When Amazon.com first launched the Kindle electronic book reader, it was a fairly simple proposition: a little device for reading e-books. You could download the books off Amazon.com, read them right there on the device, it all made sense. But since then, the idea of the Kindle has started shooting off in a bunch of different directions. There’s the standard Kindle, which has had a dramatic price drop recently. There’s the Kindle DX, which had a dramatic price drop just yesterday. There’s the Kindle app for the iPad, a device that also has its own electronic reader built in. That Kindle app also features embeddable video and audio, something that Amazon doesn’t offer on the Kindle itself. And this week we also saw the debut of the Kindle app for Android.

It’s getting a little hard to determine what “Kindle” means any more, what they’re trying to do with it, and whether it’s worth your investment. We talk with David Carnoy from CNET (also author of “Knife Music”) about the moves Amazon has made lately and Joseph Esposito, CEO of Giant Chair and a publishing industry veteran about where Amazon may be going.

By the way, David Carnoy has a new book.