By Peter Antoniou
When I first heard about Kindle I was quite underwhelmed. Kind of ugly looking, no color, yet another device to carry around that does only one thing, and there’s a waiting line to get them. So I pretty much ignored it. Fast forward a couple years later, when I’m sitting next to someone on a plane with a Kindle. It was a perfect size to read – just a little bigger than a paperback. It didn’t feel like reading a computer screen, it felt like reading paper. It doesn’t use any power once a page is displayed, so you can actually read your current page during take off and landing, and the battery life is very long.
So I started paying attention some more and I learned more fun stuff. Hardcover books are cheap on it ($9.99). Thanks to the built in cellular connection, you can buy books anywhere and get them delivered instantly. There are hundreds of thousands of free books from a variety of sources. You can subscribe to newspapers and magazines and they are delivered automatically. You can subscribe to RSS content and have it directly delivered on the device. You can email documents to your Kindle.
I could read all this electronic content while enjoying my morning coffee without having to be tied to a computer. In some ways I miss the experience of reading a newspaper, but nobody is printing a newspaper I want delivered to my house anymore, and who want to deal with all the cost and waste involved? Now I can subscribe to the content I want from a variety of sources, have my own personal newspaper, with news up to the minute, and I can read it by the pool or at the gym. All periodical publishing will eventually be like this. Newspapers better be paying attention, this is how they can survive.
So I started paying attention some more and I learned more fun stuff. Hardcover books are cheap on it ($9.99). Thanks to the built in cellular connection, you can buy books anywhere and get them delivered instantly. There are hundreds of thousands of free books from a variety of sources. You can subscribe to newspapers and magazines and they are delivered automatically. You can subscribe to RSS content and have it directly delivered on the device. You can email documents to your Kindle.
I could read all this electronic content while enjoying my morning coffee without having to be tied to a computer. In some ways I miss the experience of reading a newspaper, but nobody is printing a newspaper I want delivered to my house anymore, and who want to deal with all the cost and waste involved? Now I can subscribe to the content I want from a variety of sources, have my own personal newspaper, with news up to the minute, and I can read it by the pool or at the gym. All periodical publishing will eventually be like this. Newspapers better be paying attention, this is how they can survive.
Amazon is just launching the new version of Kindle, appropriately named Kindle 2. You can check out the product specs here and view all sorts of accessories.
I've dropped my Kindle a few times already (not on purpose of course) and it seems to be working without a hitch; so they're durable at least
Posted by: coffee | 02/24/2009 at 09:23 PM