The announcement of the Amazon Kindle wasn’t exactly a surprise. News has been trickling out for awhile now. What we didn’t know until Steven Levy’s Newsweek piece are the details. The Kindle was announced at an event this morning and as it was announced the Amazon.com homepage displayed an open letter from Jeff Bezos.

On Brief 261, I talk about the specs and it’s potential to be widely adopted. Mike Arrington speculates that past ebook readers, like Sony’s haven’t caught on because of their lack of wireless connectivity. He could be right, but I think it’s more about the availability of books and most important–the price. My suggestion is for Amazon to make the device available at a low cost or for free, in exchange for a year contract…something similar to what Audible.com did with it’s Otis MP3 players back in the early days.

I’m excited about the Kindle, but I’m also fearful about it’s UI. Watch the videos on Amazon.com and you’ll see what I mean. My guess is I’m going to wish it was designed by Apple, but we’ll see for sure tomorrow.