Comments on: Amazon's Kindle 2 leaked

Boy Genius Report gets a hold of some photos of the next-generation digital Reader from Amazon, and they seem real.

[cKarlGo]

Since reports came out that Amazon suppresses negative reviews of it's products, I closed my account and quit shopping there. There's too many other choices for shopping to bother with dishonest merchants.

[jtrue1952]

Amazon does not suppress negative reviews, as anyone reading the reviews on Amazon can tell you.

[beelissa]

I'm very interested in this gadget, but I agree with those who think the price has to come down significantly. It has to have an SD card slot, too. And -- I'm not too familiar with the ins and outs of the present model, can you sync it to your computer? I'm also one of those living in an EVDO dead spot. I could get a signal at work, but not at home. So if I could somehow capture web pages that I've pre-selected and sync the updated versions of them to the Kindle from my computer, that would be a feature that would be valuable to me. I think it's going to be a long time before I buy this device, though.

[jtrue1952]

HTML is one of the formats that Kindles read with no problem. So you can easily grab the html from any web page on your computer, and load it to your Kindle.

[xstek99]

It has an SD card; it syncs to your computer; MobiCreator makes books for you, MobiPocket lets you read them on your computer. My kids go to movies; one shot, $8, 90 minutes of entertainment, and popcorn. I buy books, $9.99, (sometimes I read several at a time over a month or so). I looked at my bookshelves; mostly built by me, about $500, with at least $10,000 in books on them, most read once. I love my little Kindle...

[centauraquilon]

I believe there would be a market for "text to speech" and a dictionary / thesarus, on these readers.

[Devans0]

The Gillette model will not work. The real problem is that content is already too expensive. If you purchase a book, you have it for as long as the paper holds. If you buy an ebook, you have it until the format goes the was of Atari's and 8-tracks. The publishing costs are gone, it costs as much to send 100 copies as 1,000,000 copies. The publishers get a huge savings, but is any of that passed to customers who pay a huge outlay?

[shelji]

i think you are spending so much time ripping the kindle apart that you are failing to see its positive aspects. i agree the price needs to come down. That's why i don't have one yet. But here are some other things i would like to point out:
1)While it CAN be synched to a computer, it never has to be. That's the whole point--it is not an ipod! You can certainly perform more complicated operations with the kindle, but it was primarily created to be an e-reader you could use without a computer.
2)Of course you can buy cheaper books, like classics, somewhere else. But when it comes to brand new best sellers that usually cost $20 or more, it is nice to get a book for $9.99.
3)In terms of feeling like you are renting a book...I know you can't always be sure, but if you think a book you have in mind is something you will want to keep indefinitely, like a classic, buy the real thing! But if it's just another bestseller or guilty pleasure that you'll probably read once, the Kindle is a great idea.
4)If you are a heavy reader, I think the Kindle can be a great thing. For one thing, it saves space! My home looks like the Amazon warehouse, which is NOT a good thing. And if you travel a lot, you always have a lot of options on hand. While i agree the price should come down, I think you can get a lot out of it if it fits into your lifestyle and you have the money.

[Ponobill]

Seems odd to have so many people who don't use a reader and haven't tried one giving their opinion. Actually not odd, just not very useful. I've been using a kindle since they first came out, tried other readers before that. I'm a voracious reader and I have a large library that's pretty full. the kindle is an excellent alternative to filling shelves with books I've read but want to keep available. Anything I read on my kindle is available instantly, almost anywhere I happen to be. And when I'm out of things to read I can buy a new book or download one I already have in my Amazon library in less than a minute, almost anywhere.

Plus I can read my email, browse the web (lame but useful, especially for blogs and forums) listen to music and make notes, all on a single device. Pretty useful. I've been through a lot of PDAs and don't use them anymore, though I have an iPhone that I like (but that's another comment). The Kindle is actually very useful, enough so that I use it every day and have for over a year.

The biggest problem with readers is that book publishers are almost as self-destructive in their protective conservatism as the record industry. They think they are in the paper and ink business. I know Amazon is paying far too much to publishers for e-book versions, and this cost and sometimes unwillingness of publishers and authors to participate in e-publishing at all is limiting the depth of the offerings and holding the price too high. .

Still, you can upload any free books from the web to Amazon and not only will they convert it for you (for ten cents in theory, but actually they don't seem to really charge for it) but they'll store it for you--I guess forever. You can take it off your kindle but it stays in the Amazon content system and you can retrieve it any time. That's a pretty impressive service.

As far as the new Kindle goes, it doesn't look like a huge improvement in design, but the feature set might be better. As it is, I'm very satisfied with mine, the little desgn glitches are annoyances that are overwhelmed by the benefits.

[Ponobill]

Incidentally, my house in Hawaii is also in a dead zone for EDO, so we use our computers to download to our Kindles (my wife has one too). It's a trivial effort.

[xstek99]

Neat-O!

I've only got about $5000 worth of books on mine so far (about $200 from Amazon, the rest free downloads or file converts from .pdf or gutenberg), or 5,000# if they weighed a pound each. Including the Machinery Manual and IEEE handbook, handy to have out on the jobsite in the middle of nowhere...

: )

[kindlegirl67]

Also, the Kindle is not the same as "renting" the books. When you "rent" books (or as the real world calls this "borrow them from the library" -- you have to give them back. They are not yours to keep. The books you buy at Amazon are yours to keep, and they cannot be lost since they are kept in your Amazon account's database. Even if you lose your Kindle, you still own the book and can re-download it through your Amazon account.

I would love to hear from someone about whether or not, if they are announcing a newer version of Kindle in a week, are they going to allow an upgrade or something for us loyal Kindle users who bought into the first version?

[dkistner1111]

One major thing I wanted to see was moving the jack for the charging cord from the bottom to the side, so one can read while charging without having that cord sticking into one's stomach.

Hardware-wise, it looks good. What I really want to know about, however, is the software-related changes. The number one most glaring need with the Kindle is a way to organize massive amounts of reading material by categories--and a way to create playlists for audio files. I also want a way to suppress the automatic listing of books on the Home page stored on the SD memory card, as is now possible in the Content Manager. I have 58 pages of book listings on my Kindle, and it makes me glaze over trying to get to things.

[kindle2]

The New Amazon Kindle 2 Has Arrived
Price: $359.00 & this item ships for FREE

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00154JDAI?tag=tophit-20

[champ_720]

If you like Kindle 2, pre-order it at http://i-love-kindle-2.blogspot.com

thank you,
champ.

[alphasun4]

These devices with rigid casing are not advanced enough. They should consist of a flexible but rugged polymer OLED screen about 2mm thick maximum that can be rolled or folded to go into your pocket (or perhpas open from / collapse into a mobile-phone size device) and opening to at least A4 size to allow persusal of decent chunks of content, newspaper style. Flat flexible keyboards have been around for years.

[navywife3]

I'm very interested in purchasing a Kindle, however, it's not backlit and I read in bed a lot and I would like a color screen for reading magazines. Add those two features and I would purchase in a heart beat.