The parable of the Kindle

I'm going to get a Kindle (when they're back in stock) I know I'm going to get a Kindle. It's stronger than me.

I stayed away from the Sony Reader only because I had a bad feeling about Sony's fondness for proprietary formats that eventually get orphaned, and I didn't want a reader that could upload only a few expensive books in complicated ways.

I have a much better feeling about Amazon, and I have an even better feeling now I see that the Kindle has temporarily sold out (I want what he's got). I know in the end Amazon wants to sell books, including e-books, in volume, so they'll make the process of acquiring and consuming them as simple and as cheap as possible. I think we're done now with technology-driven gadgets, at least for grown-ups: we want things that work easily and well, in which the job of the technology is to disappear.

I can imagine that with a Kindle I'm going to want to read more impulsively, skipping through books and abandoning them after a few pages. Will Amazon's pricing policy allow for that?

If you can't copy the books, is there any reason for Amazon not to turn into an online lending library, or a literary Netflix, where you have the book for a day and then vapourise it, at a rental price?

Is this the optimal format for blogs, delivering them for easy reading at a very modest subscription fee? Will I have any further use for Monday to Friday newspapers (which I don't read already, I merely carry them around in my briefcase in the hope of finding time to do so)?

The one reason for not buying a Kindle now might be the anticipation of bitterness when the successor model comes out with twice the features at half the price. I haven't looked at my iPhone with quite the same affection since Apple cut the price by $200. But there is a hard truth in the parable of the vineyard: if the price is right today, what does it matter if it gets even righter tomorrow?