Confined to the Amazon basin?
Posted on November 19th, 2007
Amazon’s ebook, Kindle, looks great. But as far as I can tell, it doesn’t browse. You can only receive the materials Amazon chooses to provide.
Too bad. I was about to buy one.
If I’m wrong, please let me know…
Categories: digital culture, tech
Looks as if you can search from the Kindle store tab, no problem.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/133141011/ref=topnav_storetab_kinh/
The Wikipedia page says something about being able to put text files on it and convert word documents and so on for 10 cents a pop. Feels like shitty walled-garden cellphone crap to me for $399. Cut that in half and maybe we could have a conversation.
I can’t believe that in this day and age they want consumers to accept that it’s such a difficult task to let us move BLOCKS OF TEXT between our computers and devices. So sick of this.
Also I declare it to be very, very ugly.
You can browse. The HTML support is a little basic, but it works.
According to the User’s Guide (linked from the Kindle product page), there is a web browser in the Kindle’s “Experimental” page that can apparently browse and bookmark arbitrary pages. It says the browser is “optimized for text-based websites”, so I’d expect a cell-phone-like experience rather than a full-featured browser.
Thanks for the info.
Then I’m confused about how they can charge a buck a month to subscribe to a blog. Can’t I just browse to the blog, or browse to my online aggregator?
From a comment about the product on the Kindle page:
“Missing or Negative Features (the reason for losing one star on this review) -
* Content - I expected to be able to download ebooks from my local library (for free) and read them on my Kindle. I also expected to simply copy all types of text to my Kindle using either the SD card or the USB. I have found a work-around for my pdf files using the MobiPocket Creator.”
This means I gotts either jump through hoops to read the ebooks on my computer or pay the Kindlers to upload it for me.
The Kindle’s E Ink display is very much what I’d like for my Minciu Sodas laboratory’s http://www.ms.lt endeavor, a USB Flash Drive Editor for people with marginal Internet access http://www.includer.org Our lab’s participants in Africa are often walking 5 miles to an Internet cafe where they pay $1 per hour for a painfully slow connection. We’d like them to be able to download hundreds of our letters onto their USB flash drives, then go home and plug them into a Kindle type device, then plug in a standard computer keyboard and type dozens of replies which they might upload a week later.
Please, I am very interested to make contacts with the makers of Kindle or others who might be interested in this project. There’s about a billion people who would enormously benefit from such a device. And $400 would not be too expensive, at least not to start. Daily self-directed writing is comparable to attending college. And such daily writers typically cost about $10,000 to recruit for an online community (supposing that it costs about $100 to recruit a lurker, and 10% of them write, and 10% of those write every day). I believe that such devices would open up many ways for participants to make a living. Andrius ms@ms.lt
[...] Weinberger’s review, “Confined to the Amazon Basin,” in the Nov 19, 2007 issue of his JOHO blog, states his opinion more succinctly than anyone [...]