Yeah, I really think Jeff Bezos is not the person to listen to when it comes to considering the future of technology. This is the guy who agreed with the guy who made the Segway who also said that cities would redesign themselves for said Segway. Oh yeah, Bezos is also the guy who built his own spaceship. Now what is he spouting on about? It’s that thing to the right–it’s called the Amazon Kindle and he’s convinced it’s the future of books. But check out the features:

6 inch diagonal B&W (grayscale) screen

Uses Sprint’s EV-DO network (connects to ‘net via cell phone network) to hook you to the Amazon Kindle Store (think iTunes Music Store for digital books)

QWERTY keyboard for entering in book titles (and such) to said AKS, you can also annotate and bookmark

Compatible with Audible.com tracks as well as standard mp3s

Has an SD (low capacity) slot for “expansion”

Supports something called “Kindle format” for text docs, along with PDF, Mobi, HTML, plaintext, and image files like JPEG, GIF, and PNG (source) but I have yet to read conclusively that it surfs the web

Comes with a built-in dictionary and allows you to wirelessly connect to Wikipedia.org

All that for just $400.

I haven’t even told you how expensive books and newspapers are.

Books: $9.99 (for most titles)
Newspapers: $9.99 to $14.99/mo
Magazines (the only reasonably priced thing here): $1.99/mo

Will it flop? Well, I haven’t heard of Bezos making any flights into orbit and I only see Segways zooming down the street when there’s a blue moon out, so, based on those two facts and the cost of the Kindle, I’m going to go out on a limb and say:

Baring an extreme price drop, the Amazon Kindle will bomb.

I mean, think about it: you’re saying the future of a passtime that hardly anyone does is in an electronic device that costs $400???

For that price you can get a laptop–hell, the eee PC is the same price and it runs XP! I just dropped $400 on an XO laptop and it has basic PC features (like web surfing) and it has an e-Book mode. So, why should I be expected to drop another $400 on the Kindle? Just because it has free Sprint EV-DO service?? Well, it only has free EV-DO to the Kindle store and to Wikipedia–that’s hardly a robust Internet experience. I can do more on my Sidekick 3–which also cost me $400. But my SK3 is a phone and I can surf and check my email and IM and, a short stack of other things.

So, remind me again why I should drop $400 on the Kindle?

I’d say this thing is worth $100 for what it does. Ditch the free EV-DO service and just let us load our own stuff in it and I’m good. Oh and the books that cost nothing to copy over and over and over? Those should be about $3–not $10. Who the hell do you think you’re kidding, Bezos? $9.99 for a digital book? Where do the costs go? Not to cover design or printing–just to marketing and download service support (I’m assuming that most of the mark-up on the Kindle, itself, goes to pay for the EV-DO).

Frakkin’ greedy bastards. All these guys think about is how much they can charge instead of how little. Do they want their device in everyone’s hands? Newsflash, guys! The cheaper your tech is, the more people will buy it! This is especially true if your device is as useless as the Kindle.

sources: Amazon Kindle product page Engadget: here, here, and here.