kindle too?
admittedly i’m a pretty big tech geek and have been looking forward to using an ebook reader for quite some time. i commute by train and use much of that time preparing for lectures and have been looking forward to the day when i can replace many of my textbooks and reference materials with ebooks. on the other hand after getting burned a few too many times by new products i have learned to hold out for the 2nd generation so not to become an unofficial “beta tester” for when a company releases something that is not quite ready for prime-time.
with that out of the way i have to day i really like it and it easily succeeds at its main goal (as a device to read long form content). its already changing the way i read but i have to say this still feels like a 1st generation device. during the past couple of weeks i found myself looking for features that don’t quite work or are not consistently applied but i still think the possibilities are pretty amazing and could fundamentally change the way we read, catalog, and share information.
that is if they don’t screw it up.
questions
overall the kindle 2 brings up more questions than it answers. and i think the future success in ebooks lies in the following questions:
the iphone is a great example of one direction that kindle/ebooks could develop. its mostly open and offers seamless integration and access to content on and off the device. (except for itunes, although interestingly enough amazon has created a pretty seamless workaround to get music on iphones and ipods through their mp3 downloader)
need access to an address in an old email? (gmail has got you covered)
want to check your online accounts? (mint has a solution for you)
looking for a great restaurant nearby? (yelp will help you sort it out)
reading and annotating content
so far the kindle has the right idea. i can highlight and annotate content while i’m reading (which is great preparation for my lectures) but once its tagged there is not an easy way to organize and access that information. to be useful the experience needs to become as integrated into services like del.lic.ious or evernote which give me the ability to tag and annotate anything i read online and then access it from any computer or iphone/smartphone. this is already changing the way i read and process information, especially in teaching and composition. creating twitter rss feeds based on the keywords “fired” and “job” allowed me to sort through thousands of twitter messages on my iphone to create my new electronic piece “not getting fired is the new promotion”
Not Getting Fired Is the New Promotion
book publishers need to understand that by opening up their content and allowing us share excerpts of their content with our friends will only help them out. sharing an interesting passage from neil stephenson’s anathem about parallel universes (which i am currently reading on the kindle) or sending back and forth great quotes from edward gibbons’s the history and decline of the roman empire with my friend john could be invaluable (who is currently using it as a source on a new project) . i already do this with video, audio, news and blogs that i find online and whether or not the kindle (and book publishers) embrace keeping the content open will be the primary factor on its fate.
with all of this talk of how integration, tagging and sharing is changing the way we read i have to point out that
podcasts and the iphone have already fundamentally changed how i read
like i said before the kindle 2 is great for reading any long form content (and i have to admit i have been reading less and less fiction over the last few years). reading newspapers and magazines on the kindle 2 is a pretty good experience, but after a few days i realized that preferred ‘reading’ the news on my iphone (through google reader rss feeds) or by listening to summaries of the news through podcasts (new york times, slate, the economist, la observed, kpcc radio, npr’s planet money…) i know for many podcasts (think tivo on the radio) still haven’t become mainstream, although last weeks podcast of the newly unemployed adam carrola and the king of podcasting’s leo laporte is a must listen if you want to hear the future of this technology. but when it comes to the news, i found i found that listening to the summaries of the daily news far more useful (while driving my car or riding on the train) than reading them online/kindle/paper. if something is really important or catches my eye, i’m more apt to bookmark it in my google reader (on my iphone) and then download it to the kindle 2 so that i can really ‘read’ it.
untapped potential
the potential of the kindle 2 and ebooks is pretty amazing. but here are a few innovations that could really make the kindle 2/ebooks better:
- i want to be able to click on any article and have it sent to the kindle 2. i’ll be happy to pay for it with micropayment or even pay a monthly subscription fee (like emusic) to a consortium of publishers to have this access (btw… your going to have to update your content throughout the day to stay relevant. slate is doing this well ($2.49 a month which i’m happy to pay for the convienence even though i can get it for “free” online), the and new york times (at $13.99 a month is not)
- i like reading magazines on the kindle, but the way the articles are presented, formatted and organized is very inconsistent between publishers. in general, browsing and reading articles on the kindle is very poorly designed.
- adding illustrations would help. they do it very well in the new yorker and many of my books. so why not in newsweek and the new york times? (although they seem to be adding more each week)
- i want to be able to tag and footnote what i read and integrate it into my social networking (delicious, digg, google reader) so i can easily share it with my friends while creating a library of bookmarks and annotations that are easily accessible for future projects.
update 031209
one big problem with the kindle 2 iphone reader is that you cannot sync any public domain books or .pdf’s (and newspapers and magazines that we paid for) to read on your iphone, this is a big problem. if we are going to be able to “sync” the device. we should be able to sync all of the content.
