Monday, October 12, 2009

Amazon Kindle? Not yet!

The Sunday Times (ingear) recommended waiting a while until the web access of the US version is added and more UK-centric services arrive. But even then I fear I am not tempted.

1. The cost: at £175 you can buy a lot of old-fashioned books.

2. The Amazon Kindle ebook format is proprietary, so I guess you can't easily transfer ebooks to any other device.

3. At the moment I can just hand a book over to someone else to read. Now I've got to hand over the Kindle too and Clare would probably drop it in the bath (her point, not mine).

The Kindle's advantages: a whole library in a slim package and instant loading of a new title over its wireless connection, aren't sufficient to offset its disadvantages at the point of use.

What could make a difference? A really good text-to-speech function would be a start - we all like being read to. I heard they had to disable this function because of copyright mutterings from the 'audio book community'. Great.