KEY POINTS:
As has been widely reported, bookseller Amazon has made a foray into hardware development with its Kindle ebook reader (US$399).
I picked up Newsweek last week after seeing Amazon boss Jeff Bezos on the cover, his face half-obscured by his new little electronic tablet. The title of
the article - The future of reading.
It was a pretty glowing report of the Kindle, which on the face of it certainly sounds like an impressive device, particularly with its wireless attributes which allow new books to be downloaded to the device via the mobile phone network in the US (the fast EV-DO data network which is just like the one Telecom runs here). Books cost US$10 to download.
But the Newsweek piece provoked a bit of a backlash in the media as tech commentators who have seen numerous ebook readers arrive, make little impact and quickly depart, voiced their scepticism about the Kindle.
"E-books are pitched as an improvement over the older medium, but in many ways they're a step backward. The traditional book isn't just a container for content. It's a brilliant machine that interacts in very particular ways with the body and the mind," the Los Angeles Times summed up.
"Another step closer to the perfect book reader, but still no cigar," was Yahoo's tech reviewers' verdict.
Still, the reviews so far have generally been reasonably favourable. The main complaint is that it physically isn't quite as svelte as the Sony Reader which came out last year.
After seeing that reader at numerous trade shows, I finally saw one being used in the real world last month - a woman was sitting on the BART train in San Francisco reading from her Sony Reader. She caught me staring at her.
I wasn't over-enthused by the Sony Reader when I had a go on it last year, but I do like the idea of digital ink and being able to get everything - books, news articles, PDFs, email messages on one mobile tablet that can be updated wirelessly - and has good battery life.
The Kindle uses the same screen technology as Sony's reader so the display is unlikely to be much different, but maybe it will give the industry the impetus to focus on getting the display even more like real paper and ink.
As for Kindle-iPhone comparisons, I hope they're off the mark - I've tried reading ebooks on the iPhone and it's not a very pleasant experience, the screen form factor is just wrong for books.
What I have been doing is improvising my own ebook reader so I can read old Jules Verne and HG Wells stories downloaded for free from Project Gutenberg.
I simply plug my laptop into my flat-screen TV in the lounge, open Microsoft Word and display the text, blow up the text so a line of it fills the TV screen, then use the scroll wheel on my wireless mouse to run down the text as I read it. It's easy on the eye and I can get through chapters fast that way.
I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has had experience of ebook readers and in particular, anyone who has test driven the Kindle.
