While writing my Kindle is a prison for the mind piece, I felt mighty alone.

As it turns out, I had plenty of good company, and I've put together a short list of those I think merit special readerly attention.

The most elegantly expressed job of disassembling Amazon's Kindle was done by Mark Pilgrim in The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts), and deserves to be read by the Kindle-convinced, the Kindle-reluctant and the disinterested alike.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame expertly argued that Kindle deserves to fail in a post entitled simply DUM. Among other things he said:

So the Kindle proposition is this: You pay for downloadable books that can't be printed, can't be shared, and can't be displayed on any device other than Amazon's own $400 reader - and whether they're readable at all in the future is solely at Amazon's discretion. That's no way to build a library.

PZ Myers at Phryngula dislikes Kindle as much I do, and more briefly.

Public Library of Science Online Community Manager Coturnix writes in a burst of surpassing eloquence, Proprietary, proprietary, proprietary...

None of us, I suspect, are going to give a Kindle for Christmas, or receive a card from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.