I'm an early adopter. I bought my first Palm Pilot in 1994. I bought four new and improved models before I moved to the Blackberry. I had a Sony MD Walkman in 1997. No one else was crazy enough to buy one, but I had one and I spent hours making mixes that I listened to on the subway long before the ubiquitous iPod headphones became the must have accessory on the 1 and 9.
The list goes on, but you get the picture. I'm a gear head, and a fickle one at that. I'll buy and abandon what I don't like and I'm devoted to any gadget that meets the needs it's supposed to meet (7 iPods later, I'm still a believer).
Strangely enough, I wasn't seduced by the Kindle at first. I surely wasn't going to buy one for myself for many reasons: too expensive; the State of Maine has very little good cell phone coverage including our village and most especially our house. From all I've seen and heard, the Kindle is a clunker without WhisperNet coverage to allow wireless downloads of books, blogs and newspapers; and most importantly, the books I want to read won't be available.
I lasted 10 days. I read all the reviews and articles that were published. I visited the Amazon site and I coveted. A week and a half after its release, I caved. Amazon.com kindly informed me that I'd have to wait. I kept reading the latest reviews and articles and almost canceled my order about a thousand times.
My Review: I've now had my Kindle for 23 hours and I'm so very glad that I didn't cancel the order. In that time, I've bought books from Amazon--real books that I want to read. I've subscribed to the trial subscriptions of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, as well as an Ohio State Football blog and an LSU football blog --gotta prepare for the title game on January 7th. WhisperNet works in every room of the house and down at the Bagel Basket.
I've downloaded three (In The Country of the Pointed Firs, Vanity Fair and Jane Eyre) public domain books and loaded them onto the Kindle from my mac. I've emailed a PDF document (a riveting study of the impact of used books on publishers) to my Kindle using Amazon's file conversion system); and I've copied a few .txt documents directly from my computer to the Kindle. Each process was easy, seamless and wicked fast. No waiting for delivery. No standing in a checkout line.
Like everyone else, I've got a few complaints: I can't read it in the tub; as every other Kindle owner has already noted (and which I doubted could be as annoying as they said) the buttons for page forward and backward aren't avoidable. It's hard to carry the Kindle without paging forward or backwards, but even more frustrating is that it's hard to hold the Kindle with one hand without changing a page (and it's every bit as annoying as has been suggested by others); Amazon recommendations seem to believe that I'd like to purchase books that I've already purchased from them for my Kindle. In rare cases (The World is Flat and Freaknomics) this is true, but in most cases, it' s not. I want recommendations for books that I've not already bought; there is no ability for me to "gift" a great book to a friend from the Kindle; lastly, there still aren't enough good titles available to purchase: No Phillip Roth; no Michael Chabon; no older Richard Ford titles.
Still, none of this is enough shatter the absolute wow factor--and as I reminded myself once or twice yesterday when the Kindle fell short of my expectations--a lot of what we love about iTunes and the iPod has evolved since the first generation iPod was introduced, including the number of titles available on iTunes.
The Kindle, as has been suggested, will do for reading what the iPod did for music.
No, it won't allow me to scan the 7500 volumes of paper and ink books I've got lying around the house (like the iPod allowed me to import my CD collection), and it won't change the way we read like the iPod changed our music habits with the concept of the shuffle.
But this morning, on a rainy, foggy, horrible Maine Saturday, it did allow me to read the Entire NYTimes and Washington Post and one chapter of my new book without getting out of bed--and without putting on my glasses. The e-ink technology is much easier on the eyes than a regular book and it allows for a variety of font sizes.
I won't be forced to choose which current book and which magazines to take on my business trip. With the Kindle there is room to take them all. I'm always on the first flight out of Manchester, so I usually have to wait until my first connecting airport to buy a newspaper. No more. My Times will be on the Kindle before I leave for the airport.
I won't be in a panic prior to the next blizzard. If I run out of reading material, I can buy a new book without leaving the house. Maybe this isn't a factor where you live, but here in Maine, it's a major plus.
The Kindle kills no trees to deliver reading goodness to you.
Most importantly, I do believe that it will force publishers (trade book and textbook, magazine and newspapers) rethink their business models (goodbye $35.00 hardback books discounted 40%); it should change the way college students (and possibly high school students) get their educational content. With a built-in dictionary, links to Wikipedia and a search function, it's already pedagogically superior to a paper and ink textbook--and it can only get better; as more content is loaded into Kindle format, it will free us from the mass marketed 'best-seller' model of selecting books that we've been forced into by Barnes and Noble and the other mega-chains.
The Kindle isn't perfect, but it's going to get better and cheaper. As an obsessive reader, it's going to be fun to watch. As a publisher, it's going to be fun to participate.
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