The Amazon Kindle is an ebook reading computer that poses very serious dangers to society. When you purchase a Kindle, you are subject to Amazon's Digital Restriction Management (DRM), a system designed to take away rights you would typically have when reading a book.

Your basic rights to share, sell, or donate a book are subject to fights with Amazon over the legal and technological restrictions they try to impose. If you try to exercise these rights anyway, you might be violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) -- which could bring severe criminal penalties -- and Amazon can try to revoke your ability to use all the books you've bought.

After you read a physical book, you can give it to a friend or sell it. Not so with a Kindle book. You can donate a physical book to a library -- an institution whose purpose is to continue sharing it for as long as possible. The Kindle's DRM, however, is designed explicitly to prevent sharing and the public benefit that institutions like libraries provide.[1]

Amazon has a web page about e-book lending, which explains that only certain "lendable" books ("lendability" being determined by the publisher) can be lent at most one time, only within the United States, for a period of exactly 14 days. That's a pathetic (and failed) attempt to replicate what was always a very natural aspect of printed books.