– you really need to look at the Kindle bookstore…you’ll see that there are many, many, many books for less than $9.99. If you include being able to load (at no cost) all the Gutenberg project books, your argument about price (which is a main argument of your position) just doesn’t hold water.

– As far as TPPA, the pain of adoption isn’t as high as you say, especially when I can, without adding an SD card, carry over 100 books with me, including humor, reference, etc. For people who like to read, especially those who have several books (I usually have 4 or 5) running at the same time, I don’t find myself at the airport, or in the doctor’s office, or anywhere, without a book or magazine to read. The pain of the ‘crisis’ for anyone that likes to read and has a busy life, is high…the pain of adoption isn’t. Granted, that is a matter of opinion, but you should really get your hands on one, or even better, see a non-gadget person with one, before you issue your ‘it will fail’ proclamation. IMHO, your prediction is similar to Time magazine, in 1996, saying that Apple had no future.

1) I do alot of my pleasure reading on airplanes. For me, the Kindle is absolutely LESS convenient than a traditional book. One need to make sure the Kindle is charged. One may need to carry a separate charging unit or adapter. And then there is airport security where this will look just like a lap top etc.

2) High tech products can bring huge advantages but they generally more complex. To use the Kindle, one will need to download content, transfer it to the Kindle, contact customer support if download or transfer fails, etc. How about a service contract? Updated software? Changes in format standards? Is the juice worth the squeeze with the Kindle? I doubt it.

No I think that the real beneficiary here is the book industry that would love to lower their cost of delivering content (books need to be printed, books need to be inventoried, books need to be shipped, unsold books need to be discounted, etc.) Publisher and book sellers like Amazon are the folks that benefit from electronic book adoption, not consumers. If the book industry wants to make electronic books viable, they are going to need to compensate consumers for the inherent DISADVANTAGES of electronic books. That probably means a cheap, or free viewing device, and much lower costs for electronic book content.

tivoboy - so they haven’t disclosed units MADE, which makes this data point fairly irrelevant. Furthermore, reading “consumer” reviews points to mostly existing beta testers as “reviewers” (at least they are disclosing the fact!), and the product is categorized in “Kindle Store” where’s it’s ranked first. No rank in ANY hardware category. Fail.

One thing I do like is the idea of wireless connectivity given it could add some interesting functionality such as video and music to enhance the book reading experience. Even then, I don’t think market is going to be that big.