Amazon’s Kindle: Functionality for the Literate
The knock on Amazon’s Kindle is that it is not sexy. It is not sleek and capable of eliciting jealous looks from fellow workers if it is pulled from a brief case at a meeting. It just doesn’t have that Apple zing. The Kindle is an odd duck among electronic gadgets, it only does one thing, but it does it extraordinarily well.
It is a reader, designed to allow its owner to curl up with a good book in bed, or a favorite chair, or at the beach. Its form strictly follows function. It is a Volkswagen in a world of Ferarris.
The Kindle’s creators endowed it with the ability to download books at a reasonable price from just about anywhere thanks to the use of a wireless telephone network instead of depending on Wi-Fi. It’s screen is extremely readable, depending on e-ink technology that faithfully reproduces the effectiveness of (gasp!) the printed page. In short, it allows you to have a portable library of your choosing at your fingertips.
It is expensive at $359.00, but built to last with a long battery life. It fits easily into carry bags and is good for four days without a charge. That’s about as care free as it gets.
Amazon will reformat books you already own, or purchase elsewhere, to Kindle’s format for free, if you don’t mind downloading the results from your computer via a USB port, or for ten cents if you want the convenience of downloading them direct via their network. The vast amount of public domain works available at the Gutenberg Project and other free sources becomes readable and valuable with the Kindle.
The Kindle isn’t for everyone. It’s never going to be the darling of the technorati, but it is going to be a functional tool for the literati. After all, that’s what it’s designed to do.
