Amazon recently released Kindle, a wireless reading device where you can download books from their website at a cheaper rate. At first, I thought this sounded like a really cool idea. I could have access to almost anything right at my fingertips. My wife can tell you, I buy A LOT of books.

I’ll start off with what I think is cool about it.

When I said wireless, I meant totally wireless. No routers or wifi internet access needed. After buying the device, it comes with a wireless service similar to what we use with cell phones. I can be almost anywhere and buy a book to read, which is pretty cool. The service requires no monthly plan unless you want to use it to read many of the preselected blogs that they have allowed access too.

The prices of books seems to be fairly reasonable too. It looks like Amazon is offering books for around $10. My technical books can get fairly expensive. If you have bought any, you know that they can sometimes be up to $50-60. Even though publishers are allowing PDF downloads now, a $35 book is still as much as $20 just to download it online.

Another plus to having books in a digital format is the ability to be able to search and add digital bookmarks, so that is also really a nice feature.

Ok, now for the reasons why I will probably never get one.

$400! Yeah, you read that right. It is listed at a whopping $399. No big deal, you might say. The iPhone costs about $400. Well this is no iPhone. The device itself will not win any beauty awards. And the interface reminds me of an operating system made in the 80s. When watching the video on the site, I thought I was looking at a black and white version of Windows 2.0 or even one of the older Apple operating systems.

Cost and interface aside, that is still not what kills it for me. The Kindle device is not meant to be used with anything else. It is a complete standalone device. What does this mean? No backups to your computer. No printing. No sharing whatsoever! Even when I have a PDF version of a book, I still enjoy being able to print pages out, make marks on them or just plain read them without needing my computer or some other electronic device.

A recent post from Seth Godin talks about how he was approached by Amazon to be included on the reader.

When Amazon came to talk to me about being included on the reader a long long time ago, I said sure, but.

The but is that I wanted my books to be free and included in every reader, and my blog, too.

He continues by suggesting that Amazon include 1,000 books to anyone who purchases the reader so they will not feel like it is a waste of money and that many authors would love that kind of exposure.

O’reilly has an online service called Safari Books Online. For about $40 a month you can have almost unlimited access to any of the books that they have published. But it doesn’t stop there. They have several books from other publishers plus a handful of videos from Lynda.com. I can view it on my computer or I get credits to download chapters every month so that I can keep them. If I want to view them online, I can use my iPhone to sign in and read them. I have quite literally over 1,000 books at my disposal, and I can read it on almost any device I want. How can Amazon compete with that?

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