It’s Kindle season on the Internet and for the last several weeks I’ve enjoyed following along as the almond-shaped Venn Diagram intersection of technophiles and bibliophiles have pre-ordered (i.e. ordered), tracked, and ultimately received their shiny new contraptions. Results have been varied.

I hope that the answer is not so simple as “it’s not made by Apple”.

Unfortunately, I belong to the guitar pick-shaped Venn Diagram intersection of technophile, bibliophile, and design snob. Despite my deep desire to carry around thousands of books wherever I go, an embarrassingly big part of me just can’t get past the fact that I already own a piece of gear with which I can send and receive email, check the weather, make phone calls, watch videos, listen to music, and syncs with my preferred third-party to-do list and feed reader. And it manages to do all that with only one button! Why on earth does a Kindle need almost 50 just to read a book (which are, by tradition, buttonless).

Perhaps there are real things called “designer parties”, but this was just a birthday party that happened to have a number of interaction designers in attendance.

Nor am I alone in this assessment. At a recent “designer party”, I raised the question of being uncomfortable with my lack of enthusiasm for the Kindle and found myself in good company. Some thought that its core defect was leaving all typesetting to an algorithm instead of the careful—and human—eye of a trained professional. Others agreed with what I name now and forever the Giles Argument:

Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower or a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences long forgotten. Books smell… musty and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer is… it has no texture, no context. It’s there and then it’s gone. If it’s to last, then the getting of knowledge should be tangible. It should be, um… smelly.

If we’re left to decipher who the Kindle is actually “for” by its page on Amazon, it quickly becomes clear that I am disqualified not by my indifference toward Caecilia, but by my Y-chromosome! At “press time”, the pictures of people using the product are: 1) a woman on a couch, 2) a woman on a beach, 3) a women on a pure white background. As a man, specifically a man that’s not on something, obviously this product is not for me.

Ultimately, it was a phone conversation with my mother that cleared up the target audience mystery. If I tell you that she is an elementary school librarian, you’re sure to get a misrepresentative mental image. She also totes a hot pink iPod in her polka-dotted backpack as she rides mass-transit around the Midwestern suburbs. Well-acquainted with the Giles Argument (see above), she explains that—despite a deliberate effort to dislike the gadget—the Kindle is all-the-rage among her librarian friends.

Ironically, it won their hearts for one of the very reasons designers bite their thumbs. The robotic typesetting allows fonts to be resized on the fly—a feature that she assures me I will find increasingly more valuable as I get older.