Being kind to the Kindle

The Kindle came, it was seen and it has not yet conquered. Being kind: the jury is out. Eoin Purcell has a representative sample of the mixed, but mostly negative, early reactions. The prompt Wikipedia entry will probably become definitive.

We havent tried it yet and look forward to doing so when it comes to the UK. There is no way it can really work for consumer magazines until it supports colour. Maybe Amazon think that also. On launch there were 91,390 books available for download, 306 blogs and only 8 magazines. Only 8 magazines? Somehow the Kindle reeks of compromise and committee work.

Everyone seems to be surprised by the blogs, especially the blogosphere. I will go against the crowd on that: selling blogs may be a dumb business proposition (yet Amazon is picking up the connection charges so probably doesn't want to absolutely give away too much stuff for which it is paying the download costs), but the idea of books, blogs, magazines and web pages in the same reading device seems to me just fine. That is why we have the web, and the iPhone does the web very well. Books, blogs and digital magazines included.

That is another reason why digital books have to be on the web and of the web, so that they can be close to blogs and linked any which way, to and from web pages. Why bother with downloads?