A while back we noticed the 43Folders story about a brief flirtation with the previous “hot” e-book device, Sony’s Reader. More open than previous options, the Reader could accept PDFs and other files for reading, but the compromises this forced turned the whole experience into a joke, and the reviewer returned the device as a result.

Frankly, the problem being solved here eludes us, given how portable, cheap, scalable, and fault-tolerant actual books are. Most people don’t want or need to carry more than a book or two (professionals with large and dynamic reference libraries are, of course, a different case). Still, companies continue to invest in the idea. Amazon is the next big player with their brand-new Kindle, which apparently sold out almost immediately. Frankly, it’s no more attractive to us than the Sony despite its admittedly groundbreaking qualities. It is not, for example, tethered to a computer at all; instead, it’s got a wireless modem that connects directly to Amazon and the Internet. However, it fails on some of the same points as the Sony, plus adds some nickle-and-diming bullshit that’s frankly below Amazon — for example, the Kindle wants the user to pay a subscription fee to read web sites on the it that are free on the public Internet, for example, and while it’ll take Word files and other personal documents via email, Amazon will charge you a dime for every one you send over. And of course, the Amazon’s ebooks are loaded with DRM, which means that it ultimately works for Amazon, not you, despite its $400 price tag. As Gruber points out:

Kindle actually is what ignorant critics have claimed regarding the iPod: a device designed to lock you in to a single provider of both hardware and digital content. You can easily and happily use an iPod without ever buying anything from the iTunes Store; without Amazon’s DRM-protected content, a Kindle is the world’s worst handheld computer.

What happens if Amazon decides this market doesn’t work, and bails? Ask people with “PlaysForSure” music bought from Microsoft. (Hint: you get screwed.) Gruber continues:

the Kindle proposition is this: You pay for downloadable books that can’t be printed, can’t be shared, and can’t be displayed on any device other than Amazon’s own $400 reader — and whether they’re readable at all in the future is solely at Amazon’s discretion. That’s no way to build a library.

Gadgets are cool. We like gadgets. We admit that if someone could create a real “book iPod,” we’d be interested — but that’s not likely to happen for several reasons, most notably the inability to get previously purchased content onto the Kindle. It’s simple to rip old CDs to MP3 and put ’em on your iPod; try that with a book and the Kindle. Amazon could have come closest to this idea by adopting the idea mentioned quite a bit in reviews: allow Kindle customers to download free e-books for anything they buy from Amazon as well as for any book they’ve ever bought from Amazon. That is, of course, untenable because of the paranoia of Big Content, so instead we get another DRM nightmare.

At the end of the day, as potentially promising as the idea of a portable high-capacity wireless device with a built-in bookstore is, the Kindle is ultimately a disappointment — but an avoidable one. Amazon already sells music without DRM; why not books? Without open content, we’d have a drastically different opinion. Either the things you buy work for you, or they work for someone else. Our iPod works or us. Kindle works for Amazon. We hope it fails as-is, regardless of how much the biz press may think otherwise. We’ll close with this bit from BoingBoing:

Here’s the biggest mystery of the Internetiverse for me today: why is it that Amazon, the most customer-focused, user-friendly company in the world of physical goods, always makes a complete balls-up hash out of digital delivery of goods? You’d think that they’d be the smartest people around when it comes to using the Internet to sell you stuff you want, but as soon as that stuff is digital, they go from customer-driven angels to grabby, EULA-toting horrors. Why does the Web make Amazon go crazy?

We wonder, too.