[FoRK] Kindle is kidding, right?

[Stephen D. Williams]

I think it's a reasonably cool product: e-ink, good battery life, Sprint 
EVDO with no real fees or subscription at all, searching (sorely missing 
in the Sony reader), some free interesting content (Wikipedia), etc.  As 
a usable product for a wide range of people, it seems pretty good.  Unit 
is a bit expensive, but could be rationalized with enough discounted 
books.  Book prices are OK.  Magazine monthly fee is twice what it 
should be for monthlies, but reasonable for weeklies.  Paper fee is 
expensive.  Blog fee is expensive, depending.

Not bad really, although a $100 or $200 price point would be far better, 
as would better resolution and some solution to showing fixed format PDFs.

For a sane version of this product, there has to be a way to share / 
move books at will to other reader devices / accounts, at least within a 
family or group.  Do it with DRM or whatever, but making each person pay 
for the same book as if they couldn't share a paper book is just not 
going to hasten adoption and it isn't really supported by copyright law 
in the long run.

sdw

Gordon Mohr wrote:
> Tom Higgins wrote:
>> 400$  +  drm pay to read books + amazon lock in +  messy storage
>> options (can dl some stuff, others you need to read real time) + mag
>> subs are free but not free + limited browser + focused (limited) apps
>> = pet rock from amazon.
>>
>> What am I missing?
>
> Ignore the specifics. Let's just celebrate: larger volume 
> manufacturing for e-ink displays. Better devices, prices, and content 
> arrangements will come.
>
> Kindling is for starting fires, not generating heat/light itself.
>
> - Gordon
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Stephen D. Williams 703-371-9362C 703-995-0407Fax 20147 AIM: sdw