I’m not quite sure I understand why you hawk the IDPF so much; maybe it would be good to do an article about the advantages it brings to the reader. A universal standard is far from appearing, and mobi/plucker/azw/etc could become that well-used standard just as easily as IDPF could. Who (if anyone) is publishing content or reader hardware/software for this “industry standard” today?

And what gotcha charges are you talking about? There’s the 10-cent translation charge, which can be avoided by not wirelessly emailing the translated content to the Kindle. There’s the 99-cent blog subscription charge (I haven’t figured out whether it is monthly or eternal), which can be avoided by using the builtin web browser. Both of these are basically ‘pay for the convenience of having it pushed to my Kindle’, and I don’t perceive this as a gotcha. What other gotchas did you have in mind?

As far as the looks go, for most users I would expect that they would soon not notice the device at all, and see only what is displayed in the screen. But looks do matter when other people, non-users, see you with your Kindle. “Hey dude, what’s with the funny-looking thing?” as opposed to “Hey man that thing looks so cool — where can I get one?”

And of course most of us will only get to preview a Kindle via these same photographs. Amazon would be well-advised to get some pretty-catalog photographers to shoot really beautiful product shots of the thing to send out.

As for the touch-screen, Kindle no got: instead using the ‘Select Wheel’ you navigate up and down by line, or from link to link, then press the wheel to click. This is the impression I got from reading the Kindle User’s Guide.

And I’m pretty tired of all the ‘Your Kindle’s so ugly …’ hating that’s going on. First, David, you’re right: the patent photo made it look bad and no one seems to be able to get that out of their heads. The main video shows a person walking, sitting, using the Kindle, setting it on the counter … and suddenly it looks fine. Looks good, even! Second, when the hell did ‘fashion accessory’ become one of the required traits of a p-book replacement? I think people are putting far too much emphasis on the way this thing looks. I’m beginning to wonder if they aren’t working hard to dredge up every possible excuse to hate any ebook device with a passion. Third, if you’re afraid of being seen in public with it - it comes with a leather case that (on the outside) looks like a book.

Sadly, I see this trend in the ebook communities too. And this has gotten me thinking - are we schizophrenic about ebooks? We claim to want one badly, yet each new e-reader to hit the market seems to evoke even more scorn than the last one. We nitpick them to death, use disparaging and snide language in talking about them. We gleefully condemn the Kindle to failure when it addresses some of our loudest and most recent complaints - Amazon just put 90,000+ ebooks on sale, at prices often much better than the equivalent p-book.

Seriously, I wonder if our love of books is creating an unconsciously high bar for e-reader devices. Honestly, I’ve caught myself doing it too; and I’m still doing it - I still have not pressed the order button @ Amazon. Even though I already know that I can move my existing books to it (yes it reads .mobi and .prc) and that there’s now an acceptable choice of ebooks for it. The hardware price is high, but at the rate Amazon is discounting Kindle content, I could see recouping that high cost in a year or two.

Maybe it’s time to just bite the bullet and dive in! From what I see, Amazon has just moved the ebook ball pretty far downfield. Maybe it’s time to go to the stadium and root for the team.

It could look better in person. Some gadgets don’t look good in photos. Aside from the new iPod nano, there was another recent intro that had bad photos but looked good in person. But it is too early for my brain to function, retrieval-wise (and maybe sentence-wise too!).

I still can’t figure out how someone can comfortably hold it. And while that keyboard sounds all nifty, I wonder how eInk will perform attempting that? (Then again, my jaw dipped somewhat over Bookeen’s smooth pop-up dialogs and menus…)

What we get from it is a mismash of every technical buzzword and concept in the book. Words like “milestone” and “revolution” are mentioned. There’s the obligatory iPod analogy. The device is possessed of a “disruptive” nature (well, what isn’t these days?) and there’s even talk of “Book 2.0″.

From there, the author gets totally lost in a discussion of paper vs. electronic and the joys of hypertext (the “always-on book”) that could have been written by Vannevar Bush.

The joke is getting people to believe that these limited devices that simply reek of lock-in are preferable to more versatile alternatives like laptops and cellphones.