After two major cycles of booms-dot-com and credit-inflating into bubbles, it's easy to forget that there is a stage that comes before full-blown hysteria. It's when everyone freaks out over pricing.

In December of 1996, America Online, then a novelty company growing with abandon, switched from a metered model to an all-you-can-eat payment structure. Enthusiasm for the new system caught the company by surprise, jamming the firm's servers, phone lines, and reputation, which led some to re-christen the company American on Hold.

The frustration and confusion led many observers to write AOL off. How could management be so incompetent? they thought. Investors sold their shares in disgust, causing the company's stock to crash; by January of 1997, it had fallen to $4. Were you bold enough to buy at that moment, you could have sold out just three years later for $225.

The Kindle hasn't hit that kind of hockey-stick growth phase yet. But the street fighting now taking place between Amazon (AMZN) and the publishing industry over how to price e-books suggests supersonic growth may be next on the agenda.

Amazon is trying to work out the optimal price to make e-books succeed with almost the same lack of dexterity that AOL showed in those early days. Part of the problem is unique to its mission. The Kindle isn't an iPod. Masses of digitized books don't already exist, waiting to be ripped into the new device. So Amazon cannot simply sell the expensive-to-manufacture Kindle with the assumption that users will fill it up with whatever e-books are lying around. (If it had done that, the Kindle would have been about as successful as Sony's reader and the host of other no-name devices out there.)

With the Kindle, Amazon is fighting a two-front war. On one side, it must establish a price for the device. On the other, it needs to educate and habituate consumers toward a price for content.