Amazon have launched an e-book reader called the Kindle and opinions are a-fire. Walt Mossberg, tech expert at the Wall Street Journal, doesn't like it, whereas an investment "expert" at Motley Fool thinks it is going to be the hottest device ever. How can they both be right, or are they both wrong?!!

No Moss without fire

Mr Moss berg was the guy who pimped Apple from ground zero to the current heights. If his opinion counts with all tech products, Kindle has been snuffed out before it has even started.

I’ve been testing the Kindle for about a week, and I love the shopping and downloading experience. But the Kindle device itself is just mediocre. While it has good readability, battery life and storage capacity, both its hardware design and its software user interface are marred by annoying flaws. It is bigger and clunkier to use than the Sony Reader, whose second version has just come out at $300

So he thinks it is a great device for buying and reading lots of ebooks, but (reading between the lines) it is bigger ie closer to real book size than a Sony reader. Is this a negative review?

Where fools fear to read, a Fool writes

When he first saw it, Rick, a Motley Fool investing specialist slammed the Kindle way harder than Mossberg. Big, bulky and how much? $400 to read a few ebooks, I don't think so. But then he had an epiphany, he became a producer of ebooks, not a consumer! ie He wrote a crappy book years ago and decided to publish it with Amazon. Suddenly the Kindle took on a life of its own. ka-ching.

He predicts that the Kindle will take off big big time, because every budding writer in the world can now vanity publish their work to the Kindle Amazon ebook store. (Writers can also price their book as they see fit, and get a 40% split of the proceeds.) According to his hypothesis, sales of Kindles will shoot to the moon when the retail price drops from $399, and all those eager writer publishers become major e-book readers.

Conclusion

So who is right, who is wrong? Does the Kindle replace real paper and books that won't fold properly, however hard you crease them? Is it just a fad product that Apple will do better in a couple of years' time? What do you think? Do you even care because you never read books any more?