There are geniuses at work over at Amazon. Don’t let the overpriced, first-gen-iPod looking Kindle 2 fool you.  Jeff Bezos may never talk me into believing the Kindle is worth the hefty $360 tag, but last week they almost snared me.

Amazon’s sticky web of relevancy and impulse-buying intelligence has gotten to me before (users who purchased Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season Two also bought Angel, Seasons One through Five!), but never before has my consumer willpower been so tested.

It began three weeks ago with an email from John, a coworker who knows I’m a Stephen King junkie. The truth is, anyone visiting my “library” at home would immediately recognize it as a Stephen King shrine. Proud first-editions gloat on the best shelves, lording over obviously less-favored books.

The email’s subject read Stephen King sells out again with Kindle.  Looking past the sarcasm (as a lifelong fan of King and KISS, I’m used to it), I followed a link to a cnet video about King’s exclusive deal with Amazon. To help promote the launch of Kindle 2, King would be releasing a new novella titled “UR” – available exclusively as a Kindle download. I didn’t think much of it, since this was hardly SK’s first stab at an ebook, let alone his first publicity deal. The man is, after all, the Gene Simmons of popular fiction. My curiosity was peaked, and that was about it. Kindle or no, I would inevitably read the story as part of a future compilation. I didn’t even reply to John. Probably out of spite; his subject header was rather disrespectful toward Sai King.

A week later I’m at boingboing.net, one of a few go-to blogs I visit daily. The top post on BoingBoing Gadgets is a feature highlighting the launch of an interesting new app: Kindle for iPhone. And just like that – cue the angel choir – Kindle went from expensive, out-of-date-looking piece of plastic to Apple-friendly service. It fit inside my beautiful, coveted, ever-lovin’ iPhone.

This is what advertising assholes call a consumer “Moment of Truth.” I’d seen the light, and it lead to a new Stephen King story. The app was free, so I downloaded it immediately. In 30 seconds I’d launched Kindle for iPhone and learned what I needed to do: go to amazon.com, buy a Kindle ebook, and the next time I launched the app it would automatically download my purchase. Genius. Less than 60 seconds later (1 click, $2.99) I was reading the first paragraph of some fresh King. On my iPhone. Which I love.

This is smart stuff. Find an author who’s fans are more loyal than the KISS ARMY. Tackle device-shyness head-on by bypassing the device completely. Go after another band of merry loyalists, the legions of early-adopting Apple die-hards (like me). It was an incredibly effective one-two punch. After finishing my new King story (which I devoured in one sitting like a slobbering toddler with a bowl full of ice cream), my first order of business was taking a good long gander at Kindle 2. Amazon broke through my Kindle ambivalence via two points of intersecting loyalty; content (King) and medium (iPhone). Chances are, if the Kindle 2 logo was rendered in the trademark KISS typeface, they’d already have my 360 bucks.

But they don’t, and here’s why:

All of my early-adopter nerves were firing. My credit card was vibrating in my wallet. Now I wanted ebooks on demand, but reading on my iPhone wasn’t exactly an ideal experience. The screen is small which means more page turning than reading – and the type arranges itself haphazardly, probably by design. But the first thing you’ll learn about the real Kindle is that it’s display technology makes ebooks look beautiful. 3G wireless access to the store is free, so there’s no extra bills or payments. The charmingly ugly little thing was more than ready to slip into my man-purse as though it were always there; an iPod for my inner book-lover. And the idea of tucking a Kindle into my life next to my iPod is what stopped me.

Because when I, along with the rest of the online planet, embraced “digital” as a music medium, it never occurred to me exactly what I’d be sacrificing: the glory of the physical product, and the experience of real-world acquisition.

The fabric of presentation that imbues inspired works with an innate collectibility has been lost.  Consider the 12-inch LP. For decades it was the king of music delivery mediums, in part due to its packaging as art for the masses. The outer sleeve made a visual promise that the material within had to back up. It had scale and substance. With enough room for a well-conceived photograph or a dramatic painting to do more than compliment the music, good album art actually amplified and colored the experience of the listener as they sat for hours, headphones throbbing, gazing deeply into the sleeve’s metaphors, searching for mystery and meaning. Yeah, we used to do that.

And we used to go to stores, where there were hundreds, sometimes thousands of these things speaking to us in a visual language that’s now been reduced to the size of a matchbook. I’m not talking about fluorescent-soaked corporate Hells like Tower Records or Virgin Megastores, or God help you, F.Y.E  – I’m talking real record stores, where bumping into people and being seen was part of the point. Think 1983 at your local mall. There was a pretty good chance you’d see someone wearing a t-shirt bought at a concert that you’d been to. Whatever music you loved, whether is was Funkadelic or Foreigner, Miles or Motley, you were likely to find another fan standing in front of that artist’s section. File that under “S” for social media.

For the constant reader, the bookstore experience isn’t far removed. In fact bookstores may be the last remaining place where people casually assemble to unplug for 20 minutes and find something cool that touches them, that they can touch back. Even at Borders – with their uninspired Starbucks-like interiors – you’ll find dozens of people just hanging out on their lunch breaks, browsing magazines and poking at the new releases.  The stores are laid out with this in mind, it’s an encouraged behavior. Come on in. Hang out awhile. Coffee? No prob. Look over here, it’s the new James Patterson. Not for you? Cool. Here’s a table full of authors you’ve never heard of – and dig these covers! This one’s done in the style of Saul Bass, looks like it’s about werewolves! Hmmmmn. Looks like this is a horror novel written in verse – isn’t that interesting?

Now, dust jackets rarely measure up to album sleeves. There have been exceptions, but generally speaking publishers seem content to rely on the receptionist and her pirated copy of Photoshop to get the job done. But books have other attributes that make them objets d’art. There’s the smell, of course. And the heft. The paper stock. The typeface, and the quality of the typesetting. You won’t see a lot of folks wandering the aisles wearing J.D. Salinger hats or Neil Gaiman book-tour t-shirts, but you’ll note that you’re surrounded by truly kindred spirits: readers.

Not everyone reads, not all the time. But many of us do. Just like the folks who always have their earbuds jammed into place, we’ve usually got our noses in a book, glowering intolerantly at the chatterboxes on the morning train. If you’re like me, you devour music and books with equal intensity, but never at the same time. And if you’ve read and listened enough, you’ve probably tuned in to the recurring themes found in both. You’re hip to the fact that some of the best albums are even based on books, and that makes you an interesting person to talk to (for someone like me).

I’m not suggesting that ebooks and Kindle 2 are bad. In fact, I think both are pretty awesome. And I’m not predicting the end of books as we know them, not by a long shot. Even Stephen King thinks there’s room for both, he calls the Kindle a “gadget with stories hiding inside.”

However, the way we consume things a mark of our culture. Just like who we elect, what we wear, what we watch, listen to, and eat – it’s an expression of who we are. We don’t buy music in stores anymore. Hell, if we’re being honest we often don’t pay for it at all. Plenty of folks prefer the anonymity and convenience of shopping online for pretty much everything. And MySpace and Facebook have made it easier than ever to favor snarky, quippy, surface-level relationships over the real deal.

It’s not difficult for me to view Kindle as another gateway to this kind of isolated, over-insulated consumerism. When we’re all alone in our living rooms or offices, we’re right where Amazon, Apple, and eBay want us – a captive audience that’s more susceptible to blaring and ever-more-sophisticated marketing tactics, our every move being tracked, feeding user intelligence-gathering software. I’m just not sure this is a better way for people to be.

For all the hassles and inconveniences, and for all its freakish and sometimes annoying patrons, a store might actually be more than the sum of its barcodes. It might be an important destination that draws us out of our online identities and into our real ones. Maybe if the retail industry reached for this kind of higher ground, we could re-kindle the storefront as a place where exploring without recommendations for you is fun, and where you might even ask another person what they think. Imagine that,

I realize that’s all a bit romantic. And I still kind of want a Kindle, but I don’t really want to stop going to the bookstore yet. I like looking at all the weirdos standing around the magazine racks. I like the overwhelming kaleidoscope of images and titles and their deep well of stories waiting to suck me in. If I buy a Kindle, I’m pretty sure I won’t go as often. So for now I’m laying low, closing the laptop, and curling up with a new book.