I wouldn't worry about that article; it's pretty awful, loaded with conjecture and errors. Here's just a sample of quotes that are simply wrong:
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The resolution of E Ink technology is purportedly around 300 dpi.
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It's 167ppi.
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I am sure the crappiness of the image quality is due to the fact that with E Ink you have only black or white “pixel” molecules with which to render text or image, and so it doesn’t matter if you have 300 dpi, you still need some levels of grey in order to do proper anti-aliasing and image reproduction. (I bet the image format on the Kindle is BMP.)
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Firstly, what are on earth are pixel molecules? Secondly, Kindles have 16 levels of grey, and third, BMPs are not supported. Not sure where the author got the notion that BMPs lack in quality, for devices such as the Kindle, it's the size they come out at that is the problem.
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Really? I highly doubt that scanning is part of the process of getting a book on the Kindle.
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Proves that the author just ranted for a thousand words and hit publish without researching or verifying his ridiculous claims.
The author is mostly criticising the conversion process, something that affects all ebook readers, not only the Kindle. The author very much reminds me of the people I detest in the graphics industry; the people that read a few books on 'good typography' and then feel qualified to rant about the 'abhorrent' state of modern typography, and how 'no one understands the rules of good typography!', pretending like they do themselves. Throw in a few technical words here and there, mention the Swiss once or twice and no one will notice.
Anyway, as for the criticism of Kindle's ebook format, TeX was not meant for literary work, and for that reason is no more mature a candidate than anything else. Amazon has a lot of money staked on getting the typography right, so I'm sure the people they hired to get around the problems know a lot more about the subject than any of us do.
And the idea of not allowing the resizing of text due the hyphenation issue is ridiculous. You really want Amazon to sacrifice accessibility and alienate it's visually impaired customers just to make self-professed type-geeks happy? No, good typography is about making text accessible and readable. By digitising books we now have the oppurtunity to make their content more accessible to everyone. To ask for this to be sacrificed for some comparatively trivial benefits of controlled hyphenation is clearly wrong.
Either way, so far they're doing a good job of it. There's the odd niggle here and there, but considering how short a time these things have been around, and the technical limitations they have to work with, it's obvious the developers know what they're doing. If the benefits of an ereader appeal to you, then I wouldn't let it concern you.
Cheers,
Tom