Amazon.com’s first in-house hardware product, the “Kindle” e-book device, isn’t to be officially announced until tomorrow (Monday).

But already, pundits and bloggers are placing virtual bets on the machine’s commercial viability.

Some, including Newsweek’s Steven Levy in a long puff piece, are calling it the future of reading, or at least a stepping stone toward the future of reading.

Others, such as Information Week’s Thomas Claburn, have already proclaimed Kindle a “debacle.” These skeptics note that specialized e-book reading devices have been out in one form or another, from one company or another, for almost a decade now, and nobody’s made turned them into must-have lifestyle accessories.

My take, without having seen the thing (and, as something sold only online, how’s anybody going to see it before buying it?): It’s a $399 tablet that pretty much just plays back texts and limited graphics, in a copy-protected file format. It does have Wi-Fi built in plus a little keyboard, so it can be used for email and for the digital editions of daily newspapers (by paid subscription, natch). But it probably won’t be capable of games or audio-video files or serious computing applications.

For the same price you can get the highly successful iPhone, which has Wi-Fi, displays texts, provides the free online versions of every newspaper that offers one, plays music and movies, runs (or soon will run) third-party Web-based applications, and also makes and receives phone calls.

Or if you want a larger text surface to peruse, there are tablet PCs and laptops.

And while proprietary e-book reader formats have come and gone, e-books themselves have become a real business.

I have the great fortune of contributing to a strong, growing e-book publisher. (Buy my e-book title now and get the next update free!)

This outfit, Take Control Books, uses Adobe’s darn-near-ubiquitous .PDF format. (Yes, I know the phrase “.PDF format” expands into “Portable Document Format format.”) It’s an open standard. It lets you read text at a size big enough for eyes my age or small enough for a small-screened device. (So far, refitting .PDFs for iPhone’s more intimate confines takes some ingenuity, but people are working on that.)

Yes, on-screen reading of long-form text documents (i.e., “books”) is here, and here to stay, no matter what’s Kindle’s market fate.