Under this title I found today a very good article at Forbes.com. I liked the article because it points to few things that are issues at this moment and need to be changed to have a really evolution in the way people read books.

But from a design perspective, the sooner the Kindle "disappears" the better. Amazon's reader is in many ways the anti-iPhone. It does one thing very well: downloading and displaying text. Unlike Steve Jobs' wondertoy, it's not likely to become a status symbol for hip digerati.

The Kindle is an off-white, asymmetrical tablet. Its screen is entirely gray-scale and never gets brighter than a dingy gray; images look as if they were printed in a Depression-era newspaper. Menus are navigated with a clunky up-and-down click-wheel, and when they load, the screen flashes black like a TI-82 calculator.

I agree, but like the same author says later, the technology to change this is not available yet and won't be probably until late 2009.

The Kindle's business model has another set of problems. To avoid a monthly subscription fee, Amazon is charging a wallet-taxing $399 for the device--then $9.99 or so for every book that you download from Amazon's "Kindle Store." Publishers seem reluctant to put their entire stock into the discounted e-book format. Bezos brags that 101 of the 112 current New York Times best sellers and new releases are available for download. Just don't ask about best sellers from past years. I went searching for Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff and came back with only I Am Charlotte Simmons.

For content that's already available on the Web, the Kindle is even less practical. A variety of magazines, including Slate, The Atlantic Monthly, Time and Forbes are available by subscription or individual purchase: for instance, $1.50 will get you a single issue of Forbes, or $2.49 will get you a month's subscription. The only problem: You can get the same content on the Forbes Web site for free. Even reading a blog will cost one or two dollars a month, a concept that seems as unfair as charging guests to use the bathroom in your home.

I don't know why but the above quote reminds me the Music Industry when iTunes and other online stores started. And look where we are know, in the border of having DRM removed. Of course, there are many other things that need to be done and can be done. For example, why don't we create a trade system where you can trade your printed books for eBooks? We can free space in our houses, business and more than that, can you imagine how many threes we are going to save just by recycling all that paper?

To me Kindle is the first step into the right direction and I can only hope it's accepted by readers like iPod was accepted years ago. 

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