The ‘electronic book’ was already dead when it was first proclaimed as the next big thing on CD-ROMs. But nobody bought those shiny edutainment books on CDs, no matter how annoyingly they stuffed down our throats. Remember when almost every magazine had a silver disc attached to it?

Then came the mainstream web and the browser - and once again the book was considered dead by tech pundits - the web was the new "electronic book". This didn’t stop companies like Apple, Sony and Palm to also sell their PDA’s as new "electronic books".

Everybody knows that reading a long text on screen sucks - even on very good screens. But Amazon.com has decided they do it all better. Their new "electronic book" reader is called "Kindle" (which is already a weak name) and it has WiFi, built in search, a weird keyboard and an extra nice screen, so we can read it in the bright sunlight.

Forget Kindle - buy an Asus Eee PC …

Amazon has rolled out a huge launch page on it’s site with many videos, reviews, celebrity endorsements and stuff you can already download via your Kindle.

But the user reviews are a disaster. Anyone reading the specs of this ‘contraption’ immediately sees that it is hardly state of the art. And it lacks basic PDF support among other things, battery lifetime is too short and the thing is simply bloody ugly. They should let Apple design a new one.

But for the most part it’s totally overpriced: $399 for a simple eBook reader? You can buy for less dollars any old decent Palm and get more value for your money. Or you buy a really cool and more useful Asus Eee PC for also $399. It’s bloody small, has a proper browser and office suite - and can also be used to view eBooks.

Of course for $399 you can buy many books and magazine  … without all the digital hassle and simply read without worrying about battery time and sunlight reflection on your display.