A couple of friends of mine asked me to what I thought of the Amazon Kindle at lunch before Thanksgiving. I said that I was aware of it, that reviews and comments from blogs that I read had been more negative than positive, but I would keep my eye out for interesting articles and blog postings. Here are a few of the things I’ve found:
- Kindle can light up your life by Andy Ihnatko in The Chicago Sun Times: Andy points out that the secret sauce of the Kindle is that EVDO access via Sprint is free and the Kindle has a serviceable web browser. As such he thinks it’s worth the $400 cost without regard for its usability as an e-book reader.
- Amazon Kindle: the Web makes Amazon go bad crazy by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing: Cory Doctorow hates Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology. Keep that in mind when you read his comments: “Mark Pilgrim has a great, incisive post about the Amazon Kindle e-reader that sums up almost all of the reasons I won’t be buying it — it spies on you, it has DRM (which means that it has to be designed to prevent you from modding it, lest you mod it to remove the DRM), it prevents you from selling or lending your books, and the terms of service are nearly as abusive as the Amazon Unbox terms (and worse than the thoroughly dumb-ass Amazon MP3 terms)….”
These comments are pretty much polar opposites of each other, with every other review falling somewhere in between.
My friends also suggested that I discuss another e-book reader called the Iliad from iRex Technologies. More on that product later.