Amazon unveils Kindle an electronic device that can store up to 200 books and downloads titles sold by Amazon - 80,000 titles already.
It’s not the first portable reading device, Bill Gates unveiled a book reader by Microsoft on a TV interview New year’s Day 2000 – for the new Millennium.
Sefton’s worried about the experience” of reading being degraded,, but being able to size the print for your eyes eliminates the need for Large Print editions as well as “normal” print sized books – surely a boon to an increasingly aging demographic. Flipping back and forth, etc. are all features that they will develop as soon as the readers give feedback. The Kindle 2.0 and 3.0 and 4.0 cannot be far behind. We are no longer using Windows 3.1, anybody miss it?
Scavella says books are biodegradable – Kindle cuts no trees in the first place
If cameras can be waterproof so can Kindle book readers, plus, nobody has yet died from a 9-volt battery discharge.
Rik wants finger touch screens, he’ll have them before Xmas 2008 – and more.
And, yes, Howard, top-to-bottom for Chinese characters as well. I bet they are already available in Taiwan but they never bothered to tell us waiguoren (foreigners).
Rachel – never mind page refresh and bleeding eyes – before you know it there will be an audio available with headphones for blind people. Character recognition from digital sources (ascii text) is easy – right now it sounds like Stephen Hawking but that will change. There will be a new industry for people with nice voices who can sight-read out loud. Screens have been improving amazingly in recent MONTHS!
Having your 200 volume library take up no more space than a pohone book does now is a huge boon for storage space, allergy sufferers who put up with book dust.
Costs come down so publishers will more willingly take on new writers or better yet, new writers can self publish as did James Redfield without huge risks in investment.
Writers may finally get paid what they are worth – it just may not be as much as they think it should be. This may herald the end of the wealthy author of a single best-selling book. There now can be thousands of new authors published each year instead of say, 10 per big publishing house, only a few hundred. (per language, per country)
Harry – the first transistor radio from Sony – in circa 1949 was ugly too, now we have Macs with ergonomic curves Gaudi would drool over (So you hate Gaudi, how about Frank Lloyd Wright?) We’ve got designer cell –phones already to match your clothes even.
Melanie, we can program sound effects like page-turning if you but want it – and birds chirping and groaning for the sex scenes too. Reading can be a multi-media experience like we’ve never had before.
We’ve never had it so good.
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