Jed Rothwell wrote: > I have been talking to Steve Krivit about uploading his book to Kindle. > > I have not actually used a Kindle, but looking over the standards and > limitations of the gadget, my hunch is that his book might be more > suitable for the Kindle than mine. > > I think these electronic reader gadgets are the wave of the future. But > the format of the first-generation devices is too limited for technical > books. The screen is too small. > > It is unclear how many Kindles have been sold, or how many are actually > in use. I imagine there are a number of them sitting around unused in > drawers.
I'm sure compulsive readers -- of which there are many -- find them invaluable. (Assuming, of course, that Kindle fits in a pocket. If it's too bloated to go into a pocket then it's another story.) I've used a Palm for reading books for the last few years and it beats the pants off of anything on paper as an "emergency book" for all occasions. Fits in a pocket, and with 100 MB of memory (tiny by today's standards) I can fit as many ordinary novels as I like on it, along with about five assorted dual-language dictionaries including Harrap's "shorter" huge pig of a French-English dictionary, a couple versions of the Bible (English and French versions), and a bunch of random other stuff like a web browser. "War and Peace" too big to lug around on paper? No prob -- in a computer it's tiny! I hate the Palm operating system, the web browser is awful, the screen's too small, and technical stuff doesn't work so well. And a back-lit LCD screen isn't ideal to start with (Kindle's presumably much better on that score). But despite all its problems, I almost always take the Palm along when I go out. Plucker or not, if the Kindle can read Mobipocket format then there are huge numbers of books available for it, both free and for-fee, as well as some really whizz-bang dual language dictionaries. > Amazon.com is a closed-mouthed company. It may be that the > audience is small and only a handful of books will sell. One source > estimated that they sold 240,000 Kindles as of August 2008: > > http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/01/we-know-how-many-kindles-amazon-has-sold-240000/ > > That's not a big audience, since only a handful of those people is > likely to go searching for information on cold fusion. Steve's book is > already available at Amazon, making it visible to a larger audience, so > adding a Kindle edition might bring in more readers than having only a > Kindle edition. > > I have Steve beat on price! It turns out the book costs only $0.80. > That's close enough to zero that it will not prevent anyone from > downloading it. > > - Jed >
