There are 170,000 Kindle books available. But are they the ones you want to read? As I’ve been travelling quite a bit lately, I have seen more and more Kindles “in the wild,” so to speak. I’m a pretty avid reader, and it’s a device I really want to own, but I’ve decided to hold off until the next generation, now delayed until early 2009. (And maybe the emerging competition from Plastic Logic is something that has caused Amazon to reconsider a fall launch to make sure it stays ahead of the others, though that’s completely speculative.) At any rate, as I started to look further into the Kindle, there are a couple of content items that give me pause. And it’s not clear that these are on the docket for improvement in the short term. Although Amazon brags of 170,000 titles, in actual practice, when I compare Kindle availability to the books I’ve read recently, only about half are available online. Maybe my tastes are too obscure. Books like “Joel on Software” aren’t available on Kindle, which is weird. Michael Connelly’s “Echo Park,” a decent airplane read? Check, only $4.79. Henning Mankell’s “Dogs of Riga”? Not available “Art of the Start” by Guy Kawasaki, available for $16.01, which is slightly less than the hardcover edition, but not as cheap as used copies. “Bootstrapping” by Greg Gianforte, not available (though used copies are less than $5). I’ve noticed that the number of Kindle books seems to go up by 10,000 pretty routinely. So maybe by mid-2009, enough of the books I want will be available. And with regard to new bestsellers in both fiction and non-fiction, Kindle selection is decent and the prices are generally $9.95, which is a good deal. The second area of concern is in magazines and newspapers. Though there are a few dozen available, it turns out few of the magazines I read routinely are on Kindle. MIT Review is pretty good. Fortune, great. Newsweek? Yawn. Forbes? I consider it old-fogey business stuff (other than Guy Kawasaki, of course). How about BusinessWeek, Wired, FastCompany? Why not Runner’s World or Rolling Stone? In terms of newspapers, the Kindle seems like it’s doing better. I read the Wall Street Journal fairly often, but I don’t read any newspaper daily. And the Kindle version of the Journal is $9.99 a month, which adds up fast. It also has the New York Times at $13.99, which is even worse. However, it added quite a few papers at $5.99, including the San Jose Mercury, Seattle Post, and San Francisco Chronicle, among others. I think there’s likely a high degree of elasticity for casual newspaper readers. If it’s cheap enough, I believe people are likely to subscribe to multiple papers. Still, it begs the question: Why pay for a newspaper on the Kindle if you can browse on the Web for free? Is it that much better to get it daily? The answer’s not clear to me. And finally, when can I get the Absolutely Mad collection on a Kindle? They’re just PDFs, so maybe it works already. That would be tres cool. Let me know what content you want on a Kindle. And if you’re using a Kindle, what have you bought lately? Open Source