Amazon Kindle

[Mysterion]

Personally, I'm still not "sold" on the whole e-book thing. I'm a dead-tree kind of guy. But if there was something that was gonna change my mind, Kindle might be it.

Saw Bezos on Charlie Rose's show last night, and I gotta say the enthusiasm Bezos has for this device and it's potential is a bit contagious. I'm not there yet, but could probably be convinced.

I think this item is probably a big step forward from the other e-book devies available and could eventually change the publishing business, and reading habits in a big way.

Just my two-cents.

 

[Christopher]

"Digital paper" readers do remove one of the main objections to reading e-books, the complaint about eyestrain from reading a screen. These are screens that essentially use actual ink on a white surface, that don't flicker but present a constant image until changed, and that reflect ambient light just like paper rather than emitting light. So there would be no more eyestrain than you'd get from reading a paper book -- perhaps less, if you can resize the text to your comfort level.

So if that one difficulty has been surmounted, it's reasonable to think that other difficulties of electronic books, such as cost, availability, and so forth, will be surmounted in time as well.

 

[I Grok Spock]

TerriO said:
The eBook format gives you a shorter word count to work in than a 100K novel or even a 50K short novel (although there are ways to work around that).

Is that a restriction of the publishers or a physical limitation of the file format? Just curious, because I see that there is a Kindle version of War and Peace.

Christopher said:
"Digital paper" readers do remove one of the main objections to reading e-books, the complaint about eyestrain from reading a screen. These are screens that essentially use actual ink on a white surface, that don't flicker but present a constant image until changed, and that reflect ambient light just like paper rather than emitting light. So there would be no more eyestrain than you'd get from reading a paper book -- perhaps less, if you can resize the text to your comfort level.

Well, having played with the Sony reader, it seemed more like dark grey text on a light grey surface to me. From the pix I've seen, the Kindle reader looks similar.

I think the thing I find most interesting about the Kindle service is the Whispernet delivery. We've already seen something of the sort (direct wireless delivery of media content to a dedicated device) in the new iPod Touch. There seems to be a never-ending oscillation in tech between specialization and convergence.

 

[Rosalind]

*sigh*

considering this is my third post about how derailed this thread is, I'm closing it.

I'll post replies to the various posts once I have some time. Please contact me via PM if you want to discuss anything.