Amazon Kindle
Amazon released it's long awaited Kindle e-book reader today. The best place to get a handle on what Kindle is all about is (no surprise) Amazon's web site. The Kindle product page has a six minute video that gives a pretty good overview of the features. Newsweek has a cover story by Steven Levy that discusses the implications of the Kindle on reading. Much of the article is a retreading from previous discussion on e-books, but the Amazon-centric focus of the article is interesting - the implication that if anyone can pull off an e-book reader, it's Jeff Bezos.
From my perspective, there's a few barriers to buying a Kindle. One is the price - like the iPhone, this is an unsubsidized electronic device. Four hundred dollars for an e-book reader is pretty steep. The biggest hurdle; however, is the stack of unread books I have purchased over the years that I plan to get around to reading someday. If I never bought another book again, I wouldn't run out of new books to read for at least a decade or more. Since many of these books came from Amazon, a cheap "upgrade" would be nice, but unlikely. Amazon is purportedly taking a loss on many of the books it is offering, as publishers haven't gone along with Amazon's contention that e-books should be less expensive than the dead tree version (duh).
A nice aspect of the Kindle is the wireless connectivity. Despite using a near-ubiquitous cellular data network, there is no burden on the Kindle user to subscribe to, or pay for, a data plan. Access to the network, and any cellular charges, are built into the price of the books and other content that are purchased. I haven't seen any mention of an alternative means of getting data onto the device - so if Kindle flames out and becomes an unsupported device, there may be many pissed off Kindle owners. I'm sure the hacking community will take care of that problem soon enough.
One thing I've been looking for and not finding is the opportunity to see one of these Kindle devices in person. It's not a visually attractive device - when I first saw pictures of the Kindle a few months ago I thought it was something left over from the 80's that someone was using as a joke prop. The video on Amazon's site does a much better job of demonstrating it's form factor - it's amazingly thin, and much of the clunkiness comes from making the device rugged.
I plan to take a pass on the Kindle for now, but will certainly keep an eye out for the second generation device. In the mean time, I need to get caught up on my dead tree books!
