Amazon’s much debated e-book reader, Kindle, is finally back in stock. (It has been waiting list only on and off since Christmas.)

If you click here, there are tons of videos of how it works and famous people talking about how awesome it is (Lemony Snicket’s is the funniest because he rambles about cheese).

Here is the thing, in my mind. It looks awesome. If we could ignore the two big things that I will get to in a minute, I would be all over it. I love that you can read your blogs and newspapers online and that you can upload PDFs because there are a ton of ebooks out there that it would be great to be able to read while I am, say, out by the pool, instead of being trapped at the computer. I like the size of it and if the screen is as easy on the eyes as they say, awesome.

That said, my two biggest issues are as follows:

• I don’t blame Amazon only for this because I think, in the end, this is going to be the killer of all eBook readers for a while, but the price is the problem. I am not goind to bring anything that costs $399 to the beach with me because even if it wasn’t stolen, I wouldn’t want it to get sand in it or overheat. In the same way, I wouldn’t bring it to the pool where it might get wet or get greasy from sunblock either. People like paperbooks because you can abuse the heck out of them and they are pretty much always still readable. Until they invent an ebook reader that I can abuse as badly as I do a book and is cheap enough that I can run to the bathroom and leave it on my towel without worrying, I don’t see myself getting one.
• My second issue is that fact that Amazon is charging so much for the books. I don’t think Amazon should offer the books for free like some people, because I understand that the authors need to get paid. But $10 a book, no matter the length seems steep to me. My issue with this is that most actual paperbooks don’t even cost $10 and even if they do, you then have something physical in your hand that you can then resell or trade for more books or whatever. All this gets you is a file that you read once. It would make more sense if there was some kind of monthly fee, though I have no idea how they would pay authors then.
• Now the rest of the objection to this is based on speculation only as I haven’t used it yet so the thing might actually have these features, I don’t know. I might be over this if they allowed the sort of eBook service that my library offers where you can download eBooks from the library site and then the file “expires” after two weeks unless you renew it. Even if it was not free, if they let you “rent” a book for a weekly rental fee of a few cents, I could get behind that.

Overall, there is a lot about it that facinates me and I was totally drooling over it when I was watching the little video reviews (well, except for Lemony Snicket’s, then I was drooling over cheese). I think if it was much cheaper, I honestly would have been on that wait list with everyone else. If you commute or travel a lot, I think just being able to read all the blogs and newspapers alone would be totally worth it. I am just not sure it’s for me yet.

I have to hand it to Amazon, though, that they seem to have taken a huge step in the right direction towards getting eBooks off the ground. Considering there is no standardization for any of this, I think things like formatting and pricing are going to be awkward for a while, but this certainly seems like a step in the right direction.

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