It's not untenable, we're just in a transition phase. At some point wireless networks will have capacity that far exceeds demand, and the carriers will collapse into a price war (Bertrand Competition) which will result in what we would now probably consider a good data-plan becoming virtually free at some point. This is the same thing that happened to phone companies with local and then long distance service, as well as a host of other industries over time. Sucks for AT&T, and Verizon though (Sprint probably wont make it). Sure, they're making stupid amounts of cash (billions and billions of profit per quarter) but they know where this road goes and they are trying really hard to change course to keep from getting right back to where they all started -- in the POTS business of the future.

You're forced to create an account and then send pdfs and text files to an email associated with the account for a fee ($0.20 per file or something like that). It's difficult, and Amazon has everything locked down.

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You obviously never even looked at the website, let alone read a review of the thing.

I think they're kind of lame(no removeable storage, non-removable battery), but my wife recently got one, so I know that:

A)You can(not must) send PDFs to an account for translation. It costs $.10 if you send it via the cell network(duh, that costs money). If you transfer them by computer, it costs $0.00 My wife, being an artsy type, has the Adobe suite, so she just converts them herself if they aren't just used as an image container.

B)You can just plug it in a USB port and copy plain text to it like a thumb drive, albeit with no meaningful folder managment. She has loaded it up with a bunch of ebooks she already had in plain text, plus the aforementioned converted PDFs.

Maybe if they weren't in super stealth mode they would have seen each other and the accident could have been avoided. This technology is too dangerous and needs to be outlawed through international treaty. The up side is that we know that stealth works!!