Think about it. What the iPod had – was millions of us owning a billion CD’s. The consumer _already had_ a ton of content to load in and release the value of an iPod. The Kindle absolutely doesn’t, and implies building a far more expensive library from scratch. And even if you could dump your entire book collection into it – No one RE-reads a book 1000 times over like you can listen to a favorite song.

To compare these two devices is ludicrous – other than saying they’re both electronic gizmos begging for content. End of story.

Lets pretend that isn’t true though. So the Kindle outsells the iPod when comparing 1st year sales of each. Do you really think that means in the long term that the Kindle will reach iPod mass.

Everybody I know listens to music. About 1 in 10 admits to reading. If even that. I just don’t see the Kindle being able to maintain that kind of momentum.

You can highlight text, annotate, add your own notes, and lookup information in real time via its constant-on connection.

As far as it being ugly, that is a question of taste rather than functionality.

I remember that when I was attending the University, text books were super expensive. My Automata Theory book was around $125.00 and the professor changed the book each year so used books were out of the question. Now if that book on Kindle is around $50.00 (if you figure that the books are essentially 40% of their original price) then that is something that would help many students. For students, you could even setup a book exchange program.

I started letting my 8 year old read on the Kindle because if she comes to a word that she does not know or understand, she simply presses a button and gets the definition and can continue reading. I see a lot of future in this device.

Jim

http://www.goog...=all&sort=0

I say nope.

For the folks that have one, how often do you use the keyboard?

I hear praise (mostly from people that don’t have one) about how convenient the ability to impulse buy anywhere is, but I am struggling to see that as a rule (for me) that would make me consider a Kindle over a Sony Reader or an eSlick Reader.

disclosure:

I have a Sony today and wake up every morning to freshly synced content (newspapers, rss feeds, email, books, pictures, audio) with little to no effort (scheduled polling for updates when on dock) .

The Sony store (which has a good majority of the Borders stock available in Reader format) has near anything I want and I can directly copy text, word, pdf, mp3 and images directly to the device (without having to email to Sony to convert).