AmazonKindle eBook Reader
Amazon has launched AmazonKindle, a new electronic device for reading e-books you purchase from Amazon.
- Great screen that is easy on the eyes.
- Impressive design and user experience. (Although a touch screen would be more human-friendly.)
- Automatic wireless delivery of books, magazines, newspapers, and some blogs. No need to sync with a computer. No monthly wireless bills.
- See a demo.
Drawbacks:
- It’s expensive ($400).
- You have to buy the books from Amazon (most are $10).
- Can’t use documents you already own in other formats like MobiReader, MS Reader, PDF, etc. Uses a proprietary format that is DRMed.
Overall, the best I’ve seen yet. Although it won’t have people bringing down Amazon.com’s computers buying it.
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I’m pretty excited about this, even though I won’t buy it yet…I’ll wait until something better and cheaper comes, but I think this one will finally pave the way for a healthy e-reader industry. I hope we can get the Scriptures onto these.
$400 is kind of a lot of money. For $400, you can get a OLPC (and donate another at the same time), which has a display mode which is very good for reading text, even in direct light.
The price is such that you would have to do an incredible amount of reading before it pays for itself, which means the device is more about convenience than savings.
But without support for external file formats, I can’t say the device is extremely convenient either.
I probably won’t buy one till the price comes down, but allot has been figured out about the Kindle already.
Kindle files are actually MobiPocket files with a unique PID and and extra bit turned on. People already know how to buy content from any other Mobipocket store and put them on the Kindle.
Kindle can natively load any MobiPocket file that doesn’t have DRM (Digital Rights Management) tagged on, so all of the stuff from LDS.ORG will load.
MobiPocket has a free converter that you can use to convert PDFs, DOCs, HTML, etc etc into MobiPocket format and load it onto a Kindle.
Amazon provide free document conversion via email. You add the content as an attachment to a special email address and they respond with web link to the converted doc. You can then upload the doc to your Kindle via USB.
Amazon provides a pay for conversion that converts the doc and automatically uploads it to your Kindle for at 10 cents per.
I’m not too worried about content anymore, just that upfront price.
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