Amazon Kindle Real-Life Review

I've posted about ebooks before (e.g. I Hate Books). It sounds like the Amazon Kindle has some real potential. All we need is a product with enough critical mass to create a market and then we can have real competition ala the music player market.

Has anyone used an ebook reader before? I have some friends with the Sony version and they love it. Are we there yet? Does anyone have a Kindle?

Robert Love blogged some reviews,

http://blog.rlove.org/2007/11/review-of-amazon-kindle.html
and
http://blog.rlove.org/2007/11/more.html

based on his personal experience. Sounds pretty good to me, wish it worked with pdf files though.

Cheers,

Joe

Omar Shahine has one, and had just bought the second-gen Sony Reader: http://www.shahine.com/omar/SonyReaderVsKindle.aspx

I don't get it. For non-technical books, i'd rather just have a paperback to read. For technical books, the indexing searching is a great idea, but i'd just rather have the PDF/XPS/CHM as I can search and copy/paste from it. I don't see the compelling reason for yet another device and battery I need to worry about.

Also, have you read this review:

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9820070-7.html?tag=nefd.lede

It sounds cool, but like someone above me mentioned, it will be yet another battery to worry about. Seems like we're in need of a battery revolution.

I have to worry about my laptop, cell phone, MP3 player, and I would like to have a solid e-Book reader as well, but so far only my MP3 player seems to last as long as I would expect (and even then, I'd sure like it to last longer yet).

I'm using an iLiad, and i'm quite satisfied with it, but it would be better if it could read also chm (without converting to other formats such as html pages) and if it was available also in A4 format (otherwise you often have to zoom or scroll vertically a page).

For my needs, Amazon Kindle has too restrictive constraints, and all the other devices has worse resolution and display size than iLiad.

I vastly prefer the Charlie Kindel.

If you have one of those, you get both OLEVIEW.exe and Windows Home Server.

As someone mentioned elsewhere, the reader makers should go after students (with appropriate pricing and content support and content distribution) to create the market. If only there was a multi-billion dollar corporation to make that original investment...
:)

I think the Iliad is the best eInk reader out there. If the Kindle doesn't support pdf then it truly sucks. I looked at an image of it. it's too thick for an eink reader.

See my quick Sony ereader vs Ilaid comparison:
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/HandsOnSonyEinkReaderPRS500Reviewed.aspx
(it's one of comments by me)


After trying all kinds of ereaders, I settled for a Samsung Q1 Ultra. See why:
http://www.hanselman.com/forum/messages.aspx?TopicID=16

To Shawn: the chm and online docs, integrated help is one of the reasons I settled for a UMPC. For example, I like filtering msdn docs by language. Only a real computer with javascript support can do this.

eInk readers use very little power. They only use power to "turn the page". There's no backlit screen.

One reason an ereader is handy is you can put many books on it. Imagine carrying many 1500 page computer books on a trip.

I can't speak to other eBook readers, but I've got a Kindle and have been blogging about it at www.knowing.net. Short story: initial reaction was that there was very little support from tech publishers. Longer story: it's not nearly as locked-up as people are saying -- it uses a format called AZW, which is a compatible specialization of "Mobi," which is a compatible specialization of the Open eBook Publication Standard. It works fine with at least the PDF texts I've thrown at it (i.e., Pragmatic Bookshelf) even though unofficially (probably because it reflows the PDF and thus wouldn't work with a layout-heavy PDF). CHM compatibility requires a separate stage CHM->RTF->Kindle.

Tim O'Reilly says that they'd love to get Safari subscriptions on Kindle, which would be the killer feature for technologists, methinks.