Am I the only writer willing to go public with negative feelings about the Amazon Kindle 2? Am I the only one who doesn't love it?

Putting aside an unbelievable volume of unbelievably uncritical coverage, from both the tech and consumer media, the Kindle 2 is a well-marketed, poorly conceived device that will advance Amazon as a brand, but perhaps fatally damage the e-book as a concept.

Born of the failed Mobipocket, which Amazon bought in 2005, the original Kindle revived the lame, proprietary approach of the French Mobipocket, and went on to earn a well-deserved 'meh' from the rest of the world.

Strictly juding on its ability as an e-book reader, Sony's entrant crushes all comers. I've seen many different e-books over the years, and have interviewed many of the industry's great minds (and great e-book advocates) about the pros and cons of various formats since Stephen King's "Riding the Bullet" short story ushered in the e-book era in the 1990s.

The thing that e-books need, I'm convinced, is PDF. Secure, reflowable, customizable PDF. The reader devices need to be easy on the eyes, lightweight, and allow users to shunt any PDF to it, whether it's a specially formatted e-book or not. If I am paying $300+ for essentially a document storage device on steroids, I need to be able to put my own junk on it, too.

And yes, before a horde of Kindle addicts come after me waving two-by-fours and claiming that PDFs and personal documents can be put on their e-books, I already know that you can run PDFs through Amazon's filter, and get them on board the Kindle. But that's not the same as direct computer-to-e-book transfer. And routing PDFs you bought elsewhere through Amazon opens up a can of privacy/data vulnerability worms no Kindle proponent wants to discuss.

Adobe has busted its hump to conform to open standards and to play well in the sandbox -- so the market can adapt to any standard it wants, including PDF. Sony's playing nicely with Adobe and the open-standards folks, too.

The Kindle and its daddy, Jeff Bezos, don't do that.

They also don't come close to breaking the critical $100 barrier. If e-book readers were $99 a pop or less, I'd not only get one for myself, I'd get one for my three- and five-year-old as well. But the Sony and the Kindle both cost more than $300. From my armchair market analyst's perch, that looks like the biggest barrier to widespread adoption.

It's getting too damned late for the e-book. Last night, I ordered myself a Dell Mini 9 netbook, with a sweet solid-state drive and Ubuntu Linux for an operating system. For $382 shipped, it does much more than an e-book -- including letting me read e-books on its color screen.

So thanks, Jeff Bezos, for pushing your Kindle instead of supporting open e-book standards and letting the market decide which device works best.

You might be hyena-laughing your way to the bank in the short term (last week's appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart prompted this entire screed). But in the long term, the Kindle 2 and your media tour might be -- when we look back on the history of the e-book 20 years from now much as we currently do the Lava Lamp -- the very thing that killed the e-book. It's already happening; what great irony is it that the Kindle User's Guide is in PDF format?

You might be lining your own pockets and making a few sales, Mr. Bezos, but you're also promoting confusion in the marketplace and causing division in the e-book space at a time when everyone else is pushing for convergence and open standards. Thanks for nothing.