10-06-2010, 12:27 PM
I'm curious about the "brighter screen", unless they just mean that the background is whiter/adjustable. The kindle background is sort of a gray. But since these screens aren't lit in any way, and the text is flat black, I'm not sure what "brighter" means.
The touch screen is nice, though I hope they leave a "next page" button in place rather than the "finger smear" technique. Touch screens would be nice for shopping for books and highlighting text but I'd like to keep "next/prev page" as buttons.
It will be interesting to see if Amazon does something for library support. I suppose from their perspective, the success or failure of the Kindle itself may be immaterial, provided eBooks themselves catch on. As far as I know, the Kindle is the only actual Amazon product made by Amazon. Presumably they did it to kickstart the eBook business. If the Sony reader caught on, I could see Amazon simply switching to it. Amazon has some interesting support for the Kindle (you can go to the Amazon website to read/copy your highlighted text, and "ship" books directly to your Kindle) so maybe the future will actually be Some Other Reader that Amazon adopts in place of the Kindle. I have a suspicion that this may have been what they wanted to begin with, but they couldn't get anyone else to develop the reader they wanted.
The touch screen is nice, though I hope they leave a "next page" button in place rather than the "finger smear" technique. Touch screens would be nice for shopping for books and highlighting text but I'd like to keep "next/prev page" as buttons.
It will be interesting to see if Amazon does something for library support. I suppose from their perspective, the success or failure of the Kindle itself may be immaterial, provided eBooks themselves catch on. As far as I know, the Kindle is the only actual Amazon product made by Amazon. Presumably they did it to kickstart the eBook business. If the Sony reader caught on, I could see Amazon simply switching to it. Amazon has some interesting support for the Kindle (you can go to the Amazon website to read/copy your highlighted text, and "ship" books directly to your Kindle) so maybe the future will actually be Some Other Reader that Amazon adopts in place of the Kindle. I have a suspicion that this may have been what they wanted to begin with, but they couldn't get anyone else to develop the reader they wanted.