Before I’m finally done with this topic, I wanted to correct one other part of John’s argument. Gruber:

The only way to lend a friend a Kindle book is to lend them your Kindle reader. “Unshareable books” sounds downright oppressive to my ears.

Engadget:

You can bind five or six devices to a single account, and share books you’ve purchased to those accounts. There’s no simultaneous reading lock, so if you and your significant other are on the same Amazon account you can both read the same book at the same time on your Kindles.

It’s just like iTunes in that regard. It seems that Amazon went out of their way to ape Apple’s model in every way feasible.

I agree with John that it would be very smart if they opened the unit up to non-Amazon e-books, and if they’d drop the silly $0.10 fee per document that they charge to convert your PDFs, DOCs and JPGs into Kindle-compatible files.

Unlike John, I hope they correct these few small things and succeed in a big way. All the pieces are there, they just have to put them in place.

For those of you less enamored of the idea of Kindle, here’s some grist for your mill: the always thoughtful John Gruber.

John’s got some good points, though they largely hinge on one’s faith (or lack thereof) in Amazon’s commitment to the Kindle platform. The fact that Amazon will keep the purchased books online for you in a virtual library to some extent sets my mind at ease about their intentions. I think they’re in this for the long haul.

His paranoia over lockdown is a bit overblown too. I’ve bought songs and albums through iTunes that I’ve already owned, and I have very rarely if ever backed up my proprietary AACs to CD, even though that avenue is open to me. And though I can still buy CDs, I buy most of my music through iTunes.¹ I happily embrace Apple’s DRM because I find the convenience of their service to be worth the tradeoff in freedom of use. When I look at Kindle, I see a similar thing.

Nevertheless, the future of e-books might very well be the subscription model: you pay your monthly fee to have access to hundreds of thousands of books, all at your fingertips all the time. Perhaps these will be based around large public libraries, and you’ll access them from the device of your choosing. That sounds appealing as well.

Regardless, these are exciting times. I’m glad to be alive.