I love the idea of a kindle.  I think it would be good for my mental health.  Reading material of substance, as well as getting away from the instant crack hits of social media seems like a good thing.

Appealing as the new Kindle 2 is, it’s not ready for me because:

1. An Apple tablet would make it redundant.  By Apple tablet, I mean something about 3x the size of an iphone, running the touch OS.  It would have a screen large enough to be comfortable for reading, but more importantly, it would be just one device to carry around.  It would be weird if Apple releases such a thing and Amazon doesn’t release a Kindle App to go with it - so that’s what I’m waiting for.

2. As far as I know, PDF reading still sucks.  As I understand it, you can pay Amazon to convert a PDF by emailing it to them.  However the results are not good,  I have numerous technical books that I have purchased in PDF form, which I’d love to have on a tablet device, but they need to be converted really well.  There are also all sorts of academic papers that I’d read in this form.

3. Most of the books I really want to read are not available yet.  That’s a hard problem.  Many of the books I want to read are already on my bookshelf.  I don’t like the idea of having to buy them again, but for some of them, it would be worth it if they were available.  But they aren’t yet.

4. Books are expensive.  You can’t by eBooks secondhand.  I used to have a policy of buying any book I wanted, new, because I love knowledge and the books represented something personal to me.  I stopped doing this when I started having problems managing my library, and the ratio of unread/read books was heading towards a limit.  Now I buy books 2nd hand and don’t think of holding onto them.

I’d buy one today if I could pay 99¢ per chapter!

There are a lot of books that are not to my liking.  I’d like to be able to read a part (for pay) but then not pay for the whole book if I’m not going to read it.  I’d be reading all the time if I didn’t have to pay for material I wasn’t reading, and I suspect this is true for a lot of people.  When I buy a book, I’m not only deciding whether the topic and author are interesting to me - I’m deciding whether to take the risk that I won’t get value for money out of the purchase.  

If Amazon took this risk out of the equation, I suspect they’d do a lot for reading as a whole.  They’d help to improve the market by channelling more money towards books that actually get read as opposed to poor material that has a lot of marketing behind it.

It could be made transparent - as you turn to the second page in a chapter, you get billed for it.

I am sure existing publishers and authors would resist the idea because it would disrupt their models, but Amazon could offer it as an option for self-publishers and if it proved effective (as I suspect it would) they would be forced to adapt.