I’ve been a big fan of Amazon.com from the very beginning, and I’ve written about them before. After reading Brad Feld’s blog on Monday and realizing that their new ebook was shipping, I ordered an Amazon Kindle and it arrived today.
Wow. This is the closest thing to magic I’ve seen in a long time. The photos don’t do it justice and the praise that has already been written doesn’t come close to describing how cool this is. The design feels right to me, starting with the box it shipped in. I was using it effectively within two minutes, and I had already sampled a book and bought today’s New York Times (75 cents) within five minutes. It just works.
It was shipped to me already connected to my amazon.com account, and it came loaded with a letter from Jeff Bezos addressed to "Terry" which was a nice bit of personalization. The wireless just worked. No setup, not searching for a hot-spot, it just worked. The display is amazing. It looks like paper. I did not realize that the electronic paper technology was here but apparently it is. Even with it asleep, it displays a nice picture that reminds me of an old book. Here’s how it looks, but again, the photos don’t do it justice. This is going to be big. Really big.
A
http://thekindleblog.com/index.php/uncategorized/12/
Terry Gold:
Wow. This is the closest thing to magic Ive seen in a long time. The photos dont do it justice and the praise that has already been written doesnt come close to describing how cool this is. The design feels right to …
Terry,
Really glad to see you got one of these. I’ll be anxious to hear your reaction after you’ve quaffed a couple of novels via E Ink. I think there are 2 inevitabilities: 1) The paper book will never go away. 2) eBooks WILL be significantly used. This isn’t a binary “one or the other” situation like vinyl LPs to CD (to mp3?)
I too was pretty amused by the AMAZING amount of backlash by people who haven’t even touched a Kindle yet. And the warm reception (thus far) by ones that had. I think we are afraid of cold technology replacing something as personal as “the book.”
It’s inevitable that ebooks will be around. So it’s time to keep trying to get the form factor and experience right so it can be enjoyable in its own way.
Enjoy and report back this weekend!!
Jim