Here’s a peek at what is supposedly an Amazon hardware eBook device, called the Kindle. It looks very Atari-80s, although I’m guessing it’s smaller than it appears in the photographs.

Having worked for Rocket eBook and Softbook Press, I’ll just say in order for these readers to succeed, the DRM has to be held back. Any hopeful hardware eBook reader really should look at the iPod as their business model. With the iPod, although it is frowned upon, it is technically quite easy for people to rip their own CDs and push content to the device. If the iPod did not allow people to do this and only relied on the iTunes Music Store for content purchases, there is no question in my mind that it would have failed dismally: no matter how cool or useable Apple made the hardware.

So after the DRM fiasco that is the Amazon Unbox, I’m not hopefull that Amazon has done the right thing with this Kindle, not sure about Sony either. After seeing Rocket eBook take a downturn after a promising start, my only suggestion is head-scratching that other companies will likely make the same mistakes. Allow people to put their own content on their hardware, be it PDF, text files, whatever. In any case, I’m sure that Apple will let us do this on a future iteration of the iPod and have the e-book market wrapped up in a few months.

Disclosure: I own a tiny amount of Apple stock.

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