The Amazon Kindle is an electronic book reader. Since it is an Amazon product, they have donated a lot of space to singing this devices praises. Revolutionary electronic-paper display provides a sharp, high-resolution screen that looks and reads like real paper-the first line of a very long page of description states. And it must be working as the book reader with a keypad designed for text messengers is sold out.
Issac Asimov was still around when people were first talking about portable entertainment devices. He wrote a pretty cool little article about how this device would need to work. It would have to only power on when you looked at it, so as not to waste power. It had to be light enough to carry around and tough enough to take the occasion drop to the ground. It would have to feel good in your hands, preferable a feeling that you have had your whole life. It would need to be cheap enough that anyone on any salary could afford one. After listing a number of common sense features like these, he proudly proclaimed that he had just such an entertainment device-a book.
I have always been a big reader and for a while I was a book dealer myself. There is something really cool about holding a signed first edition in your hands. There is something nice about the smell of an old book, or a new book, for that matter. And there is that very interesting feeling of a leather bound book. At the moment there are a little over 640 reviews for the Amazon Kindle. Like myself, many of these reviewers have not actually used the Amazon Kindle, and yet they still felt the need to give it a one star rating, just judging it from the photos.
It is not a pretty device, and that is a bit baffling. Ipods are pretty when they clearly don’t have to be to play good music. Nikes come in more styles than Imelda Markos ever dreamed of, and there is only one reason why, people like stylish things. More to the point, they are willing to pay ridiculous prices for stylish things.
So maybe the Amazon Kindle is the gee whiz product of the future that Amazon says it is, but would it have killed them to use some colored plastic? Maybe something textured to look and feel like leather? Still, I do kind of like the throw back look the Amazon Kindle, it reminds me of those very first home computers made my IBM.
But hey, it’s Amazon.com, so maybe this time the electronic book will work the way it is supposed to. Maybe.
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