Posts by Stephen Roberts

Kindle fails to set light to unsold e-book pile

P.S.

Regarding th4e Kindle. I haven't figured out a good place to put the boogers.

Mixed Review of the Kindle

My Kindle came as a gift as I was not disposed to plunk down $370 USD for the privilege of buying books exclusively from Amazon. But I have one now and it is largely filled with free or low cost ebooks. Best Sellers are a bargain at about $10.00 and I have two of those. I do not regard the Kindle as a replacement for books but as a way to extend reading content into other parts of my life. When I travel I dine alone and the Kindle is great. As I decamp from Wyoming to Florida for the cold season, I will have many references and old friends at hand. Some older out of print books are only available as ebooks and I am glad to have them at hand..

The device in this first issue has some shortcomings. Amazon could take a lesson from iTunes. In Wyoming there is no Sprint network-thus no connectivity nor web surfing. That will change in Florida. Meantime, my laptop is a more cumbersome way to add ebooks to the Kindle.There are some tricks to it. There are a number of aspects of the Kindle that are not intuitive.Mostly I'm really annoyed that the books I purchased from Mobipocket- an Amazon company, can NOT be read on the Kindle. That investment must rely on my computer and Motorola Q telephone. Mobi ebooks also has a free reader that can read ebook purchases on one's laptop. Not so for the Kindle. If you buy a Kindle book it is a Kindle forever.

They attempted to emulate the simplicity of the iPod with a rather convoluted menu system. The optional memory card must be accessed separately to appear in the table of contents. The standard 256 MB memory seems paltry in view of the the low cost of memory, though it must be noted that ebook files are fairly small files.

Battery life is problematic in any portable e-reader. I left the Internet switched on overnight and went to proudly demo the Kindle the next day only to find it dead. The Motorola Q similarly is limited in time. I don't take kindly to tethering. A common complaint on Amazon is that the supplied rechargeable proprietary battery dies in about three months. A user replaceable spare, nonethelss prorietary, costs $20.00. A definite weakness.

The screen is not an issue for me. It is fine and ingenious. I note they are selling booklights for the Kindle now so the screen may an issuue for some.

I would buy one at a price point of about $200.00.Given the lock Amazon has on the content and the lower cost of content, that would be about right. I believe the lack of interoperabilty among various ebook formats is going to be an extreme hurdle for the ebook industry. All content producers are going to suffer unless they adopt a single standard.