Kindle

[cjsmith]

I finally figured out what the Kindle would be good for.

See, I read paperbacks. I wouldn't want to carry a Kindle around because it is larger than a paperback. If I know I'm going to be waiting a bunch, I'll just carry a book. Duh. I also wouldn't prefer to buy a Kindle-book because it's more expensive than a paperback. PLUS the thing can run out of batteries, or break if you drop it. AND it's got a $399 start-up cost. What's to like?

I figured it out.

Airplanes.

Every December I fly from California to Boston, from Boston to Louisville, and from Louisville to California again (or the other way 'round). Every leg of this trip has two flights. Every flight includes a bunch of waiting time in the terminal. I can easily wipe out two paperback books on one leg, often three if it's a long one or a plane is delayed (and when, in December, are they not?).

A Kindle is a lot smaller and lighter than NINE paperback books.

It's still not worth $399 to me, not by a long shot. But now I can see that it's worth more than zero.

Comments

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

The Kindle's "e-paper" screen is MUCH BETTER than other screens. I ran into a guy at the cafeteria the other day who showed me the NYTimes on it. The screen might be nearly as easy on the eyes as paper.

Highlighting, of course, is right out.

[eichin.livejournal.com]

actually the reason the older sony eink readers had keyboards *was* for highlighting, or at least bookmark-notes. (They also had "print to eink" - the reader couldn't handle anything particularly advanced, but there was a print driver that would cook anything you could print down to ebook format. windows-only, which was funny because the box itself was a somewhat-hackable linux box...)

(The kindle, on the other hand, has a keyboard so that you can shop for more books over the built-in amazon-funded EVDO connection... really, market-wise it's a direct port of the iPod model, to books, except for the "rip your existing collection" part :-)

As for free stuff, as I understand it Amazon does have a free service to convert a document, send you back the converted form, and let you upload it via USB. They also have a for-pay service where you send them a document and they convert it and send it over-the-air to your kindle directly; similarly you can get some online sources that way (probably how the NYTimes got on there.) There are also people already selling converted Gutenberg books for $1 or so, because there's always a market...

Early adopter type that I am, the kindle doesn't interest me, not so much because of the DRM, but because I can't sanely feed it my existing library :-) However, I'm likely to get one for my mom, simply because she reads a lot the sort of pop/mass market books that amazon will *have* for this... and because she doesn't have to buy (rarely available) "large print" editions, she can just crank up the font size.

(It also looks like they don't have any cookbooks for it yet :-)