I think I got the point, what I'm saying is that the kindle is not a book, and should not try to be. It should be a kindle/e-reader. Bringing in a book designer would likely make it more like a book, which it would fail at, and a great designer would also try to make it a beautiful book, which it would fail even worse at.
Great books design is a factor of not just picking a good font, but the right font. The right margins and font size, the right paper weight and finish, the right line height, cover, putting blank pages and linebreaks in the right spot even when it's not consistent. These are the tools of the book designer.
But e-books take all of those tools away. Sure e-books could handle all of that, you could make a reader capable of displaying LaTeX files pixel-perfectly, but it would be a terrible experience. I bought my mom a kindle because she can make the font size gigantic, it would be unbearable for me to read like that. I have my kindle set to use a different font, size, line spacing, and margin than my girlfriend, and the fact that we can make it just right for ourselves is one of the reasons I've read exactly 1 hardcopy book out of 50 in the past ~2 years and she's read maybe 2.
I'm not saying the kindle can't be improved, but you need someone who wants to make a better kindle, not a more book-like kindle. In my experience, great leaps in design need to come from a distance. The best early website/Director designs were not made by the best print designers, or the best programmers. They were made by people with backgrounds in music and dance and animation, those that grasped the actual beauty of interaction, in that it is dynamic and ephemeral, not "just so". You can't get much more uncompromising than a book designer. Look at Edward Tufte, he was unable to find a publisher who would make exactly the book he wanted, so he started his own publishing company.