Amazon.com this week introduced the Amazon Kindle, a ten-ounce, $400 e-book reader that downloads books, blogs, magazines and newspapers over EVDO (with no subscription fee) without any need for a computer. And despite a reasonable amount of skepticism from reviewers and bloggers, the device sold out almost immediately.

The device itself is strikingly unsexy - it looks like a mini version of a late '80s laptop - and in addition to the $400 purchase price, there are a lot of other costs to anticipate: $1 a month to access a blog, $6 to $15 a month to read a newspaper, and even $0.10 per document to access your own files (no PDFs, though...) on the device. That last one strikes me as particularly egregious.

"It's not an 'electronic book' - it's a portable vending machine for syndicated content and EVDO access," notes InformationWeek's Serdar Yegulalp. "And if it works, it might hint at a new way to sell high-speed wireless access to the Internet as a whole, albeit in a heavily closed-ended way..."

And regarding the design of the device itself, Forbes' Andy Greenberg nails it. "Kindle's flaws add up to a device that's as expensive as an iPhone, with far fewer uses, and a clunky design that seems aimed at the gadget illiterate," he writes.

More here from The Register ... more here from CNET News ... more here from BBC News ... more here from the New York Times ... more here from the AP ... more here from Digital Trends ... and the press release is here.