Iowa Sen. Charles E. Grassley is one connected dude. Blah blah blah blah long NYT article but look at that Kindle DX. Compared to the piles and piles of printed pages surrounding him, I’d say he’s ahead of the curve here.

Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader Locked Up: Why Your Books Are No Longer Yours →

Thought provoking article on ownership from Gizmodo. This is especially interesting to me because I’ve been reading so many free Tor eBooks lately.

If you buy a regular old book, CD or DVD, you can turn around and loan it to a friend, or sell it again. The right to pass it along is called the “first sale” doctrine. Digital books, music and movies are a different story though. Four students at Columbia Law School’s Science and Technology Law Review looked at the particular issue of reselling and copying e-books downloaded to Amazon’s Kindle or the Sony Reader, and came up with answers to a fundamental question: Are you buying a crippled license to intellectual property when you download, or are you buying an honest-to-God book?

Taking the Kindle for a test drive →

Review of the Amazon Kindle →

I speculated that the newspaper and magazine subscription service was the Kindle’s killer feature. A device that is automatically pushed the day’s paper every morning is the future, right up there with flying cars and an insolvent social security. So I subscribed to The Journal. To be sure, its neat having a copy of the day’s paper always on hand, and the $9.99/month price is fair. But, while the Kindle successfully captures the book metaphor, it is not so good with newspapers.

Kindle not the game-changer everyone craves

The E-newspaper of the future has finally arrived. At this point, though, it’s too late to change anything.

Amazon’s newly-unveiled Kindle is supposedly going to change publishing forever. Based on all the photos I’ve seen, it looks like it’s about the size and thickness of a Moleskine notebook, and while it might not be the prettiest bit of consumer electronics released this year it does come with a smart-looking pleather case.

The most interesting item on its insanely huge product page is this one:

Top U.S. newspapers including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post; top magazines including TIME, Atlantic Monthly, and Forbes—all auto-delivered wirelessly.

That’s really revolutionary, for several reasons. Because Kindle has its own cell-phone-style network connection, you can get these updates anywhere there’s cell service (without paying data fees, which is nice). Kindle also has a 160 dpi electronic paper display that approximates the way printed paper looks. A portable device that wirelessly downloads articles each morning and displays them on a crisp paper-like screen? This is the device that’s going to save the newspaper industry from the Internet, right?

Well, not really. True, if you were debating about the newspapers vs. Internet a few years ago, someone might have proposed a device exactly like Kindle. (Like Kindle except for one detail: the hypothetical paper-saver would be supercheap, instead of $400 like Kindle.) But the Internet’s threat to the traditional newspaper business has evolved over time. For one thing, Kindle isn’t interactive. For another, there’s still the ad problem: if newspaper content on Kindle comes free, how are the newspapers getting making money? Will there be ads on Kindle?

Web sites are too deeply ingrained at this point for Kindle to get people back to reading the E-newspaper. Plus, unless there’s a very strong and aggressive ad system on Kindle, newspapers won’t be making much money either. Then there’s the ethical problems with Kindle: everything on Kindle belongs to Amazon and the content creators, not you, and you can’t lend Kindle books or articles to other Kindles. Amazon also makes it difficult to upload content to Kindle. Philosophically, Kindle (and other E-book readers) are a change for the worse in the way we think about writing, reading and intellectual property. Mark Pilgrim has assembled a nice collection of the different voices on this issue in The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts).

Kindle is already being referred to as the “the iPod of books,” and people will probably continue to refer to it as such. It’s best summed up by John Gruber:

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.

Doesn’t sound like a win to me