My Kindle finally arrived. The blogosphere is awash in reviews, so I'll keep it short: the device itself is a 4 out of 10 for industrial design. It's clunky to hold, inelegant to use, and ugly to look at.

Nonetheless, I love this thing. So it's not the industrial design accomplishment that an iPod is, but that almost doesn't matter. What drove the iPod's success isn't the device itself, but iTunes: a cheap, fast, always-on distribution system for content. And that's what Amazon is doing with the Kindle.

Here are two visions of a better future with the Kindle:

Futurevision 1: The Endless Book
With its pre-paid EVDO connection, the Kindle gives a book infinite extensibility via hyperlinking. In the middle of muddling through a book on string theory, you might realize, as I did, that your grasp of quantum mechanics isn't so hot either, so you'll want to stop and read a quick "Heisenberg for Dummies" guide before you move on. That's an opportunity for the publisher of the Dummies guide to make, say, two bucks. And for Amazon to keep squeezing revenue out of you, after your initial book purchase. With that kind of financial incentive, I can see the future Kindle editions of many books being laden with hyperlinked cross-sell opportunities. And we ain't even talkin' advertising, yet.

Futurevision 2: The Infinite Army of Librarians
Another unexpected nugget of coolness is the Ask NowNow feature, which must be the first consumer application of Amazon's great crowdsourcing experiment, the Mechanical Turk. You can submit any question and expect 3 well-researched answers from  human beings, within 10 minutes. It's the portabilization of the Sunday/Mahalo trend: humans are still the best search engines. The Ask NowNow "staff" is currently composed of the Mechanical Turkers –– people scattered all over the internet, making 5 cents per answer. (I'm one of them, but I've been derelict in my Turking responsibilities.) In spite of the fact that these "research librarians" are an untrained bunch, their sheer numbers mean that statistically speaking, you'll get at least one solid answer. If Amazon can sustain this model and find a good way to monetize it, it would be an amazing proof of the power of crowdsourcing.

On the whole, the Kindle is amply worth the $400 price tag – not because of the device, but because of the content services and where they're headed. But that same price tag might be a barrier to the proliferation it needs, in order to become the paradigm-shifting force that the iPod has been. Amazon needs to realize one thing: the device itself needs to feel like it justifies the price tag. If they manage to create a device that's as smart and elegant as their content system, this thing will change the face publishing – and make books sexy again to the Xbox generation.