It’s not. It’s a book. You do not browse the Internet and manage your e-mail using a book. For that you use a computer, like a laptop.

Amazon is clear that Kindle is a book and not a computer.

As to whether it will succeed, my wife tells me that books must be on paper. Otherwise they are not books. Given that she is 54 and I am older, it may be 30 years or so for this type of device to become commonplace. That is, the current generation will have to die out in order to paradigm shift a book from paper to digital format.

What do you bet that Gutenberg got the same flak over movable type? I expect he was told it will never fly. Proper books must be hand-made and illustrated.

Meanwhile, I will use my Kindle until something better comes along. That means a newer better book and not some new gimcrack computer with 3rd party apps like Flash on it that by the way lets me read a text file. I can do that already. It’s called a laptop.

Also, they were charging for RSS-like updates of the device with blog and newspaper subscriptions, but I haven’t heard anything about that recently.

I am staying out of the e-Reader market [at least] until I see what Plastic Logic is coming out with later this year. It sounds like their device will have some more functions than the Kindle does, though I kind of hope it will also work with the Amazon store.