Do you usually pay to be a beta tester? Not me. I usually get something free for debugging somone’s product.

Well today Amazon released the bigger dog of their reader and will charge you about $500 bucks for a device that looks like a cardboard prototype of a technology product from the 80’s.

Expectations for electronic devices are considerably more sophisticated than what the Kindle offers. Now of course Amazon is just warming up the market for a smart innovative company like Apple or a smart startup to take over much like Apple did with the iPod. I actually think that Amazon doesn’t care. Amazon is all about the distribution chain. They want to sell you the content not the device. They just created the device to create more interest in reading. Certainly the publishing industry doesn’t understand how to do that. But will this actually reinvigorate the reading market? That remains to be seen.