For all its versatility, the Kindle is still a relatively simple and straightforward platform. You browse for a book, you buy a book, you read a book. The process continues for as long as your batteries remain charged and those precious neurons keep firing in your brain’s neo-cortex.

That elegant simplicity may not be long for this world however, if one begins to read the writing on the wall.

Consider a small company called Luidia. They’ve developed a technology called eBeam that allows users to instantly scan the contents of a white board full of notes into a handy image file, which is automatically delivered to the email address of a Kindle 2 or Kindle DX.

When you pair this easy method for note taking with as-yet-untapped digitization of text books, it’s not difficult to see how the Kindle could quickly transform from a somewhat superfluous gadget into a must-have device for college students.

Or consider the Choose Your Own Adventure books. Once a staple of the elementary school book fair, the Choose Your Own Adventure books allow you to read interactively by making choices presented to you and following along with their consequences. If you haven’t seen them already, those very same CYOA books are available in the Kindle store. And in fact, they actually work much better on the Kindle because you don’t have any way to cheat and find the best way through.

Nancy Knight of the Baltimore Sun makes an excellent point in a recent blog – this Choose Your Own Adventure model could be adapted to take advantage of more adult fiction, be it a noir detective novel or a Dan Brown-esque thriller. If you jazz up the presentation enough with rich images and the like, you could even go so far as to call it a game. A game? On my e-Reader? It’s more likely than you think.

Indeed, I think this is one untapped facet of the business into which Amazon will inevitably delve – some sort of app store that would allow you to purchase interactive games or useful add-ons. Anything from an integrated facebook app to a book recommendation engine to drink recipes could be accomplished on the existing hardware.

Just look at what the app store has done to help sell the iPhone. Apple makes a killing on those apps, and they serve the dual purpose of helping to promote their product. The next generation of Kindles is likely to be the one that takes advantage of such a Kindle app store, but the Kindle as it exists today is clearly capable of doing more than just allowing you to read books.

With Apple themselves rumored to be on the cusp of entering the market, Amazon would do well to begin to pioneer this idea now, before somebody comes and steals their thunder. At this point, it’s only a matter of time.