If I were to devise an electronic device to display books, with the aim of putting off anyone from ever using e-readers in the future, I know just what it would look like: Amazon's Kindle.
I know nothing, OK, so I am in no position to comment, but this is my show, and to me it looks like a Fisher Price version of the scientific calculators I used to get through Maths GCSE in the 1980s. This is a public product, like a phone, a book, a magazine. You use it in public and it makes a statement about you. The Kindle statement reads something like: "I'm with stupid", but it's ironically self-referential.
The electronic paper display I like. It's not tiring to look at unlike the TFT screens of a laptop. So that's my one concession to otherwise blanket hatred.
What else to hate? The price. It comes in at about £200, then Kindle books average around £5, according to reports, and you have to pay for stuff you'd normally get for free, like online news, blogs; even your own documents such as Word files will cost you to open on a Kindle.
There's a reason for this. Amazon is using a 3G mobile phone network (using the EVDO standard if you must know) and it's not free, so while Amazon won't charge you a monthly "line rental" charge, it has to recoup that cost some how.
Fortunately, we're nowhere near getting an EVDO cellular network in Blighty, so book printers, rest easy. But it could be done with a half decent rollout of WiMAX (it would be cheaper too).
Now let's have at least one objective dispassionate perspective on all this. And this is that although everything's turning into bits and bytes, life is not binary. There isn't going to be a watershed moment where no-one picks up a printed book again. But conversely the failure (if it happens) of Kindle will not be the end of e-readers. Both will find their balance in the way we consume newspapers, magazines, books and so on. What the Kindle won't find though is its way into my bag.
Should you have jumped the gun and actually bought a Kindle, can I recommend the following 21 Dog Years: doing time at Amazon.
But the MOST gratifying thing about this rant, is that I am not alone. You see, if you haven't done so already, head on over to Amazon's Kindle page; it has already received 266 reviews, with an average of 2.5 stars out of 5. Kindle is hardly on fire by anyone's standard.
