Kindle 2/DX

While I’m glad to see that we are finally moving to a paperless world, we are still have a long way to go. I applaud Amazon’s efforts but there still are 2 shortcomings that bother me.

1. Price
No way I’m paying $500 just to be able to read something on the go. I already pay enough for iPhone and that lets me do a lot more than read just books. They need to figure out how to subsidize this thing with a subscription or something. Either that offer an “All You Can Download” monthly plan ala Zune. If they did that $500 would totally be worth it.

2. Physical Asset
Living in Portland I get the fantastic benefit of having the original Amazon.com (before they started selling everything) just a few blocks away from my house. Powell’s books off Burnside lets me access more books than I can possibly imagine at prices better than Amazon often times. Additionally I can let my friends borrow the books or sell them back to Powell’s for cash/credit. The Kindle locks me down. Kind of like buying mp3′s. While you might own the file you can never resell them like a CD. But hey that business model is working incredibly well for Apple so who knows.

It takes a while for everything to take off, somehow I bet this device isn’t going away anytime soon. I also don’t anticipate this signaling the beginning of the end for the traditional book. I’m a lot less concerned with spilling a drink on my book than I am a piece of expensive hardware.