The Kindle Review

I've been using Amazon's Kindle ebook reader a lot over the last two months. I'd promised earlier to blog about it, but I wanted to wait until the honeymoon wore off. A dozen books and a few blogs and periodicals later, I'm sold: the Kindle really is the first practical ebook reader.

I just finished a round of meetings with publishers, and although the hard data won't be out for a few weeks, it would appear that a lot of people agree with me. Kindle titles are doing quite well, in spite of the fact that Amazon has had trouble keeping the ebook reader in stock.

Unlike the polished Apple iPhone, the Kindle is a work in progress for Amazon, but the ease in browsing and purchasing content (no surprise from Amazon), and a "good enough" reading experience should enable Amazon to become a substantial ebook reseller. Amazon will continue to iterate the Kindle design: this first Kindle is close in kinship to the first Apple iPod, which also got mixed reviews.

My most serious reservation about the Kindle relates to the supply chain that Amazon has created to feed it. Unlike the iPod, which supported MP3 music files from the start, the Kindle doesn't support standard ebook formats like epub, so the Kindle experience is a closed garden experience, at least for now.

A side note: it's surprising how much power the Kindle uses on standby. If I don't turn it off, it shuts down in a day or so, even though e-ink displays aren't supposed to use power if the pages aren't being turned. We worked with PVI, the e-ink display manufacturer, on several display prototypes, and those prototypes lasted a lot longer.