The fire inside Amazon's Kindle
I just got my Kindle, Amazon's new book reader. I got it because this was a technology that I thought that I needed to understand and for some reason, the descriptions sounded compelling; more so than the half dozen or so failed book readers that preceded this one.
There are three things about the Kindle that are markedly different:
- It uses the new "electronic ink" technology providing a crystal clear display, even in direct sunlight
- It has built-in wireless (Sprint EVDO) that is preconfigured and transparent to the user
- You can buy content from Amazon amazingly easy and a book downloads in less than a minute
I bought a copy of Colbert's new book and of course, a copy of my own book (Privacy Lost--if you buy a copy you'll get 76 virgins in paradise), and a subscription to the NY Times.
The books are amazingly readable. In the case of Colbert's book, the illustrations are rendered and crisply, (in monochrome, of course). The device is light enough, that you don't get tired holding it up, the way you do sometimes with big hardbacks.
There are also things that you can do with a Kindle that you can't do with a book--looking up definitions (there's a built-in dictionary), playing background music, accessing Wikipedia, highlighting text (surrounding it with a box, anyway).
The battery seems better than I would have thought. 3 or 4 hours didn't hurt it too badly, whereas it would have killed my laptop.
The device is a bit clunky; it's not as elegant as say, an iPod.
But the big thing here is that it works. You can buy books and newspapers, quickly download them into a gadget and quite legibly read them when you're on the go. That's pretty cool. And by the way, many people have criticized Amazon for missing features from the Kindle, but there is an experimental web browser, via which I was able to manipulate to do most other things that I wanted to do.
I believe that this gadget will be quite successful. A reader is not a phone nor a music player. Some gadgets won't converge for awhile and unlike GPS's which will almost certainly be subsumed into phones, this reader might survive as a standalone thingie for quite awhile. I am looking forward to traveling and having a bunch of books in the Kindle and out of my suitcase for once.
Posted on November 30, 2007