| Is anyone actually buying the Amazon Kindle? According to that Amazon website, the Kindle is a revolutionary portable reader that wirelessly downloads books, newspapers, magazines and blogs to a crisp, high-resolution electronic paper display that looks and reads like real paper, even in bright sunlight.The thing that is bugging me is that I have never actually seen one. None of my gadget buddies have one (that I know of). Where are these things? I should be tripping over them in the streets. |
According to their site, Kindle customers, no matter where they are in the U.S., can wirelessly shop the Kindle Store and download new content — all without a PC or a WiFi hot spot. Apparently Amazon pays for Kindle’s wireless connectivity so there are no monthly wireless bills and no service commitments for customers. I understand that the the Kindle Store contains over 90,000 books that can be purchased and delivered wirelessly to Kindle, each in less than a minute. Customers can choose from hundreds of top newspapers, magazines and blogs and have their subscriptions auto-delivered wirelessly. All New York Times Best Sellers and New Releases are $9.99, unless marked otherwise.
Check it out and let me know what you think. The Kindle weighs 10.3 ounces and is lighter and thinner than a paperback book, carries two hundred books, and includes built-in access to The New Oxford American Dictionary and wireless access to Wikipedia.org.
I think some very cool products based on E-ink (manufacturer of the displays in the Kindle and Sony Reader) electrophoretic displays are going to be out in the next few years.
Right now, E-ink sell monochrome displays with switching times on the order of half a second or so. But, they have prototype full color displays and I believe the “in the lab” switching times are getting down into the 50ms range — early LCDs were around 30ms or higher.
Pretty nice, considering that the display is reflective and nonvolatile, so it only consumes power when switching. An ultraportable laptop (or tablet…) with 10-20+ hrs of battery life would be nice.
Saw a working prototype of a full-color e-reader that was maybe 1cm thick – I think I’ll wait for that to hit the streets instead of being a Kindle early adopter. Plus, for $400 I can have an iPhone instead.
@Adam — do you ever see these on campus? I can see a real application for eTextbooks.
Mark
Haven’t noticed anyone on campus with one. I’ve only seen them ‘in the wild’ on airplanes – I guess they’re popular with road warriors who enjoy reading but don’t enjoy lugging heavy books around the world.
I think the publishers are the biggest impediment to eBooks. They’re worried that their business model is going to end up like the music industry, with rampant piracy and dropping prices as content goes digital. So they’re reluctant to sign deals to make their books available electronically.
As far as textbooks go, I personally like to have something I can put my hand on. But a supplementary electronic copy would be fantastic; I’d pay $20 or so more for a hardcopy/eBook bundle, but a $150 electronic-only would be a tough sell.
The ability to mark up textbooks with notes on a touchscreen would be a killer app for education, I think… you could even imagine working out homework problems and submitting them electronically all on your reader device.