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It’s Official, Here’s the Kindle
By Richard Nantel | November 19, 2007
Amazon launched their e-book reader this morning. Here’s a demo from the Amazon site.
I can’t help thinking it looks like a big cheap calculator or perhaps a medical device. =:0 At the very least, Amazon should make it available in nice colors.
Interestingly, in this Newsweek article about the Kindle, the One Laptop per Child XO laptop I wrote about last week is mentioned as a good choice for an e-book reader. The XO laptop has a high resolution screen (1200 × 900, 200 DPI) and can be charged by hand. Here’s the quote:
“All this becomes even headier when you consider that, as the e-book reader is coming of age, there are huge initiatives underway to digitize entire libraries. Amazon, of course, is part of that movement (its Search Inside the Book project broke ground by providing the first opportunity for people to get search results from a corpus of hundreds of thousands of tomes). But, as an unabashed bookseller, its goals are different from those of other players, such as Google—whose mission is collecting and organizing all the world’s information—and that of the Open Content Alliance, a consortium that wants the world’s books digitized in a totally nonproprietary manner. (The driving force behind the alliance, Brewster Kahle, made his fortune by selling his company to Amazon but is unhappy with the digital-rights management on the Kindle: his choice of an e-book reader would be the dirt-cheap XO device designed by the One Laptop Per Child Foundation.)
My XO laptop will get here shortly, so I’ll provide a review when it arrives.
Topics: Kindle, OLPC, One Laptop Per Child, XO Laptop, e-books, eBooks |
November 19th, 2007 at 4:04 pm
[...] has to agree here the design is unimaginative. Richard Nantel from Brandon Hall research calls it a “big cheap calculator”. While I won’t go that far, i will say its not the design that it needs to be to reinvent [...]
November 20th, 2007 at 7:39 pm
Admittedly, it’s a little disappointing, but it might be nice if it revives the digital reader. I remember in my hometown, just before I left for college in 2001, the library got two digital readers, and I think my dad was fiddling around with one too. My initial impression was that they were neat, but impractical. With Kindle, the Wifi connection to purchase books and the connection to Wikipedia is indeed nice, but a bit basic for three years development. I suppose tho (and perhaps this is the optimist in me trying to play the Glad Game) that this will be a good step forward, much like the original cell phone or mp3 player. Not overly wonderful, but if it catches on, it will open up a new technology that has exciting potential (smart pen and tablet technologies come to mind, not to mention a great potential for universities). But we’ll see I s’pose.
August 7th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
Disappointing as it may be, it’s just the first version of an almost completly new device. Some shortcomings are allowed. Besides, bringing books to a new era of massive difussion and interactivity, should count as a major accomplishment.