I am an avid reader of technical books although I often struggle in that my interests outstrip my time to read. Now I am finding my interests outstrip my storage space so I am tempted by the concept of a Kindle. I keep holding back for the following reasons:
- I can often get a heck of a deal on used books so the Kindle sales price is very expensive in comparison. Seems like electronic books change the dynamic here in favor of the publishers rather than the consumer. For example, you can’t buy an electronic book second hand but if you could there would be no degradation in quality so if reselling was allowed it seems like you could get full price for it. As reselling is not allowed, you should get the electronic book at a steeper discount in my mind.
- I really want Amazon to give me electronic versions of all the books I have purchased through them. While not the reason I am holding back, it would be a HUGE incentive for me to move forward.
- Some of the reviews of the kindle seem poor.
- In the end, my killer app is not an electronic device that helps me read books but one that lets me read pdf, word docs, etc. The bulk of my reading is currently work related and not just book reading. Thus pdfs are the most important electronic content and not a secondary one. This extends from displaying pdfs too getting content onto the device in the first place.
One product that may meet my desires is www.plasticlogic.com. It is a bit early to tell as I really need info on the software performance rather than just the size, form-factor but what I see looks promising. It is due out in 2010.
My other idea for serving this need is to get some sort of tablet pc netbook but here the problem is long boot times. To pick up a book to read, you don’t want to wait 45 seconds for boot up. Here again, I encouraged by some work by intel on a device with a 2 second boot time. A PC like device should be able to handle pdfs no problem and with a big enough battery I could get the reading time I want. We will see…