So you have to buy the equivalent of 40 books for the reader and you still need to shell out another $10.00 to read your first book.

Stupid is as stupid does…

For this "revolution" to be one for the better, there need to be a few changes in the Kindle plan. Most important, the devices should not be locked into the proprietary Kindle format. There is so much other information available in competing formats — PDF, JPG, plain text, etc. — that a successful device should not be locked into a single format from a single provider. Why shouldn't we be able to read Project Gutenberg e-texts? Just because they don't generate money for Amazon? Sorry, that's not a rationale the market is going to buy for long. Make absolutely everything available — the entire breadth of world literature, every obscure journal published since the time of Gutenberg — well, that's exciting, and a damn good idea. Heck, the ongoing book-digitization projects are making this possible at this very moment.

The devices should allow the easy transferrence of information from a PC to the reader. (It's not clear from the descriptions, but it sounds as though some sort of removable memory card can be used with the device, so perhaps this issue has been addressed.) I mean, there has to be a way to get this stuff from the Internet to your Kindle reader — you don't want to be locked into the Kindle wireless delivery system, which no doubt will provide only Kindle-approved Amazon-revenue-generating material.

And finally, there must be a way for a reader, once finished with his "book" or "magazine," to store it in a personal library. This last point no doubt gives the publishers heebie-jeebies, because it means books might be as easily copied as CDs and now movies. But otherwise everything we produce in written form — literature, non-fiction, news — would not only be "disposable" in an artistic sense, it would be designed to be disposable. You would be expected to dispose of it. You buy a book, you pay your ten bucks, you read it, and then you delete it. Bleep. Gone. You can't give it to the Goodwill. You can't pass it to a friend. You can't save it and come back to it later. What's the chance that a hundred years from now, a teenager is going to come across a book from our time and read the darn thing, and remember who we were? Probably the computer files will still be out there in some electronic form in a hundred years, but they aren't going to be accessed the way we might "access" an old book we find in the basement.

Nope, if the Kindle revolution works the way Bezos plans, it will change the meaning of literature, and much to the worse. Let's hope the natural competition of the market will produce a better device. Otherwise, this latest e-book reader may end up like all those other e-book readers that have come to market in the last ten years — can anyone remember their names? And heaven help us if it doesn't.

While I understand the economic model Amazon is trying to create, I share Dane's concerns about vendor-lockin. Just yesterday, I downloaded Project Gutenberg's DVD with more than 19,000 public domain e-books. What a library! But I won't be able to read them on the Kindle; the only way to get content on the Kindle is to buy it from Amazon. Sure, from Amazon's point of view the Kindle is more a content-delivery service than a product. But that's just not a model I can afford, or am interested in.

I also found Jennifer Cole's question interesting. I love used bookstores and would love to see a used e-book market. I just don't see either Amazon or publishers allowing it. Apparently, you can't even back up your Kindle ebooks to your own computer (Amazon stores them on its servers for re-downloading in the event of data loss); I highly doubt you'll be able to "loan" them them to friends, or transfer ownership in any way.You can thank DRM for that.

Finally, the whole EV-DO/Sprint thing means the Kindle will only work in the U.S. Kinda leaves out the rest of us.

So 1) proprietary content lock-in; 2) DRM shackles; and 3) US-only content delivery all mean I'm still waiting.