Not the most glowing review Borders has posted to highlight their new Kindle/Nook-esque ereader. Inauspicious marketing launch.

…Kobo is considerably cheaper than other eReaders. The design aims to make eReading more accessible to book lovers. – The Wall Street Journal

Likely the biggest culprit at Amazon is the Kindle, and while we don’t know how many were actually sold this year, Amazon says it was the highest-selling product in the company’s history. It beat the iPod touch — historically top-seller around the holidays. This is all well and good, but remember that Amazon is the only place you can buy the Kindle; clearly not the case with the iPod, or any other top sellers at Amazon.

Still, according to this, if you’re not reading an ebook now, you will be soon. Prepare for the robot uprising, people.

The Nook (Technologizer’s great review here) is part of the latest gadget bubble to take hold of the elder and technorati set, the e-book reader. Like the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle before it, the Nook allows you to buy books from the Barnes & Nobel store, download them via 3g nearly instantly, and begin reading. The Nook brings not much to the discussion that the other two devices haven’t covered; E-Ink screen, fancy keyboard, books and newspapers. The killer features on the Nook that are supposed to wipe out the Sony and the Kindle are, well, two.

First, there’s a color screen. No, not the whole thing, just an awkward strip across the bottom which allows you to see small covers of your books, and converts to device navigation when you’re not browsing.

Second, you can lend books. This one might have been a game changer, as neither the Sony or the Kindle allow you to loan books to other device-weilding book mavens. A game-changer were it not for the fact that you can only loan a book once. Once. One time for that book, period. It’s a gift that’s only almost as good as not being able to loan books at all. With friends like these… yeesh.

I have the Kindle 2 — Amazon’s remix of their self-acclaimed hit e-book reader. I love it. For sitting down and reading a book with my feet up on the couch, with coffee, and maybe a cruller, it’s the perfect device. The screen is clear, and the fact that it’s not backlit means no eye-strain for long reads. It’s easy to navigate. It’s compact and terrific for vacations on which I’d usually lug along a bookbag. It’s the best way to read a newspaper, too. Seriously, dead-tree apologists haven’t spent enough time on the Kindle; it’s like having a newspaper that is clean, organized, and searchable, right there in your hands.

But, then, I love cross-word puzzles. The Kindle has a keyboard, so I assume I’ll just turn to the crossword and get solving, right? Nope. No dice. No crosswords on the Kindle. For that, you have to turn to something like the computer or the iPhone, which I happen to have in my pocket. OK, fine. No crosswords. How about books not in the Kindle fancy-format? You bet. PDF. Effective two weeks ago, Amazon announced that Kindle users can now drag PDFs to their Kindle 2′s when connected to their computers, or use their Kindle email address and have the documents processed and mailed for a fee.

Or, I could go back to my iPhone and read any damned thing I want right now, PDF or not. And this, right here, is why hardware e-book readers will be one of the shortest-lived gadgets in tech. They’re very cool, until you realize they’re never quite cool enough.

The Kindle epitomizes the paradox of the single function device: focus on one thing and do it exceptionally well, while your competitor focuses on nothing and delivers much with mediocrity. Turns out that in all but the most extreme cases, people want a device the does more, more often, and smaller. I can read my Kindle or my Nook books on my iPhone. I can read PDFs. I can edit documents and take pictures and send emails and play games that let me push people down stairs.

The hardware failings of the Kindle and this ilk come only when you have really discovered your delight in the device. You love reading so much on it, that you want to read more. You want to read email and webpages. But you can’t, not without suffering through the pain of lag in the E-Ink screen. You want speed, but you can’t have that either; the device was designed to do all the heavy lifting that comes with turning pages, for crying out loud. Anything more and you need a laptop.

Luckily, and where I happen to be quite bullish, is in the e-book as a technology and platform for further development. The best thing that could happen to reading books electronically would be for all these devices to fail in spite of themselves — in spite of the industry they’ve kindled. That may just mean that people have rediscovered their love of the written word beyond email and the web, and that they demand more of the tools that help them consume it.

For anyone looking for a recommendation before you head out shopping for that someone special, I’ll keep it simple. Buy a Kindle. It’s less stupid than the others. Then see if you remember how to read.

• 58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.
• 42% of college graduates never read another book.
• 80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.
• 70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.

To be fair, I don’t go to bookstores often anymore, but I’m a Kindle guy. The rest of this stuff? So much for respondents inflating their answers to look smart…

I just finished recording a great discussion for the soon-to-be-launched, if not long-awaited, OutsourcedCMO show in which we not so much dissect, as gloss over, Amazon.com’s retail reign in spite of economic turmoil. It’s an interesting discussion that spans the history of online direct selling, including the online cambrian era in which the first macroscopic retailers emerged from the boom/crash sludge, to the phanerozoic era, in which abundant online retail life exists and many such life forms are trying to figure out whether or not they should actually kill one another.

I, for one, don’t think that they should. Kill one another, that is.

Whatever does this have to do with Amazon and the Kindle?

The Kindle is a brilliant platform — right, I said it, it’s a platform — because it greases the skids on a whole category of products that Amazon already owns outright: books. They have boatloads of them. They are known for books. They’ve been doing books forever. And other than Google, there is no other company making such hay about making books available electronically. You can’t underestimate this point: There is no cognitive leap required to go from thinking about Amazon the book seller, to Amazon the ebook seller.

But, platform? According to NYTimes, Amazon is working on making the Kindle format open to mobiles.

“We are excited to make Kindle books available on a range of mobile phones,” said Drew Herdener, a spokesman for Amazon. “We are working on that now.”

If the Kindle initiative was about channel and platform development more than just unit sales, they succeeded on many fronts. First, the device ain’t bad to hold and look at. Second, they throw in absolutely sexy always-on wireless from Sprint bundled in the cost of the device. Third, they give you access to a massive library of content, including the web, with no real strings attached. It’s hard not to be sucked into the Kindle movement, even if you don’t actually own a Kindle.

And there’s the rub. Opening up the platform to iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and so on, suddenly has greased the skids yet again, providing content to devices Amazon no longer has to support. Will Kindle on iPhone kill the Kindle device? Probably not, but who cares? Amazon has already won on the platform.