As I exited the library yesterday, I noticed a placard on the checkout desk that announced the Bates College library had acquired a Kindle. I'm going to be blunt: I can hardly think of something more idiotic a library could do, save perhaps for burning its collection or committing its binding supplies to the aid of terrorists in a glue stick-powered takeover of the government.

First of all, there's the cost of the Kindle hardware itself, about $260, or enough to buy about 10 "real" books, even at publishers' list prices. So, right of the bat, the library has sacrificed the ability to grow its collection by at least 10 volumes. And any savings associated with the fact that the Kindle can access public domain works, like Pride and Prejudice or Othello, is offset by the fact that the library probably owns at least two copies of such famous public domain works.

Second, there's the huge opportunity cost of buying a book for the Kindle. The nature of Amazon.com's DRM on Kindle books means that only one person at a time will be able to read whatever collection of books the library purchases for the Kindle. Contrast this to the conventional arrangement, in which different books can be lent to different people at the same time. It's as if one particular shelf or stack of the library's collection had to be checked out at all at once, and only one person could check out that stack or shelf at a time.

It would make far more sense, assuming Amazon makes the technology and licensing available, for the library to purchase copies of electronic copies of books and magazines that students who happened to own a Kindle could access, much as Sony does today with many public libraries.

And all this is not to say I don't like my Kindle. It's a great device for linear reading, where one starts on page one and moves sequentially to page n. But the Kindle is a device to read content, not a piece of content itself. People don't go to their local libraries to check out televisions; they go to check out DVDs.