Despite being a massive advocate of ebooks, I am utterly unimpressed by Amazon’s Kindle. While I welcome Amazon’s interest in making ebooks more commercially viable, I have no interest in books being converted into a service.
I already have thousands of books and thousands of ebooks, the idea of having to pay to access them when I can simply fire them over Bluetooth from my laptop into my Treo is ludicrous. Also, having carried around my Alphasmart Dana for 18 months prior to switching to Treo, I can attest that having an ebook reader that fits in your pocket is far more useful than one that is actually the size of a book. And basing everything around DRM… please. No one on Earth wants to pay for a subscription to a free blog, although some of the newspaper subscriptions are probably a good deal, assuming that you are one of the aging dinosaurs who still actually read newspapers.
I think Amazon’s approach is incoherent, as it is positioning this primarily as a service for a gadget crowd that really doesn’t need it. We already have better ways of reading ebooks and we know how to get around DRM, so there isn’t likely to be a significant market there once the “hey, shiny!” factor wears off. I fully expect Apple to come out with something in the next year that is smaller, prettier, more colorful and capable of appealing to the non-early adopting masses in much the same way that those wretched iMacs did.
It should be somewhere between the size of a Treo and a Kindle, use all of the various proprietary and non-proprietary formats and have a various easy means of loading books both wireless and mini-SD. Ideally, it would also have a phone in it, as my Treo has made me allergic to carrying multiple devices. There should be two versions, one with a keyboard and one without, so that those who require email/Internet can have it and those who can get by without typing anything can have a smaller device.