Amazon.com Kindles Its Kindle
We’ve discussed e-book readers and electronic paper several times on this blog. Amazon.com announced today the release of Kindle, its own e-book reader, or wireless portable reading device, as it calls it. It retails for US $399 and thus far ships only in the US and is not available on amazon.ca or amazon.co.uk. It is a standalone product, in that content does not need to be loaded via a computer or other external device; a purchased book is delivered wirelessly to the reader in about a minute, according to Amazon. It is said to hold 200 titles and weigh about 10 ounces. Amazon also indicates that 88,000 titles are available for Kindle, new releases and best sellers for about $10. More product information is available on the Amazon.com Kindle product page.
Also worth noting is that a user can use Kindle to subscribe to, and then receive automatic updates of, any of a number of blogs or newspapers, but for a fee – many of these would be otherwise available for free (or the price of having to view ads) on the Internet. Wikipedia is offered for free. The suggestion seems to be that the subscription cost is a trade-off for the free wireless access through Kindle. The NY Times article on the launch calls Kindle “a Wireless IPod for Books”.
Crave‘s review with more information and another photo
What gets me is that they want to charge you for the privilege of getting your own Word and PDF documents onto the thing.
What get’s me is that it’s butt ugly.
It’s being touted as a huge success, or soon to be. My prediction (gulp) is that it will tank. And soon. Readers like books. This has nothing sufficiently cool about it to tempt them into gadget foolishness the way that Apple products have.
As The Economist says, it looks “quaintly functional rather than Apple-chic.”
I have friend in the US who is in love with his Kindle, and this was way before the Oprah endorsement.
I used to use the Rocketbook, which died a premature death of lack of users, so I am wary about the Kindle.
But the feature of books on demand, plus my messy library will probably make me take a look at this when it comes to Canada.