I’m highly sceptical about the new Amazon Kindle e-reader. I think it fails to solve the fundamental issues which stopped similar products from being successful in the past. I’m sure it will be bought by many gadgeteers but I can’t see it breaking across into any other market.

Engadget
TechCrunch

The big problem for me is that the book is not broken. In fact it’s about as popular as ever. So while I can see this being useful for certain types of document, I can’t see it replacing the novel. But for manuals, guides, reference books – things that are read out of order or in small chunks, books that benefit from being searchable and generally shorter items such as blogs or articles it could be useful.

The price is $400 at the moment which is a lot (iPhone or a Kindle?). And this is the sort of functionality that I want to have in existing things that I own – I don’t want to have new bespoke e-reading device weighing me down.

What’s good about it?

• It can still be read in bright daylight (how many expensive laptops still can’t do this?).
• It has a long battery life and batteries are easily replaced.
• It’s small and light.
• Amazon remembers what you’ve bought so if you lose it or it gets wiped you can re-download your e-books.
• You can get RSS and Blogs.
• It has free EV-DO wireless so you don’t need to hook it up to your PC
• While it has its own Kindle format it supports pdfs and word docs

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