About a half hour ago, Amazon opened up a new feature on the Kindle: the ability to read your notes and highlights on the Web. Readers have always been able to make notes and highlight text on the Kindle itself. Now those annotations appear on your account at http://kindle.amazon.com. Once you sign in, you can see all your notes.
While this opens up all sorts of possibilities, Amazon is taking a very conservative approach. You can’t share your notes with others. You can’t even edit them in your browser. All you can do is read them. That makes the feature little more than a Web archive of your notes and highlighted text snippets. It is a convenient feature, but why not enable sharing? Why can’t I share an excerpt with my friends on Facebook or Twitter (with the beginning of a quote and a short link)?
Amazon needs to connect the Kindle to the rest of the Web. Hopefully, this is the first step in that direction.
What a great feature by Amazon i was waiting for it. Thanks for on time information
the only things stopping me is that the battery runs out so fast
this is the good mobile ebook reader, this mobile have a feature to read you notes and you can not delete or edit from the web browser.
Very tempted to buy one of these now
This might be exactly what I need so I can grade my student’s papers and give them feedback on the Kindle!
Looks like it might be a cool feature. My problem is that I use the Kindle outside of the US, so it never gets the chance to sync to Whispernet.
No point in doing annotations without a touchscreen. Amazon could provide a Wacom touchscreen interface on the Kindle 2 and Kindle DX for very minimal added price and very limited amount of loss of clarity, but they don’t.
Sharing annotations online, collaborating on editing texts, documents, reports will become one of the biggest killer applications in connected ebooks. Imagine 12 people collaborating on writing a report on something, all being able to see each-others notes and corrections in real-time like on Google Docs, imagine teachers collaborating on reviewing, annotating, commenting, correcting school reports by students, also sent digitally.
This whole thing will be huge, but you need a wacom touchscreen stylus input, ou need handwritten interaction with text (including online based handwriting recognition), you need USB host or Bluetooth input of a full sized foldable keyboard to input text just as fast as on a laptop.
If by minimal added price, you mean doubling the cost.
Touchscreens are expensive.
Touchscreens that don’t ruin the reading experience by destroying clarity (a la the Reader 707) are even more expensive.
Not sure but won’t sharing “excerpts” run into copyright issues? (What if I make the whole book or a whole chapter an excerpt and share that with my friends?) – probably the reason why Amazon is shying away from sharing at this point.
have any other food reviewers put themselves on kindle for download and seen results? Not sure if I should put http://www.worstpizza.com on there yet?
I’m only getting a small subset of my books at this time. It appears to be just the last 8 I’ve purchased.
This has got to be a “teaser” feature. What good are one’s notes on a WEB-site? What is needed is the ability to get the notes on your PC/Laptop so that you can use them.
The user should be able to give a command to the e-book Reader to upload notes to a “server” of some sort–be that “server” the Amazon WEB-site, or a person’s PC/Laptop. The notes should have the date, book name, and page number with which the notes were associated, should that be the case.
Hopefully Amazon, and Sony, will have these features designed and in their respective e-book Readers quickly.
People also will want to upload whole paragraphs of text too, using this same upload feature.
The logical step forward for kindle to generate more business is enable sharing of these notes and highlights. The quotes from a book sent to a sharing place is bound to generate more interest in the book and can be used for easy quote sharing. The possibilities are unlimited…
i sure wish the kindle 2 didn’t treat magazines and newspapers as 2nd class citizens! those are my preferred content sources for the device and yet the iPhone app doesn’t support sync of this content *and* the new web feature to manage notes/highlights doesn’t feature notes/highlights from magazines/newspapers! why is amazon crippling this functionality? very disappointing.
i see this feature targeting the textbook market – an area Amazon is definitely targeting as part of its eReader strategy.
Sharing and editing via the web seems like an obvious evolutionary step, especially with the release of the new larger Kindle for Text Books. Man, I’d love to be able to share snippets in FriendFeed so I could get comments and start a discussion. I’m sure this is where they’re headed…they’re probably just purposefully treading lightly and iterating a ton with each step.
It looks like someone is already developing a desktop add on to the kindle:
http://www.kindleair.com
The Germany base startup http://txtr.com/ is, afaik, going in this direction, by building a community around their eReader.
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… reading … means you can copy (and paste somewhere else) what you wrote OR you can JUST read on the screen?