Kindle has never excited me enough to want to buy one. A quote in this article nails it: “Is there a market for a $360 book device with limited capabilities?” There are a few major problems with Kindle. First … yeah, yeah, I keep hearing how many titles are available. However, most of it is modern, junk fiction, or cheeseball non-fiction. There are some serious works of literature or non-fiction available, but it still has to be “popular” before that occurs. That leaves me out for the most part.

The other (bigger) issue with Kindle is that it is far too expensive to buy newspaper, magazine, and blog subscriptions. If you are an eclectic and voracious reader as I am – as with many people who read this blog – it can get mighty costly having just a few subscriptions. The New York Times costs $14/month! And that’s one newspaper. And look at the rest of the prices.

Another bothersome thing about Kindle is the blogs available for subscription – mostly mainstream (popular within the masses), commercialized, boring crap. Many of these blogs are $1.99/month.

That means that two newspapers (NY Times, WSJ), two magazine subscriptions (Forbes and Slate), and five blogs would cost you approximately $40 per month. That’s just another monthly bill that the typical American household doesn’t need. Personally, since I don’t like monthly payments, I don’t mind the higher upfront charge ($349 for the device) if it has the technology to give me what I want, and need, without the recurring monthly charges. And you still can’t surf the web on it. In fact, this blog post came about because I discussed this with my chiropractor yesterday, and neither of us has a Kindle for the same set of reasons. It’s a great-looking piece of equipment and I like its PDF capabilities, but it’s a limited-use device. If you are someone who reads popular fiction all the time, it is probably worth it for you.

On the other hand, I think this is the direction where I am headed: the new Asus Netbook with the Atom N280 Processor, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB Hard Drive, and 9-10 hours of battery life. For under $400 it seems like a bargain. The only thing that bothers me is that it runs Windows, but all the newer-model Netbooks seem to be going to Windows XP. Some, like the Sylvania, have Ubuntu, while others, like the older Asus models, run different packagings (distributions?) of Linux.

If any of you techies have any thoughts on the Asus (or similar Netbooks) or the Kindle that you’d like to share, throw your expertise my way (rothbardiancpa-at-yahoo.com).