I bought a Kindle about 6 months ago.

And I really, really like it. I have noticeably read more since I bought it. It’s nearly weightless, runs forever on a single charge. And I’ve almost always got it with me. Riding on the bus for 10 minutes? Awesome. Time to read. And it doesn’t matter whether the bus is too full, again, and you have to stand in the aisle. Have you ever tried that with one of those hefty paperbacks?

And yet, and yet.

I use my Kindle for more than just reading books. I use it to read text. And there’s plenty of resources to push content to your Kindle. There’s Instapaper’s Automatic Wireless Delivery which I use heavily. Then there’s Dave Pell’s awesome Delivereads, which sends curated longform, found on the web, directly to my Kindle. And just recently, my friend Peter pointed me in the direction of klip.me, a browser-extension which makes it even easier to send text to the Kindle.

It’s dead easy to get stuff onto the Kindle. But once it’s there, it’s practically dead.

There’s no reasonable way to do anything with the content you have on there. You read it. And, if you’re anything like me, you most likely want to share parts of what you read. Amazon allows you to share content on Twitter or Facebook, that is, if your Kindle is registered in the United States. If it isn’t, they won’t even let you set up the necessary connections.

What they do, though, is that your shared content get’s pushed to their servers and is accessible only with the URL that get’s pushed to your Twitter or Facebook account. For books purchased on Amazon, the story’s a little different, as you have a site with Amazon where all you’re highlights are stored. Unfortunately, this is not true or ‘personal documents’ which you’ve pushed to your Kindle. And ‘personal documents’ is everything that isn’t an e-book from Amazon.

The text you’ve sent to the Kindle is useless once you’ve read it. There’s no reasonable way to do anything with it. In the connected world we live in, this is plainly wrong.

Why can’t my highlights get stored in a way that I can access them in a central repository, regardless of whether I’ve bought them at Amazon or not? And why the hell can’t set up routines that do stuff with my highlights? Why can’t I feed them into Readmill or Findings automatically? We’ve come to expect to be able to automate a lot of the interactions we have with content on the web. Rightfully so, in my opinion. Not being able to do so diminishes the practical value drastically, so much so that I regularly find myself going back to my Mac, or my iPhone, really, to do stuff the Kindle by the very function of the device should be destined to be used for.

The Kindle’s a one-way street for content. Unfortunately, that makes it a dead-end street.