[Web4lib] Amazon's Kindle e-book reader

[Richard Wiggins]

So every time another Web4liber pipes up about the Amazon Kindle, Google
Gmail pipes up with this ad:

    The Reader. From Sony(R) - Sonystyle.com - Ultimate Digital Reading
Experience on an impressive paper-like display

So it seems promising -- seems to be the same sort of electronic ink
technology that Kindle uses.  And it supports PDF and image formats and
non-DRMed audio formats.

And it uses, sigh and sigh, the Memory Stick.  I thought Sony had admitted
the error of their ways when they came out with a D-SLR that, believe it or
not, both has Memory Stick and Compact Flash slots.

Sony is a company I love to hate.  I've owned a boatload of their
camcorders, especially, but also digicams and music players and whatever.
There was no reason for Sony to invent Memory Stick, at the point in history
when they chose to do so.  Sony has some of the smartest engineers on Earth
but the sometimes engineer some silly stuff.

/rich

On Nov 27, 2007 2:34 PM, Dan Lester <dan at riverofdata.com> wrote:

> Tuesday, November 27, 2007, 11:39:54 AM, you wrote:
>
> > If your files are in the following formats, you can just transfer them
> > directly: .azw, .txt, .mobi, .prc, .mp3, or .aa.
>
> > For all other formats (ex. .doc, HTML, .jpg, .gif, .bmp), you have to
> > email them to Amazon for conversion.
>
> That would seem to be a fatal flaw.  If the kindle is as easy to read
> as claimed (and thus much better than any laptop I've ever seen,
> including the one I live on), it would seem to be ideal for many of
> the applications in business for which one wouldn't need a full blown
> laptop.
>
> However, I can't see a business or a library sending them internal
> docs in any of the formats that require conversion.
>
> Most important, they're trying to limit you to reading THEIR BOOKS
> (which even Apple doesn't require with an iPod) except perhaps for some
> ebooks you might have downloaded from Project Gutenberg or someone
> else that does pure text documents.
>
> --
> Best regards,
>  Dan                            mailto:dan at riverofdata.com
>
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