Nov 19, 2007 0
It's Official, Here's the Kindle
Amazon launched their e-book reader this morning. Here’s a demo from the Amazon site.
I can’t help thinking it looks like a big cheap calculator or perhaps a medical device. =:0 At the very least, Amazon should make it available in nice colors.
Interestingly, in this Newsweek article about the Kindle, the One Laptop per Child XO laptop I wrote about last week is mentioned as a good choice for an e-book reader. The XO laptop has a high resolution screen (1200 × 900, 200 DPI) and can be charged by hand. Here’s the quote:
“All this becomes even headier when you consider that, as the e-book reader is coming of age, there are huge initiatives underway to digitize entire libraries. Amazon, of course, is part of that movement (its Search Inside the Book project broke ground by providing the first opportunity for people to get search results from a corpus of hundreds of thousands of tomes). But, as an unabashed bookseller, its goals are different from those of other players, such as Google—whose mission is collecting and organizing all the world’s information—and that of the Open Content Alliance, a consortium that wants the world’s books digitized in a totally nonproprietary manner. (The driving force behind the alliance, Brewster Kahle, made his fortune by selling his company to Amazon but is unhappy with the digital-rights management on the Kindle: his choice of an e-book reader would be the dirt-cheap XO device designed by the One Laptop Per Child Foundation.)
My XO laptop will get here shortly, so I’ll provide a review when it arrives.
