The recent release of the Kindle by Amazon.com in many ways reminds me of their exclusive right to sell the Segway. It had to be six, or seven, or more years ago that I wrote an ad for the Segway for InDepthInfo. At the time, I thought the Segway was kind of cool, but I also thought it impractical. I wrote the ad on the off chance that someone might buy one. I actually did sell two of them, but Amazon only paid $12.00 commission on an item that went for over $1000.00. They would be ridiculed today for being so parsimonious.

I don’t think that the low commissions then are why the Segway hasn’t been the revolution in human transportation that its manufacturers and the fawning press predicted a few years ago. The Segway is still around, in fact I saw it in a cameo in a Superbowl commercial the other day. It never caught on because it would be hard to park securely in the city. It is ultimately limited by its battery. I can see it being handy for a supervisor in a warehouse, but for going downtown to Seattle to go shopping? Where do you put the packages? How do you get it on the bus if coming in from the suburbs? No, it really is just an item to tool around the neighborhood as a brief novelty. The price of the item is pretty steep, when you could just get yourself a motorized scooter!

Well, I don’t think the Kindle is quite so impractical. Yet it has the same feel. People are not ready to give up their books, and those who are don’t have time to read books anyway. They are too busy IMing or Blogging, or plugging into the 24 hour news cycle. Having written a few books, I thought I would check out the Kindle with a view to publishing one of my previously unpublished works. (I have an inventory of these larger than I would like to admit.) The publishing process proved so cumbersome, I gave up after three hours of fiddling. I am no techno-geek, but I am not a babe on the internet highway either. When, I finally gave up working on it at 1:00 in the morning, I thought, “I’ll finish this up tomorrow.” But I never could make myself get back to it. There were too many higher priority items to work on, like making a video, or playing a game of minesweep.

Well, if the interface for converting a word document to Kindle is that unfriendly, I am wondering how the interface is with the reader. The hardest thing about it is that battery thing. You want to be able to take a book camping. You want to be able to plop it on the library table and wander around looking for another and not have to worry that someone is going to pick it up and wander off with it. It may well be tough and rugged, but can you make margin notes or dog-ear your favorite pages? I could be wrong in this pronouncement, but the time for the Kindle has not quite arrived. In fact, I think it will become passe in the near future. It will be like the Segway in that we will think back and smile at our naivete in a few years hence.

Even so, I think a good book reader that will blow our socks off is just around the corner, and I will have to eat my words. Luckily they will be tiny dots of light and not ink stained pages.