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I agree with Harry, and it is that great unknown which may be a huge surprise to the early adopters. And I'm wondering about the connect fee also, not just the download fee.
For instance, Borders claims to be a wi-fi hotspot, but you can only use it if you pay a fee or already have a t-mobile wi-fi access account (for which you're already paying a monthly fee.) What you do once you're on-line through that one-time payment is up to you and any expenses you incur are additional to that one-time access fee.
That's a concern also -- will Amazon be able to sustain the connect fees if people go browsing through their ebook store and decide not to buy anything that particular day. I can see that they will eventually have to charge some sort of access fee.
With that said, though, Amazon made it through how many years posting a loss each year while still growing? And people kept on investing more money into it even though it hadn't shown a profit. I haven't checked to see if it's shown a profit yet, but they may be able to operate their ebook division at a loss for a long time.
Yes, there's free shipping (slowest ground rate) once you've accumulated over $25 in eligible purchases, but you have to wait until you get to that point, if you order a single paperback book or CD before they ship any of them to you. They do have a higher level which includes free shipping (their standard 2-day shipping) for everything but you have to pay a one-time fee to subscribe to that service.
So they may offer some such service for the kindle. Or they may simply build in the fee to all their subscriptions and ebook prices with enough extra in that built-in fee to pay for those who browse but don't buy.
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