And still, when it happens, you will have forgotten this exchange and that it was I who warned you. I am cursed with memory.

The recipe writer, the cook and the cake-shop owner’s are all managers, doing what managers do best - cocking things up, turning perfectly good ingredients into putrid melanges.

I thought the design was ugly, but ugliness is a passing thing, then reviews pointed out it was also awkward - this does not fade, but aggravates increasingly with prolonged use.

It seems that from conception to final product Kindle is in every sense a business project, and looks like it. Control of content and control of customers goes hand in hand, but when it comes to such controls which reader wants such restrictions? Which reader could live for long under such a regime? Not many and not for long.

But let it sell, be advertised and touted, it will encourage demand some thing much better, and in the end that will be all to the good.

And the Singularity will come and we will live happily forever in tech paradise!!

Also we were supposed to have personal flying cars by now (forgetting for example that air traffic is so hard to manage among other issues)…

Not to come as a Luddite, I love e-books and read quite a few of them on my 770 (any text based), my iTouch (pdf’s are excellent here) and once in a while on my Sony (too slow, no backlight) but we are far, far away from the above mentioned Cloud, and in 5-10 years from now who knows what will be in fashion…

When commercial e-books will be more than a footnote in publishers revenue, it will be time to worry about Kindle’s effect on society, right now I profoundly doubt it will have any.

AFAIK, those were refurbed units. If you go to ebay, prices for even *used* 500s are shockingly high (perhaps they are being bought by people with Euros for whom even those prices are a steal, given that the US Dollar is now the toilet paper of world currencies).

Thanks for the new link to that XO, David. I’d heard of that weeks ago. Others have stated we’re headed down that road even a few *years* ago.

And don’t poo-poo David’s concerns. I’ve commented here elsewhere that the future will probably mean *all* ebooks will reside in The Cloud, with read-only temporary versions on your local device of choice. Some of you will begin to question your sanity when you re-read a book and notice things have changed (oh, yes, books will have version numbers, baby!) — did you imagine it, will anyone believe *you*? Ha.

On another topic, keep us posted on your Kindle-related sales. I’m eager to tell people about the pros, not just the cons! You could even write something on that for the main part of the blog. For the sake of balance, I actually want to see MORE pro-Kindle stuff here.

HH!
David

I’m all in favor of a bit of paranoia and would love to see Congress or the Supreme Court make it clear that the privacy of our reading choices are very much protected under the first amendment. Still, I’m not sure that singling out the Kindle as especially dangerous is the most helpful means of achieving these goals.

Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com

Personally I profoundly doubt that Kindle in the current incarnation (expensive and drm ridden) will be more successful than Sony - let us not forget that Sony500 was sold out for a while and then got to the 50$ bargain bin.

When you can read books with your eyes only and online used book stores and online discounts made book purchasing much cheaper than ever, there is no reason to believe that a 400$ device and 5-10$ ebooks will be a mainstream hit.