Kindle Schmindle etc.

Kindles. E-Ink. Kindle-2.

I’m not entirely convinced by Kindles at a conceptual level. It’s kindof like designing vacuum-cleaners so they look like brooms. It’s kindof like PDF turned into plastic. It seems to me like an exercise in building limitations into a piece of technology so it resembles an already existing object… which although very successful, was itself the product of technological limitations.

It’s an exercise in interface design, which is locked into a single “use”.

I think the way e-ink will probably go, if it goes at all, is as a cell-phone peripheral, and when I say cell-phone, I mean proper, open, programmable device, and not these propriety tethered-appliances we have today.

Mind you, the advert is mildly convincing

Although obviously when I saw the bit that said “new titles only 9.99, on Kindle, much less than the print version”, I immediately thought “oh, you are so fucked”. You know why they’re much less? Because the replication and distribution costs are zero. And you know what that means?