Tech-Unfriendly Cafes Say No Kindles Allowed

theodp writes "At the risk of pulling-a-Groupon, I have a dream that one day my children will not be judged by their e-readers, but by the content of their character. The NY Times' Virginia Heffernan complains that many indie New York City cafes now heavily restrict, or ban outright, the use of Kindles, Nooks and iPads. Evidently, she says, too many coffee shops have had their ambience wrecked when itinerant word processors with laptops turn the tables into office space. Full-dress computers are one thing, says Heffernan, but banning devices the size of books is going too far, and it's anathema to the character and history of cafes. By contrast, Starbucks offers free, one-click, unlimited wireless service to their patrons, making it in Heffernan's eyes 'a flawed franchise that is squarely in the public good.'"

It's a free country

[Relyx]

Those cafes are quite free to ban eReaders, iPads and the like. Whether it will actually be enforced is another question entirely. Even if the management comes down hard, there is nothing stopping their customers going elsewhere.

Re:No one's saying it isn't

[cyn1c77]

The said coffee shops in the articles are doing this for very good business reasons. They have found that when people camp out at a table or booth for hours working on their laptop or reading a kindle, they don't get much revenue. They way the potential for lost revenue by kindle customers getting upset and going elsewhere with the actual loss they were experiencing.

If you don't like it, you are free to frequent other coffee shops or even start your own that caters to kindle users. That's what it means to live in a free country.

I support this as a customer too. It is annoying as hell when you buy a coffee and there are no seats... purely because 15 people have setup their mobile offices on all of the tables.

If you want to work (or read for an hour), go to your office or the library. There will be less distractions and you will work faster.