Next year's Christmas present?
 

Amazon has created a new book reader, Kindle touted as the biggest thing in reading since Gutenberg.

I know we've talked about reading, books, and ebooks before, but here's a fantastic article on it from Newsweek: the Future of Reading. Kinda long, but interesting to me.

Kindle looks like it may actually fix the problems of previous incarnations of ebook readers and will take off. It's "perpetually connected" to the Internet.

And so, it turns out that this will be my "Next Year's Christmas Present" to myself.

[Daffy]when you take into account that this year was next year last year[/Duck]

I placed my order earlier this week, it should show up sometime in the next two weeks.

I couldn't in good conscience ask anyone else to get one of these for me, as I am already the owner of an expensive paperweight (RCA/Gemstar eBook). I've asked my family to give me money for content for it, though.

I've never tried one of these, but I tried the Sony ebook reader at Borders a few weeks ago. I was favorably impressed with the screen, which is supposed to be the same one as the Kindle. If the price came down a bit I'd seriously consider it. I'm wary of all the DRMed content, though... I'd have to be convinced there was enough stuff out there that couldn't be arbitrarily yanked.

My Kindle arrived yesterday.

The packaging was even too cute ... looks like an oversized book, had nice little compartments to hold the device, cables, and minimal printed documentation.

It's too cool.

It fits extremely well in the hand, has a book-ish feel to it, and the display is excellent.

It arrives already hooked up to your amazon account information, and makes sucking new books into the device a breeze.

After going through the introductory section of the User's Manual, I headed straight for the store and downloaded my first book ... Anathem by Neal Stephenson. I'm fairly well into it at this point, enjoying the book itself, and also the interface.

If you need to look up a word while you're reading, it's very easy to get definitions.

I do agree with some of the reviewers who have said that the page forward/back buttons are placed in such a way as to make it easy to accidentally trigger them, but overall, the Kindle is SWEET.

I have heard that they have redesigned it to address some of these issues, and the version 2 release will be adding charge via USB, but the prerelase buzz is that the original Kindle is to be preferred at this point, something about not being able to access the battery compartment or use SD cards for additional storage? Not sure about that, though.

I'm lovin' it.