Sorry about the headline: couldn’t resist.
After chewing it over all day, I’ve concluded that Amazon’s Kindle is going to flop. Or at least I hope it does. [From ★ DUM]
I don’t have any high hopes one way or the other on it. I agree with Rafe that it’s ugly with a capital UG. I think it’s far too expensive for wide-spread adoption ($400 is a lot of books or music or movies, especially if you already have a device that plays the latter two).
I think the idea of a portable library, if you heard Neil Gaiman’s pitch, is interesting, but unlike a library of books with multiple styles, designs, type faces, illustrations and pictures, you get all your books with one font in variable sizes. Part of the joy for bibliomanes is the physical artifact, the design of it, the materials, the form factor, the paper weight and color, the typography, etc. What we’re getting with the Kindle v1 is current books, stripped of the appealing physical aspects, a la Project Gutenberg.
When I learned that the device has a web browser/renderer built-in, it would make it a lot more appealing if the books arrived as web content — as html markup with CSS that mimics or at least attempts to capture the original design. I wish the Gutenberg books came tagged so that enterprising types could roll out CSS files that worked with any book (so long as they adopted consistent style names) or even specific ones for works they felt needed it.
What I think I am looking for is a device like this, with a high-quality display and an on-board renderer that will take any ASCII text file or perhaps PDF and allow me to read and navigate it. I don’t want a lot of features, no editing or annotation, nothing more complex than ☜, ☞, â˜,☟, and search.
Wireless acquisition of books is all very well, but if the thing holds a lot of books, surely you can plan ahead and have a virtual stack of them. Syncing up with whatever you use to buy the books — airport and mall kiosks, perhaps? — via a wired or BlueTooth connection would be fine, I think.
For the newspaper/magazine end of things, you need the wireless component, but what if you didn’t want it? You can’t buy it without that. Has online reading replaced the dead tree edition to that extent? If the media powerhouses were subsidizing the device — discounts for current subscribers or as a premium for new ones (consider the cost of printing and mailing that they might save if these took off), perhaps the price could be made more appealing.
I wonder if Trudeau will be find this as laughable as he found the Newton.
Yes, I know Jeff Bezos is way smarter than me.