Opinion: New shiny Amazon Kindle doesn't replace my old book

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...Still, for now, the product doesn't really have the specifications for prime time. It lacks a color display, which limits the capacity for newspaper and blog reading, supposedly major features that seem as though they can be nothing but underutilized. If there's going to be a digital book-reading device, why exclude almost anything that has illustrations? A "Kindle 2" is probably pretty much inevitable, so why release the lesser version to begin with?

Plus, it costs $400 and each book costs $10. I doubt there's really anyone that needs to have 200 books on call at any given time, so the whole thing doesn't really make a lot of economic sense to begin with, especially since used books are generally far cheaper than $10 anyway. It makes sense for an iPod to be able to store zillions of songs because who knows what they're going to want to listen to moment to moment? But it's a pretty slim demographic that gets halfway through a Toni Morrison novel and suddenly gets the craving to switch over to William Burroughs. And, well, if there are people who belong to that elusive group, they can probably manage to have two books on hand as opposed to an unrealistically expensive electronic device...

(Damon Beres, columnist of Washington Square News.) Read the full article here.