The Amazon Kindle

greggh · Post by **greggh** » Tue Nov 20, 2007 8:21 pm

http://amazon.com/gp/product/B000FI73MA ... =tr_359161

When it comes to locking down a device and restricting what your customers can do with it, step aside Steve Jobs, here comes the new King of Closed, Jeff Bezos.

Scroll down to the "watch a video demonstration of amazonkindle" video and note what is said at 5:10...

If you have personal documents you want to read on your Kindle like Microsoft word files, you can just email them to your Kindle. For just a small charge Amazon will convert the document and deliver it wirelessly.

--Wow! What convenience! Thank you so much for allowing me to pay you so I can read my personal documents.

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Tue Nov 20, 2007 11:51 pm

But, but, but...DUDE - it comes with free access to wikipedia!

It's actually a pretty cool idea IMO, but I don't have much use for one.

Post by **dann** » Mon Nov 26, 2007 10:06 am

At first I thought this device was awesome. I could care less about transferring documents. To have a portable book reader like this would be great. Especially if most of the books I was interested in were available. But then I read some of the comments and noticed that it does not support pdf and all the files are drm ruined.

greggh · Post by **greggh** » Mon Nov 26, 2007 4:40 pm

Robert Scoble has a good (well actually bad, very, very bad) 14 minute video review of the Kindle

http://scobleizer.com/2007/11/25/dear-j ... le-review/

UI sucks. Menus? Did they hire some out-of-work Microsoft employees?

It’s obvious that they never had this device in their hands when they were designing it.

Whoever designed this should be fired and the team should start over.

jturning · Post by **jturning** » Tue Nov 27, 2007 10:04 pm

Cool idea, but the content producers won't let them do it without it being locked down with DRM. So with DRM and the high price, it's doomed to fail.

Notice how you can't share a book with your friends. The greedy corporations don't want you to be able to share a book when they can charge for more copies. Like a real book, you should be able to at least transfer the book to another reader.

I thought the Sony reader looked promising, but Sony has it locked to their store and high greedy prices. So of course it's failing.

If they would just trust their customers and not be greedy, they'd actually be successful with getting these new platforms adopted.

Bugz