I really hope the Kindle is the iPod of books. It could revolutionize the industry and open up all sorts of new business models. But I’m not going to buy one. My biggest problem is the restrictions put on free content. I have a few books in PDF on my Ubuntu laptop. I obtained these books legally, all downloaded with permission from the author. Because the Kindle doesn’t work with Ubuntu and doesn’t read PDF, I don’t even know how I would get these books onto the Kindle. And since reading free books I get online on something other than a computer screen is one of the primary reasons that I want an ebook reader, this is kind of a big deal.
I know the wife will be happy with this decision, because she thought I was crazy for wanting one in the first place.
I really hope that Amazon’s push in the industry brings about more competition. Sony, as much as I loathe them, got things started with the first electronic ink ebook, and things have started to move more quickly since then. Now that there’s another big player in the market, it seems reasonable that we’ll see big changes in the very near future.