Kindle the Second • 10 February 2009 • The SnowBlog
Kindle the Second
Is the new Kindle any good? Will it truly smell like a book? Will it be waterproof enough to drop in the bath - perhaps swelling up to twice its size but still being readable? Will it have the indefinable magic of paper books? And which of these questions is sarcasm masquerading as proper humour? All of them? None? If everyone in the world were forced to vote on whether Kindles should entirely replace all paper books, what would they choose? Or is that a false choice? Will gadgets like the Kindle in fact nibble away at paper book sales for years to come, gradually gaining ground - grabbing a gadget-fan here, a frequent-flier thriller reader there? Will this be the first eBook reader that makes a real dent in the market or will it be the next Kindle or Sony Reader, or the eventual Apple entry into the field?
Read a preliminary review of the Kindle 2 here. Excerpting a quote from that article, spoken by Amazon's CEO: "Every book ever printed in every language available for download in under sixty seconds." Apparently that's his goal for Amazon and eBooks. What kind of a monster is he? I mean what if you sat on a Kindle? What's wrong with just owning every book in the world on paper? At least the Library of Alexandria never got a flat battery.
(And sorry about how creepy the severed hand in the photo above looks).
Rob
Is the new Kindle any good? Will it truly smell like a book? Will it be waterproof enough to drop in the bath - perhaps swelling up to twice its size but still being readable? Will it have the indefinable magic of paper books? And which of these questions is sarcasm masquerading as proper humour? All of them? None? If everyone in the world were forced to vote on whether Kindles should entirely replace all paper books, what would they choose? Or is that a false choice? Will gadgets like the Kindle in fact nibble away at paper book sales for years to come, gradually gaining ground - grabbing a gadget-fan here, a frequent-flier thriller reader there? Will this be the first eBook reader that makes a real dent in the market or will it be the next Kindle or Sony Reader, or the eventual Apple entry into the field?
Read a preliminary review of the Kindle 2 here. Excerpting a quote from that article, spoken by Amazon's CEO: "Every book ever printed in every language available for download in under sixty seconds." Apparently that's his goal for Amazon and eBooks. What kind of a monster is he? I mean what if you sat on a Kindle? What's wrong with just owning every book in the world on paper? At least the Library of Alexandria never got a flat battery.
(And sorry about how creepy the severed hand in the photo above looks).