The Trouble with Kindle

And so Amazon has released an e-book reader named 'Kindle" in hopes of, as stated, to be the iPods of books. There are a couple of huge problems with this idea the least of which is that the proprietary DRM they are going to use on this thing.

I own a N800 for which there is an ebook reader available. I can get books from the website WOWIO transfer it to my N800 and read it as I recently did with "Where Darwin meets the Bible". Those books are PDFs so any PDF reader will open them. The biggest problem has been that I could not make notes with the reader I was using I often want to annotate my readings. The bigger problem is access. I deal with a lot of history and science books. A lot of times I need to reference a topic and going to my library is easy. I don't have all my books in electronic form so being able to search across volumes, which is what any heavy reader or researcher would need to do, is what is lacking.

Lastly the fact that these books are far easier to lose is a debatable issue. If one is as careful with your e-books as most of us are with our digital music (I have three copies one of which is off-site), then it really shouldn't be an issue.

What is good about Amazon's offering is that it helps to push us into the era of the Star Trek D-pad. One of the issues is that we are on the verge of a generation that will see the computer as more than somewhere you do work. Many of us older folk still have have the mindset of our computers being tools rather than extensions of ourselves. Another generation is coming that will see their digital devices as extensions of themselves (for better or worse). They will grow up in schools where the books are all electronic and there is no library only a central server that books are accessed and or downloaded from.

We may quibble with the Kindle for the services shortcomings but eventually this type of device is going to happen. It is the same reason that the Nokia Internet Tablet was created. It is about ubiquitous internet access which is about ubiquitous data access to any and every piece of information legally (and not so) available.