Evan Williams' post is the second defense of the Kindle that I've read recently. The first was at 37 Signals' blog Signal vs. Noise, and it did them no favors in my mind given that Jeff Bezos is an investor in the company and that it is one of the most ill considered posts I've ever seen on the blog.

Their main point is that too many people had knee-jerk reactions to the device without ever having used it. They praise its good points, such as not being tethered to a computer and saving trees. They conspicuously ignore the fact that you don't have to use the device to comment on features that are known quantities, such as the very ones they discuss, as well as the pricing model, the DRM, and the way it looks (assuming the photographs are not completely deceptive).

Evan Williams focuses on the much-maligned feature of paying for subscriptions to blogs on the Kindle. He claims to rebut an argument that it is immoral to price them this way:

"Look, blogs aren't free anyway. You paid for your computer, and you're paying for your Internet access (or someone is)....You get blogs with the package."

But there is a clear difference between paying for a computer and internet access, with the money going to hardware makers and sellers and the ISP, and this pricing model, in which after paying for your Kindle (but not for its internet access), you then pay Amazon and the producers of the blogs for each one that you want to read. It's a confusing situation with many possible analogies, but I think you could argue that blogs are normally free because you don't have to pay the author for the specific act of reading them. If anyone is interested in it I would be glad to take up this debate in its own entry.

In any case, I think the 'immorality' of the pricing model is something of a straw man. Of course blog authors and Amazon are free to offer any service they want. Some blogs are definitively not free; until recently no less a blog than Daring Fireball had a system rather analogous to this one, in which you could pay for a certain convenient delivery format, in this case an RSS feed rather than a portable device. This was canceled primarily for technical reasons.

I think what Williams is really getting at is why people are reacting more strongly to this than they would to any old product that they don't find compelling. The reason for this is that Amazon presented it as a revolutionary product, and it seems like it could have been one, and yet as this column so eloquently stated, they seem to have chosen to cripple it for no good reason. "The Kindle is almost certainly the first bona-fide Internet appliance." Blogs and the entire web could have come "with the package", even if it meant paying a monthly connection fee instead. That is clearly the preferred model, as Williams acknowledges. If anything is immoral here, it's pointlessly bad product design, where that term includes aspects such as the pricing model.

"Frankly, this applies to them charging money for your personal documents (I think its $0.99), as well. Do you not pay for paper and ink if you print them?"

Just because the screen technology is called e-ink doesn't mean it's ink and not simply a better screen. The only resource being used up with each document is electricity, and the user pays for that. A better analogy is paying for each document you open in Word. No, it's not immoral, it's just ridiculous.