Some Thoughts on Kindle

Amazon hopes Kindle will spark interest in e-books
By Tom Abate
San Francisco Chronicle
Taking its cue from Apple, Amazon.com has introduced a $399 device, called the Kindle, in the hopes of creating a market for electronic books, much as the iPod popularized paid music downloads.

Kindle premiered to Applesque hype, complete with adulatory broadcast interviews and fawning magazine articles quoting Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos calling the gizmo, "the most important thing we've ever done."

But the long, sad history of e-books demands skepticism, even from favorable reviewers.

"This is probably the first e-book reader that's worthy of criticism," quipped Michael Gartenberg, a consumer technology expert for Jupiter Research. He thinks the Kindle, although not perfect, has better visuals and wireless access, which make it "potentially a game changer."

Erik Wilde, a computer scientist and electronic publishing expert at UC Berkeley, said the Kindle has some advantages over competing gadgets - the $299 Sony Reader lacks wireless downloads, for instance. But Wilde said the Kindle does not allow readers to clip a passage and e-mail it to a friend - a feature that would give it a capability that no paper book ever had.

Kindle has arrived. Long live the book!
Beverly Sullivan
I’ve been a bookworm for as long as I can remember. My shelves at home are groaning under the weight of books that go back to my early reading days. They’re starting to stack up on the floor too. I have a ‘to read’ stack, a ‘must re-read stack’, a ‘recently read’ stack and several random stacks.

So ‘Kindle’ should be the answer to my prayers, and save me from having to move house within the next year or so too.

Amazon’s new ‘ipod of reading’ is an amazing idea.

Amazon electronic book offers new opportunities
Sam Ingleby
Amazon’s founder Jeffrey Bezos was on stage in New York this week announcing the imminent release in the US of what he hopes will be the new ‘killer’ handheld device: an electronic book-reading console called Kindle.

Whilst not as aesthetically pleasing as the iphone, Kindle is still an intriguing proposition: long and slim, with electronic ink that mimics the appearance of paper - if not the feel - and with a back lighting facility that allows you to read in any light, Bezos believes its introduction could herald a step change in our consumption of books and newspapers. Retailing at about £200, users will be able to download books over a wireless connection accessing the extensive Amazon back catalogue of over 90,000 titles for about £2.50 a throw.

Thoughts on Kindle
Don Park
I think the e-book technology as well as the market are still not mature enough to address the needs of the general consumer market. Five years is my best guess on when everything will come together.

However, there are market segments which are not only ready but in severe need of e-book. One good example is the K12 market. Kids today have to carry insanely heavy textbooks to school everyday. And those textbooks are too expensive and often too scarce for parents to buy second set of every semester. That's the market ready to pay hundreds of dollars for an e-textbook device and services. That's also a great market to foster user-created content community: notes, tests, translations, tips, and lessons created, shared, and sold to teachers, tutors, and parents. Feynmen Lectures? Think Super-Mom's Easy Geometry slideshows or Don Park's How to Speak Konglish video.

Worst Book Titles

World’s Worst Book Title winner
By Phil Kloer
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Well, folks, we had a squeaker in the vote for World’s Worst Book Title ever. But the Supreme Court was called in for an emergency ruling, and by a 5-4 vote they declared George Bush to be the winner.

No, wait. Wrong vote. The winner was “Cooking With Pooh,” which is a real book from Disney. It barely beat out “Letting It Go: a History of American Incontinence,” “The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification” (which I think maybe some people did not realize is also a real book) and “Everything You’ll Need to Remember About Alzheimer’s.”

Writers Guild

From the striking WGA, 'A World Without Writers'

Author Trudeau in Trouble

Court finds 'Natural Cures' author Trudeau in contempt

WASHINGTON – Best-selling author Kevin Trudeau violated a 2004 court order by making “patently false” claims in one of his books about a weight-loss regimen, a federal court said in a ruling released Monday.
The ruling found Trudeau in contempt of a 2004 court order that barred him from using infomercials to sell any product or service other than books and required that he not misrepresent the content of those books.

Book Notes

In India: Help for the visually impaired:


Guwahati: For visually disabled persons in the northeastern States, listening to books in English or in the regional languages by a writer of their choice that would be read aloud in a Talking Book Library may be a dream that will come true soon, courtesy the National Federation of the Blind (NFB).

A Talking Book Library equipped with a compact disk recording studio is one of the three projects identified by the NFB aimed to make the learning process easier for visually disabled persons of the region and to provide them skill development training to ensure gainful employment.


And a librarian tells his story

Fixing Your Books

There's an interesting article on Wikihow, explaining how to repair a book's binding. I confess, it never occurred to me to try.

Amazon's Newest Idea

Newsweek looks at Amazon's latest ideas about delivering books.

Nothing will replace the joy of holding a book in your hands but that doesn't mean there aren't other ways of delivering stories.

The Future of Reading

Amazon's Jeff Bezos already built a better bookstore. Now he believes he can improve upon one of humankind's most divine creations: the book itself.

Where Reading Is Regular

Imagine! A place where people like to read!

In the Valley of the Literate

...The Pioneer Valley is arguably the most author-saturated, book-cherishing, literature-celebrating place in the nation. Popular leisure outings here include browsing a dusty used bookstore, taking in an art book show, attending a workshop in bookbinding or letterpress printing, or chatting with an author (while buying a signed first edition of his work) at a public reading.

“That’s what we do for fun,” said Bonnie Isman, director of the Jones Library. “It’s part of life here.” While the library has several author readings each month, the independent bookstores of the area are adding still more, she said.

Smart Words About Dictionaries

TED.com--Technology, Entertainment, Design--is one of my favorite sites because of the intelligence of its conference speakers.
And look who turned up--Erin McKean!

The Power of Poetry

This is pretty funny: poetry as presidential politics statement.
There are, of course, both pro and anti-Bush; I've chosen the latter.
"Make the Pie Higher"

I think we all agree, the past is over.

This is still a dangerous world.

It's a world of madmen

And uncertainty

And potential mental losses.

Rarely is the question asked

Is our children learning?

Will the highways of the internet

Become more few?

How many hands have I shaked?

They misunderestimate me.

I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.

I know that the human being and the fish

Can coexist.

Families is where our nation finds hope

Where our wings take dream.

Put food on your family!

Knock down the tollbooth!

Vulcanize society!

Make the pie higher!

Make the pie higher!


Snopes.com has successfully traced all of the lines back to Bush except the "pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity," which remains, thankfully, elusive