I’m sit­ting at Chipo­tle putting the fin­ish­ing touches on an arti­cle about decid­ing between using thick clients (Word, Out­look) ver­sus thin clients (Google Docs, Gmail) on net­books, and a guy walks up to me and stares until I take out my ear­buds (one of the rea­sons I love writ­ing at Chipo­tle is that between my hear­ing dam­age and my –20db head­phones, it’s actu­ally less dis­tract­ing here than at home).

He points at my HP Mini-​note. “Where do you get a com­puter like that?” He explains that he needs to get a PC for his daugh­ter in high school.

I tell him that for a high schooler, I wouldn’t actu­ally rec­om­mend the HP, as it’s a lit­tle pricier than the com­pe­ti­tion. I tell him about the Asus eee 1000, which has a 10” screen, comes pre­loaded with XP and could run all the stuff she needs for school. Then I tell him he can find it locally at Best Buy for $399.

His eyes nearly pop out of his head, and he starts grin­ning widely. I make note of this, and he says, “Wow, that’s such a great deal.” He booked out of the restau­rant and I’d bet dol­lars to donuts he was headed straight for Best Buy.

I see this sort of thing all the time. I’ve talked before about my 12-​year-​old niece’s netbook-​lust, and the other day when she brought her friend over while I was at my sister’s for the Bron­cos humil­i­at­ing defeat by game against the Patri­ots, her friend was also star struck at the pos­si­bil­i­ties afforded by a com­puter of her very own that she could take anywhere.

Paul Thur­rott and Leo Laporte dis­cussed net­books in this week’s Win­dows Weekly pod­cast (along with soundly thrash­ing Win­dows Mobile) and dis­missed them as a tem­po­rary bridge between tra­di­tional lap­tops and future smart­phones run­ning desktop-​class oper­at­ing sys­tems. While I like the idea of a Win­dows smart­phone run­ning the same Win­dows ker­nel as the desk­top ver­sion, using the same API for pro­grams and hav­ing binary com­pat­i­bil­ity with desk­top Win­dows, but using a user inter­face opti­mized for mobile use, that doesn’t obvi­ate netbooks.

I’ve used mobile phones for years as stand-​ins for ultra-​mobile PCs, and the prob­lem isn’t the oper­at­ing sys­tem or appli­ca­tions. As evi­denced by the pop­u­lar­ity of not only net­books but devices like the Celio Red­fly, form fac­tor mat­ters. A clamshell device with a larger screen and touch-​typable key­board is just bet­ter for some things. I post blog entries and read Google Reader from both my Treo and my Mininote, but I read ebooks exclu­sively on the Treo and write longer form work exclu­sively on the Mininote. It’s about using the right tool for the right job, and it’s becom­ing increas­ing obvi­ous every day that net­books are the tools a lot of peo­ple have been wait­ing for.

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.