Kindle’s out and ugly, but cool?
UPDATE: Couple things I saw on the Kindle page. First it supports .prc and .mobi files - great news! Presumably you can mail those in but maybe you can also hook them up to your computer (or add them to a an SD card) and get them right on the piece. If that’s true, then all there needs to be is a local app that can manage your library and that would be amazing. And just cause I’m a super geek, here’s a link to Neil Gaiman’s endorsement of the thing, he says it’s “worth its weight in gold.”
Well, Amazon’s got the Kindle up on their site now (thanks for the heads up, Ben). And there’s not a lot of anything new to know - mostly what I said about the Kindle yesterday I still believe today.
It is interesting that the battery life is “a week or more” if you turn of the wireless. I imagine for most people wireless will be off most of the time - so that’s really, really decent. It’s also cool that you can email your word docs and pictures to the Kindle - although the video on their page says there’s a small fee - don’t know what the fee is. It is annoying, though, that it’s word format - will they support plain text? PDF? Or other e-book formats?
The store seems well stocked, although I haven’t really browsed to deeply into it. They are treating books available on the Kindle as a new edition, like hardcover and paperback, now there’s a Kindle Edition so if you’re just browing through books you’ll see that it’s available. Of course you can just search through Kindle titles specifically.
The magazine selection is pretty limited, although it’s good to see that my work represents 1/4 of the available titles. :) Satisfying!
The blog selection I find completely irrelevant. I think it is outrageous that they would charge a subscription fee for free blogs. Ok, if not outrageous, then at least, dubious. I don’t need it - I’m perfectly fine reading my blogs with Google Reader on the iPhone. I’d save my money and my battery life on this one.
The newspaper selection is pretty small - but it’s got some international flavour going on which is nice. Be a good way to get early delivery (hopefully?) of some international editions for a reasonable cost.
Anyhow, it’s still pretty interesting, I wish I could test drive one. This makes a lot of sense to me, especially if you’re a buyer of hardcovers - the Kindle editions are significantly cheaper and a heckuva lot easier on the backpack. I’d think about this a lot more if I had a real commute as it is, I’m still interested. I’m keeping my eyes open for the reviews after maybe a month of using these bad boys. But honestly, why couldn’t they have made this thing way cooler looking? It looks a little early 90’s if you know what I mean. At least it’s thin and light. You guys digging it?
November 19th, 2007 at 1:10 pm
If I was still childless I would have been very tempted to second-air one of these to myself for our upcoming trip this Thursday. But I’m not and this probably would have just become an expensive new gadget for Devon to nibble on and lick all over. So I’ll probably wait till the next version. =)
I also decided to check out Sony’s reader and while it’s $100 cheaper and looks better hardware-wise, the library is pretty craptastic and the controls on the Kindle may be better. Then again, it supports PDF, Word and image files and even MP3s and AACs. But no wireless of any kind. So the Kindle’s probably the better deal. Sony’s library does have manga/graphic novel titles though so at least I know it’s possible, Amazon just has to add ‘em to their library.
November 19th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
Yeah - according to the Giz Kindle does support MP3. Doesn’t particularly matter to me, though, I don’t think I’d care. But I’m feeling mildly optimistic about this bad boy.
November 19th, 2007 at 7:43 pm
Now don’t get your hopes up like you did for that magic invisibility flight utility belt. I told you that was a scam. If they make a pop up version of this I will buy one.
November 20th, 2007 at 9:21 am
Dude, you only thought it was a scam… muah ah ah….