I love the way he approaches the device. His argument that Amazon should work their asses off making this as perfect as possible for reading books is very compelling. Great buttons - yes. Beautiful, deliberately selected typography - yes. I hope someone at Amazon is thinking the same way - I think I'll wait to buy a Kindle when Gruber says "this is what it should be."
I would pay a significant premium for that sort of deluxe luxury device. I doubt Amazon will ever do it because they're all about scale. I wonder if they'd ever work with a third-party for doing that sort of work.
Don't hope too much. The Kindle app on the Mac is horrendously bad. I mailed Bezos personally about it. The mail was acknowledged, but now, 1 year later, the app still stinks as much as before.
Even though it's not as pleasant as print typography, it's still worth it. I totally agree that it can be better, but for me it's already outclassing the physical book experience.
