Amazon Kindle Sells Out, Despite Lots o’ Skepticism
Amazon.com this week introduced the Amazon Kindle, a ten-ounce, $400 e-book reader that downloads books, blogs, magazines and newspapers over EVDO (with no subscription fee) without any need for a computer. And despite a reasonable amount of skepticism from reviewers and bloggers, the device sold out almost immediately.
The device itself is strikingly unsexy – it looks like a mini version of a late '80s laptop – and in addition to the $400 purchase price, there are a lot of other costs to anticipate: $1 a month to access a blog, $6 to $15 a month to read a newspaper, and even $0.10 per document to access your own files (no PDFs, though…) on the device. That last one strikes me as particularly egregious.
"It's not an 'electronic book' – it's a portable vending machine for syndicated content and EVDO access," notes InformationWeek's Serdar Yegulalp. "And if it works, it might hint at a new way to sell high-speed wireless access to the Internet as a whole, albeit in a heavily closed-ended way…"
And regarding the design of the device itself, Forbes' Andy Greenberg nails it. "Kindle's flaws add up to a device that's as expensive as an iPhone, with far fewer uses, and a clunky design that seems aimed at the gadget illiterate," he writes.
More here from The Register … more here from CNET News … more here from BBC News … more here from the New York Times … more here from the AP … more here from Digital Trends … and the press release is here.