There’s a ton of text, among other things, on the web today and that has given rise to new cultural forms in order to deal with it. Linkblogs, del.icio.us, RSS, Google Reader, etc. have all come about as guides and tools for dealing with all the content on the web and they are now just great unto themselves. I like to share what I read and comment on it. I like to read what other people had to say about things on the web. It’s a huge value to be able to read within a community. Filtering, commentary, and participation in general are all part of reading now. And the Kindle is completely cut off from all that, basically because of DRM.

That said, the Kindle is still probably the best way to read a book today. But it’s not the best way to read text today and it is probably not going to be the best way to read books someday soon, at least not unless the Kindle becomes radically different. I can’t wait for the day when I can read books through some sort of a general-reader version of O’Reilly Safari on an iPhone-like Mac Tablet. I don’t mind paying for content, but I do mind being cut off from the web and community.