E-books on your phone?

I don’t have an iPhone or a Blackberry, so the idea of reading a book on my phone never crossed my mind. Even if I had one of those devices, with a larger screen, I’m not sure I’d want to read a book on it. But there seem to be a lot of people who are into this. Amazon just released an iPhone app that does nearly everything the $359 Kindle does (only lots smaller), and e-book distributors are supposedly selling lots of the versions that go on phones.

Do you read e-books on your phone? Why or why not?

Is this an untapped market in the drive to conver people from paper to pixels? Or will the next generation end up not only with funny thumbs but squinting from the tiny print?

Personally, I think the key to making e-books take off is to make the readers a LOT cheaper. Practically give them away and then people will spend lots of money on buying the books to fill them up. Why haven’t the e-book reader manufacturers figured this out? As an economist (in a former life) it’s clear that the marginal expenditure of $5-10/book is where the decisions will be made rather than at the $359 price point.