Amazon’s Kindle is to a book as the cells in Central Prison are to nearby North Carolina State University dormitory rooms.

Once purchased, books printed on paper grant the buyer enormous freedom of use.

Kindle proposes to erase that freedom for books purchased to read on its high-resolution screen.

As MacWorld explained in passing, Kindle users will find their book collections chained and padlocked to a single device.

They will be unable to read Kindle books on any other computers they may own. They will be unable to lend one of their books to a friend, give it to their son or daughter who is away at college of pass it along to another favorite relative who shares their literary tastes.

By all accounts, the only way to lend someone a Kindle book will be to pass along the entire device.

With the device and password go the privileges of using the Kindle service on your tab, and your ability to read other books in the Amazon-imagined stack you bought for your Kindle.

Kindle also adds difficulty and expense to the sharing of snippets from your reading. You can after all presumably share paragraphs and stanzas by way of the email account that is built into every Kindle, for ten cents per message. With a Kindle, you see, comes the privilege of paying postage to send email.

Users are simply unable to make the same use of Kindle as they might a book, because Kindle is not an electronic book.

Nor is Kindle in my view actually an attempt to create the digital equivalent of a book.

It’s a text subscription service to a wireless distribution network.

The bill for that wireless access is not $0, as implied by almost everyone in sight, but concealed in the other costs and relative inconvenience of use.

To be fair, Amazon chief Jeff Bezos flatly told Newsweek “This isn't a device, it's a service.” One for which I am confident he has planned a variety of alternatives. More precisely, Kindle is the door to what in the world of digital publishing is called a walled garden.

With Kindle as thus far offered, subscribers would not be on or have access to the Web, although a small selection of mollifying Webbish content is to provided to them.

As a result, wonderfully readable screen and all, Kindle is not an advance or improvement.

Kindle is a throwback to the era when online publishers still believed they could trap their clients and their money inside a network or site. Even when it works, as Bezos surely knows, that is historically a short-lived strategy.

The digital freedom real ebooks would provide may not be in view for years, even though the technology to create them exists, because currently the big money is in traps.

Kindle is a trap, and we are asked to pay some $399 for the privilege of putting our hands in that trap.

For my part, and long experience in the electronic publishing business has made me a little more radical than others about this, I would rather follow the example of the bobcats who roam the White Marsh Swamp where I grew up, and gnaw my leg off to escape the trap.

No doubt you have guessed that if perchance someone were to give me one for Christmas, I would return it. I would use the money to buy something acceptable to me and appropriate to the spirit of the gift.

My loved ones would understand, and after the era of traps passes, we can give one another the realized dream of ebooks for Christmas.

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Correction (Nov. 22, 2007): Kindle owners report you can surf the Web with it, albeit with some difficulty. Others note that there is a fee for Kindle-delivered blogs to cover the cost of delivering their data via Sprint's wireless network (again showing that Kindle wireless access is not "free").

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