Thursday or Friday I was pissed off at them, because while the new hard drive was working the Internet connection wasn't, but it turned out that I wasn't filling in the network key in the right place or something. So overall, good job Dell. (I had one blood pressure spike this weekend when my computer crashed again while playing WoW and I realized that the problem wasn't the old hard drive, or at least the crashes were a separate problem from the hard drive, and it must be the video card after all. I turned down my video settings - hindsight being 20/20, I didn't need them all set to the max, even if it does make the game prettier - and no problems since then. I sure as hell wish I had tried that two weeks ago.)

So, to summarize: about a week of hassle, at least partly my own fault, but it didn't cost anything except for the new external hard drive, which is the kind of thing I should be using anyway.

A related concern that the Kindle thing reminds me of, though, is that I haven't got around to checking on my iTunes music library in the files recovered from my old hard drive. Some of the songs were bought from iTunes and some were copied from the CDs of friends and family who are now in other states, so all in all, it would be a lot to lose. And I doubt the files are unrecoverable, but I really hope iTunes isn't too assholeish about using files on too many different devices. I had one computer when I was in college, I got a new one in 2005 when I graduated and I got this current computer as a gift to myself after I got my first paycheck at my current job in late 2008. I also used to have an iPod and still do use an iPod mini. If any of those iTunes files are older than 2005, then that's five different licenses right there, not counting this new hard drive...