I’m thinking Apple ends up owning this sphere.

I’ve seen the future of reading, and it’s the portable electronic device.  Those who say they love physical books are no different from those stating they love CDs.  Antiquarians destined for the scrapheap.  It’s just like Napster and MP3s, you don’t get it until you try it.

Felice gave me a Kindle for my birthday.  The experience is staggering!

Unfortunately, there’s a learning curve.  And some of the design choices are inane.  To go forward, you push the button on the right.  To go backward…you don’t push the button on the left, that also makes the pages go forward, you have to push the small button upper left to go in reverse.  Huh?  Didn’t the iPod establish the rules back in 2001?  Right forward, left back?  Maybe Amazon was worried about lefties, or did a bunch of research.  But that’s where you get into trouble. The public has no idea of the future.  You’ve got to go by your gut.  Not giving people what they think they need, but what they want!  This is what Steve Jobs specializes in.

And the keyboard?  Anyone with an iPhone/iPod Touch will immediately ask himself why it’s not a touch screen.  Hitting the letter buttons on the Kindle is akin to playing with a 1980’s electronic toy.  Whereas the virtual keyboard on the iPhone/iPod Touch may seem daunting at first, but is adapted to almost instantly and represents the future, not the past.

But the reading experience…  Wow!

I get an adrenaline rush in a bookstore.  Everything seems good.  So I end up buying books that don’t read as well when I get home.  And you actually have to go to the store.  Or the library.  Whereas you can shop on the Kindle when you’re at home.

But it’s better than that.  Because there are reviews in the Kindle store.  And the first chapter of every book is free!  If you were a real schnorrer, you could forgo buying anything!  Just download the first story in a collection, or read the introductory section and say you read the book.  These are not brief passages, these are not little excerpts, these samples can be forty pages or so.  At least that’s how long the sample of the Vanderbilt book is.

I was reading the "New York Times".  And there was a fascinating review of a new biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt

The Mogul Who Built Corporate America

So I just fired up my Kindle and downloaded the sample!  I was thinking of buying it, but the average review wasn’t that high.  Digging deeper, I found that the book got either five star or one star reviews.  The one star reviews?  From Kindle owners!  They were bitching about the price!  In excess of twenty dollars!  There’s a whole coterie of dedicated Kindle shoppers who refuse to pay more than ten dollars a book, the usual Kindle price.

Ten dollars.  That’s below wholesale!  That’s the price of a movie.  In a shitty theatre!  You get hours of enjoyment.  Sure, you can’t transfer the book to someone else’s reader when you’re done, but at these prices, how much money will you end up spending in a year anyway?

More than I am on books now.  The Kindle breeds excitement.  At your fingertips is a breadth of excitement and knowledge.  My little device is always at the ready, and calls me not only at night, but during the day, to delve into a story that tells me so much about the world but is not laden with the hit and run facts of today’s infotainment society.

Fiction tells you more about life than non-fiction.  All these years later, to rediscover the experience of reading stories is thrilling.

But I don’t expect the mainstream to join me on my adventure quite yet.  The buy-in price of the device is way too high, $349.  And the new Kindle, $489, this is not something for the masses!

iPods got cheaper.

Kindles are getting more expensive.

Buy the third or fourth generation.  Maybe the fifth.  The ergonomics will be better and the price will be lower.

But, as stated above, Apple might end up owning this market.  The notoriously tight-lipped company is supposedly readying a tablet.  With a screen many times the size of an iPhone/iPod Touch.  You’ll get that vaunted virtual keyboard, and backlighting, and a wireless subscription…

That’s why the iPhone is so cheap, it’s subsidized by AT&T.  If you can buy a subsidized tablet, which works better than a Kindle, who is going to buy the Amazon product?

And if you’ve got wireless connectivity, and can surf the Web, who is going to pay the "New York Times" a monthly fee to subscribe to the paper?

That’s one of the keys to the Kindle DX.  With its larger screen, newspapers and magazines can be rendered in a format closer to their physical iterations.  Unfortunately, if you subscribe already, you get no break.  And if you go on vacation, you can’t buy day by day.  They’re so busy protecting their model that they’re turning potential customers off.  The same way the  music industry did at the beginning of this century.

And speaking of the music industry…  Will Amazon and other e-book companies be forced to remove the DRM to gain wide acceptance?  Will books be torrented and not paid for?

If you can read them on an Apple tablet, beware.  The proprietary encoding and sending to the Kindle protects publishers today.  But will they end up controlling the market tomorrow?

When I go on the road, I travel with a cornucopia of reading material.  Unfortunately, with the above issues, I cannot forgo my three physical newspapers and multiple magazines quite yet.  But I will.  In the near future.  Hell, how long does the physical newspaper have left?

If you’re someone who owned the original five gig iPod, buy a Kindle today.

If you own an iPod, know that you will own a portable, personal electronic reading device sooner rather than later, you just don’t know it yet.

As for the Kindle DX…  Yes, a larger format with more capabilities is to be applauded.  But you could have had a similar-sized screen on the present Kindle if there were a virtual keyboard.  Hell, the screen could have gone from edge to edge if the buttons were virtual, or on the side.  Amazon’s going in the right direction, but it cannot compete with Apple.  Which was not first to make MP3 players, but now owns the market.  Jobs says no one reads.  Yet he’s famous for stating that no one wants what he ends up launching later.

Stay tuned.