On top of that the battery life of palmtops and especially laptops is really too limited for book reading. Back when I had a black-and-white Palm (5000 and later V and Handspring Edge) the battery would last for a couple of weeks of a few hours a day of reading. With today’s color LCD technology, though, I’m lucky to get eight hours and six is typical. Six hours is not even one trip across the US on a plane unless it’s direct. I often bring paperbacks purely because I know the battery won’t make it, even though the Palm is otherwise superior given that it has a library of about 80 books in it; I will never run out of reading material on a trip (and be forced to buy something lousy at the airport shop).

To me the current generation of e-ink based readers bring back the weeks between recharging I loved with my original Palm devices, and provide the best electronic screen ever created for reading — it’s not quite paper, but it’s pretty darn good.

I skipped the Sony device, which certainly has it over the Kindle in price and form, largely because it was highly limited in terms of formats it could take. That need not be a killer; I have tons of eReader documents on the Palm. Unfortunately the Sony book store had very few titles I was interested in. I compare that to the e-book title availability on the Palm and there is just no contest.

Amazon brings all of the major publishers to their Kindle party, something no e-book before has offered. Even right out the door it has almost as many e-books as the largest PDA vendor, and far more than all other dedicated readers. The book selections are good, too. Needing some titles to start fiddling with the book I went browsing for both current titles and back-catalog titles. I found almost all of what I was looking for. New title availability is far superior to any other e-book store I have ever seen.

The extra-base hit compared to previous e-book readers is the wireless access. With that I effectively have access to tens of thousands of books with only a few keypresses almost anywhere, brought to the device in a minute or two. The convenience and accessibility that brings are second to none. Compare the ease of getting a new book with the Kindle versus all previous technologies. With the exception of the Rocketbook (with its built-in analog modem) you were SOL if you weren’t near your PC. This, and push of dailies and periodicals, are very big features.

You raise some good points, and yet as I’ve said there are reasons that the device is at least somewhat appealing now It’s definitely not mainstream technology yet, but I think it has just defined the playing field whereas previous attempts were rather haphazard.

As for the future: They’ll make it look better. Color e-ink will be available. It will be faster, handle more formats. I expect subsidized readers within five years, although the actual cost of the device ought to hit $100 within two or three years anyway. These and other rough spots are sure to be smoothed out in the coming years. Many of the problems are A Simple Matter Of Software, not expensive to fix.

I bought this thing primarily because I want to play with it, see how well it works in the real world. But it would have to be a lot worse than various reviews suggest for me not to prefer it over reading on the Palm, and it sure will be nice to have something that works on longer trips without frequent charging so I don’t have to lug books around.

YMMV, but people have panned all kinds of technologies that turned out to be long-term hits. Remember the Rio? We’re still in roughly that time-frame in the e-book reader world. Lots of things are yet to come.