With Kindel Amazon is trying to build a money machine by selling ebooks in the way that Apple has done by selling music through iPods and iTunes. Amazon launched Kindle a few days ago and the blogosphere is full of (mostly unhappy) reviews. I have been expecting Kindle like gadgets for sometime and Sony has a similar product called Sony Reader and as of now I would look for Kindle version 2.0.
Here is a video demo of Amazon Kindle from YouTube
I like Kindle's features which allow users to bookmark pages or highlight text but paying for conversion of my own doc and pdf files seems unreasonable. Sony reader has doc and pdf reading for free. Amazon has apparently got a library of 88,000 book titles that can be read off Kindle. Its seems you can't print a book from Kindle (Amazon User Forum discussion) and if that is true then I don't feel its good value. And hey what about the good old system of borrowing/lending books from friends for a few days?
Overall ebook readers would need to evolve into multifunction devices atleast letting people view images, videos movies and type emails and docs (a bit like mobile phones) and prices would need to fall for wider adoption. Kindle like proprietary formats won't or imho shouldn't survive. I sense that someone (Philips, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Adobe, Nokia, Sony, Samsung etc.) would come up with a cheaper device that would be Amazon compatible along with allowing free access to own documents and PDF ebooks already published. Apparently the web browsing experience on Kindle is horrible according to TechCrunch.
Would Apple jump in and change the game with a hipper cooler gadget that syncs with Macs something similar to iPods and iTunes? That would be interesting. What about Google's program of scanning books? Why would Google sit quiet? What do you think?
Here is a comparison of Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle by Gizmodo (over one done by Wired).
