Amazon Kindle Drops
By J. Wallace
Amazon Kindle dropped today, promising a new wave of convenient e-book reading. The e-book has been a troubled concept, as people just plain like to turn those lovely pages. And who can blame them? Still, this is one of the most promising developments; in spite of completely misguided hype about a screen that Amazon calls “Revolutionary electronic-paper.” Amazon marketing flacks, listen up: nobody is buying that one, no matter how cool the screen actually is. Book lovers won’t be taken in by such breathless nonsense. That said, Amazon does answer the chief complaint about e-books (readability) with the Kindle‘s high resolution screen. It looks pretty sweet on first glance. From the sample pics, it does appear that the text appears much more “printlike” than other attempts.
The real cool thing about this? It’s ten ounces, and wirelessly receives newspapers, blogs, and any book you care to purchase–in seconds. It holds 200 blogs, books and other material. 88,000 books are available for Kindle, including 100 of 112 current New York Times bestsellers (for under ten bucks!). Amazon says you can get thru War And Peace in a single charge, but what’s more appealing is that you do not need ANY computer assistance to read with this. It is a complete standalone product, and because of the blog, book, newspaper, and Wikipedia access, is also cross-platform in terms of access to books, newspapers, mags, downloads, etc. This is definitely a step forward for travelers who hate lugging heavy loads of reading material.
