Should You Get Amazon's Kindle?

Today, Amazon made a foray into hardware with the Kindle wireless reading device, a $399 e-ink gadget that CEO Jeff Bezos promises will make reading as easy as thumbing through a paperback.

Indeed, the device has lots of cool features, including a long battery life and free access to many websites and the ability to wirelessly download a huge selection of books from anywhere without connecting to a computer. It also looks like it works well in all sorts of lighting. But the prevailing opinion from many bloggers is that for the money, Kindle should be so much more.

Techdirt, for example, complains that the content is way overpriced. It costs ten bucks to download new books, and there are relatively high monthly subscription costs to services (like the New York Times and several blogs) that are free online.

Kottke writes l that the actual product doesn't look that cool—dubbing it the Pontiac Aztec of e-readers—and Wired (via Gizmodo) complains that (unlike the Sony Reader) the Kindle uses a proprietary format that makes it impossible to migrate the content you download to other devices.

If you're an early adopter who spends lots of time commuting, then you'll probably be able to get past many of these flaws. If not, though, it might make sense to continue killing time by killing trees.