I am really interested in a kindle. I plan to get one as soon as they release a version for Japan. That might be a while, but that is ok, I can wait. The wireless feature is just killer and I would hate to import one and be without it.

I am a bit worried about the Digital Restrictions Management on it – you should read Stallman’s prescient The Right to Read if you haven’t – but generally think the Kindle offers a reasonable tradeoff. I would vastly prefer no DRM, but Amazon’s approach is good enough for me.

Still, I am glad to see other people complain about the issue. See, in particular, this post about DRM on the kindle, the followup, and an open letter to Jeff Bezos on DRM.

In the meantime, I have upgraded my OLPC to a newer firmware and version of Ubuntu. It can sleep now so it should be more useful for me for reading ebooks, but I haven’t finished the setup (getting Japanese to work) and testing FBReader. I’ll post on that once I get all that set up.