So have you seen that Amazon’s going to be selling an ebook of its own called the Kindle? It looks pretty ugly, doesn’t it, and yes, we’ve seen ebooks before, but apparently this one will be different because it’s got wireless connectivity and will hook up directly to amazon.com, allowing you to buy books and do anything else you do on Amazon from the book itself. Which might just work. Despite the device’s rather extreme ugliness (how much un-cooler could you make an ebook?) it does have a keyboard, something that the previous generation of dedicated ebooks pretty much all lacked.
It was announced on Engadget back in September, but Robert Scoble’s all excited about it today, linking to a feature on the Kindle in Newsweek and hinting that he’ll say more himself once he’s no longer bound by an NDA that expires tomorrow. Which I suppose is today given he’s in California and I’m in Norway.
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Thomas
Just think how this would look if it came from Apple!
2ndhandsoul
Yay, save the trees! Create non-perishable/recyclable items! I am pretty sure text will be electronic eventually. It would be simple to keep your entire cirriculum (sp?) in a jumpdrive, etc. We’ll do away with libraries and put up housing. That thing just looks awkward and bleh. I want someting iPhone-ish.
arneolav
This sort of reflects what Apple did when they launched the iPod togehter with an online service for buying music. MP3-players were all over the place, but in tandem with iTunes Music Store, this was a hit. Every single e-book-reader has more or less flopped, but this time around, there’s a service accompanying it.
William Patrick Wend
DRM + no support for PDF + $399=Not interested.
I would LOVE to have a good ebook reader, but at that price, with DRM, I will stick to carrying around books in my bag. I can’t wait for the day there is a good ebook reader though…
Jill Walker Rettberg
Good point, Arne Olav, that connecting the iPod to iTunes worked – if this device makes it REALLY EASY to buy new books for it it might work. Without PDF support, though, it seems pretty annoying. I would love a handsome-looking device that I could buy new books on and that I could put, say, research papers I want to read onto, and additionally shift student papers and stuff I’m grading onto and for it to allow me to take notes and so on in some exportable format.
aud
I do not believe that the kind people in for example Microsoft or other companies are thinking about the trees! Well it might be so of course. Another alternative is that they are thinking about making money…