Kindling

A video demonstration of the Amazon Kindle tells me much of what I need to know about this new paperless reader. It's a nifty gadget for sure, and its potential is great, but I do have a few issues:

1) subscriber rates to read blogs or feeds... as selected by Amazon (it would like it if I could convert my blog into a "Kindle friendly" blog, and my friends could do the same, or if I could set up a feed that would convert the content into Kindle format)

2) how many books are actually going to be available on Kindle?

3) Comics? Yeah, didn't think so. If Kindle could partner with comics makers to provide digitally available comics that were easily read on Kindle, that would be an easy sell for me.

4) The fact that it will allow you to convert your Word docs and other files to Kindle format is great, but it also for a fee. Also, since you can't un-convert your file it's not really transportable (I guess the idea is for Kindle to be just a reader and not a file transferrer, but still, in this world things should be that flexible). Also, they should sell or provide a Kindle converter you can put on your own computer and then upload to the unit rather than having to constantly pay them for converting your own files.

The electronic-paper display is pretty sweet, and the tabbing and notes function of the unit is pretty impressive (but can you extract your notes?). Autoconnecting to Wikipedia is fab, the on-board dictionary and lookup function, equally bril. The connection being more like a cellular rather than wi-fi is an excellent idea.

I'm not sold (especially at $400), as I think something less proprietary is in order, but good on Amazon for getting the first to market with a rather well thought out product.

more on Kindle

via: Toasty