Justin Hampton at The Bookloft

The Peking University Group's inevitable Kindle clone

Well, lookee here, a bootleg Kindle 2, coming from the Chinese, no less!

That’s right, in keeping with all the great knockoff Gucci sunglasses and Yves-Saint Laurent handbags these guys love throwing our way, they’ve finally cracked the code on Amazon’s newest tech toy, according to Gizmodo this Sunday. It should be out in 2009, and it’s called WeFound. Lots of silly, geeky speculation abound on the name’s origin, but I don’t traffic in that sort of thing myself.

Somebody had to do it, especially overseas, which apparently has been totally ignored by Amazon in its marketing strategies. I’ve been telling Eric here at the Bookloft that someone desperately needs to come up with an open-source eBook reader (maybe call it a WeBook Reader. I’m sure the Peking University Group, who created WeFound, won’t mind.), and that independent booksellers need to get behind it. Boing-Boing recently reposted the Amazon Kindle 2 contract care of the Science Fiction And Fantasy Writers Association’s (admittedly non-legal) interpretation, which I’ll discuss, hopefully with some professional commentary, in a future post. Suffice it to say that no one benefits from a monopoly on information, or the means to access it. I mean, really, where is the Internet on this?

I have yet to hear all of the commentary on this, though my favorite so far comes from a oh-so-smart guy from the peanut gallery poo-poohing the messenger of this news:

“Hell, with your [press] contacts you could even drop an email over to eInk to ask if their patent has been infringed and if so, are they going to sue?”

Yeah, sue the Chinese for patent/copyright infringement. Maybe even do a class action with the RIAA while you’re at it, too. Good luck with that.