I'm glad you understood that I wasn't dissing the Kindle per se.
I was certainly expressing my belief that the Kindle isn't right for me (or, at least, not yet). However, I am trying to get my thoughts together about a blog entry in which I propose to try to examine who the Kindle is right for, and whether Amazon's apparent success with the Kindle (http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2008/08/despite-flaws-kindle-a-growing-success-for-amazon.ars) so far is sustainable.
I can see the benefits of having textbooks and other books a student must read for class on a Kindle, and it may well be that the student market will be a permanent market for such devices. On the other hand, your description of annotating books on your Kindle suggests, to me, that an even better idea might be a notebook computer with Kindle capabilities (or that is Kindle-compatible, at least), so that the student can have the annotated books, *and* his or her related notes/term papers/other works, etc. all on the same machine.
One might also ask why the Sony reader hasn't had comparable success, but I think I can guess the answer to that; Amazon cleverly has arranged to market not just the Kindle, but a large supply of downloadable books for it, adding a convenience factor that the Sony lacks. We'll see if that "tying" strategy continues to work over time.
no subject
I was certainly expressing my belief that the Kindle isn't right for me (or, at least, not yet). However, I am trying to get my thoughts together about a blog entry in which I propose to try to examine who the Kindle is right for, and whether Amazon's apparent success with the Kindle (http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2008/08/despite-flaws-kindle-a-growing-success-for-amazon.ars) so far is sustainable.
I can see the benefits of having textbooks and other books a student must read for class on a Kindle, and it may well be that the student market will be a permanent market for such devices. On the other hand, your description of annotating books on your Kindle suggests, to me, that an even better idea might be a notebook computer with Kindle capabilities (or that is Kindle-compatible, at least), so that the student can have the annotated books, *and* his or her related notes/term papers/other works, etc. all on the same machine.
One might also ask why the Sony reader hasn't had comparable success, but I think I can guess the answer to that; Amazon cleverly has arranged to market not just the Kindle, but a large supply of downloadable books for it, adding a convenience factor that the Sony lacks. We'll see if that "tying" strategy continues to work over time.