I do believe the Kindle will be unimportant and not very useful to libraries in my area. I live in South Carolina, and the patrons in my library hardly know how to use a computer. These are poor rural counties here in South Carolina and while we may have many computers available for public use, their use is limited to job searching and MySpace (unfortunately). I even asked patrons for a couple of hours as an experiment if they have heard of the Kindle. None of them had.

Maybe in the far future they will become relevant but I just don’t see it.

and another thing. with text to speech, we *still only get one copy* of the item purchased. if we were getting both an audiobook and the text version out of the deal, i could listen in the living room and my spouse could read in the den — that’s not how it works. it is *completely analogous* to having someone read to you while you’re using your eyes and hands for something else.

and — why aren’t publishers screaming about the loss of sales of large-print editions, too? not that i want them to, but publishers *are* aware, are they not, that kindle owners can customize their font sizes? if i needed large print, i’d *definitely* spend the $ on a kindle, because the benefits would so profoundly outweigh the costs through its expansion of the universe of readable material.

i am a kindle owner; and yes, i’ve lived in the tech world long enough to know better than to think that it, and my content, will work forever. [i love the device without reservation. i just look at amazon's current business model with a jaundiced eye.]