Amazon's Kindle

So what do you think of Amazon’s Kindle? The cover article of the 11/26/07 Newsweek did a lengthy article on it. I was impressed – not all positively, not all negatively.

The Kindle is not just a book reader. It can subscribe to newspapers, blogs, search w/in a book, highlight and capture passages and has many more tricks. But will it be like my cell phone – w/ many bells and whistles I neither need nor want? The Kindle is wireless but not dependent on Wifi.

[The article used a new term for me – ludic reading, a trance-like state that heavy readers enter when consuming books for pleasure.]

Bill Hill, Microsoft’s point person on e-reading, claims we already use the internet as a reader and that 20% of the time we are browsing on it and 80% of the time we are reading on it.

I wonder how always being connected would affect my reading personally. Will I be able to get down the “rabbit hole of absorption” if the cyber diversions are just a finger twitch away?

For the next generation who does everything on a screen this Kindle may fit them perfectly.

Advertising is not yet a part of Kindle but may become so to make this industry profitable.

Kindle has the potential to allow the community to become a part of the writing process much like Flickr, YouTube, ebay or wikipedia.

I like being able to share books – remember parts – with friends and family. A drawback for Kindle is that you cannot share it in that way. I like browsing my own bookshelves to remember my book friends. Sometimes I remember the person who gave me or recommended a particular book. Or I remember where I read it. Or I remember why I read a particular book – what chapter of my life I was in. Somehow I don’t think staring at an electronic box will ever evoke those emotions or memories for me.