Maybe if it weren’t so freaking ugly

With Amazon’s Jeff Bezos push­ing the Kin­dle like it’s chicken-​fried Jesus and media heavy­weights like Oprah on board, ebooks are finally get­ting some respect in the main­stream media.

Per­haps with Oprah’s help and a new and improved ver­sion due next year, the Kin­dle will achieve escape veloc­ity and Ama­zon can stop show­ing me the annoy­ing Kin­dle ad and dis­close how many units have been sold. As for elim­i­nat­ing phys­i­cal books from the ware­houses, books are lag­ging music and video. The end of print is not near, but the writ­ing is on the vir­tual wall. The eco­nom­ics of the Inter­net, as well as tech­nol­ogy inno­va­tions such as improved vir­tual paper, instant trans­la­tion, and always on, fast con­nec­tions to a uni­verse of knowl­edge indi­cate that Bezos is on the right track, just as he was in cre­at­ing a vir­tual shop­ping mall for phys­i­cal goods in 1994. And, he will have lots of com­pany, or com­pe­ti­tion, as the dig­i­tal age gets into full swing.

Amazon’s Kin­dle obses­sion: Bury the printed book | Out­side the Lines — CNET News

I’m on record, many, many times, as say­ing stand­alone ebook read­ers are a dumb idea. While I haven’t yet seen a Kin­dle “in the wild” I have seen sev­eral Sony read­ers and I remain unim­pressed by e-​ink tech­nol­ogy. I read more books on my Treo, I’d wager, than even the most avid Kin­dle fan. And eReader on the iPhone has become the most widely used ebook reader on the mar­ket (what the heck, the iPhone may as well be good for some­thing).

But I was pre­dict­ing the end of print over a decade ago, and that was before a whole new gen­er­a­tion was intro­duced to Harry Pot­ter. While I don’t have much use for them myself, printed books aren’t going any­where for a long time, and the Kin­dle, for all its advan­tages (e-​ink, great bat­tery life, built in EVDO con­nec­tion for buy­ing and down­load­ing books directly) isn’t going to get bib­lio­philes like my mom to stop lug­ging tree pulp around.

As for me, I’ll stick with smart­phones. I like the look of the rumored sec­ond gen­er­a­tion Kin­dle (and was it inten­tional to name this thing after paper used to start a fire?) but I’m already lug­ging around a smart­phone, net­book and all the asso­ci­ated power cables, sync cables, bat­ter­ies and what­not for those. I have room to add a Kin­dle to my Scott e-​Vest (seri­ously!) but I don’t hon­estly see the point when I can read per­fectly com­fort­ably on my phone.