Kindle 2: Reference Library
I want a Kindle 2, but I want it for all the “wrong” reasons.
I have no interest in reading fiction on it. I imagine that (and the $359 price tag) is what keeps most people from buying it. I like reading actual books, and they happen to be very well designed for their purpose as it is. I also typically borrow books, or buy them used, at a significant discount. This re-use benefits all of the various readers of that physical copy, but both the original and used bookstores that it passes through. Amazon currently has over 240000 books available on the Kindle, the vast majority being fiction. None of them can be resold to someone else, or loaned to a friend for a month, or passed to your child so they can experience the same feelings you did when you were their age reading those exact same pages…
I have no interest in reading magazines or newspapers on it. I hardly consider pushing your print content to the Kindle “innovation”. There is no customization, interaction, filtering, aggregation… no hint of any of the things that would actually break from the status quo. Paper content rendered on screen is just paper with fewer trees sacrificed for the cause.
However…
I *do* have a 50lb stack of reference books next to me, and a couple hundred more pounds on my bookshelf that I would love to have at my fingertips all the time. Not only that, I’d love to just have them automatically updated as new versions come out (this a wish, not an actual feature). The idea of having to repurchase all of the books I’d want on it is a bit daunting, though.
It would make the perfect RSS reader. With free 3G wireless internet and a great large format screen it would easily beat out my T-Mobile G1 for that purpose. They claim to have about 1100 blogs — which isn’t many — but I can see them adding more. Unfortunately, my guess is relatively few of the blogs I read are carried at this point.
I have a very large collection of reference PDFs — mostly white papers and research articles — that I consider invaluable references. Like my textbooks, I’d like to have them at my fingertips without having to fire up my laptop to read them.
Though my T-Mobile G1 lessens the need for it, the fact that it has 3G internet and allows some limited web browsing would be nice as well. If the Kindle became my resource for reference material, it would make sense that Wikipedia was on it as well.
The Kindle replacing textbooks is the thing that excites me going forward. Textbooks are unwieldy, heavy, quickly outdated, and hard to search through. Carrying around a single Kindle with all their textbooks would not only save the backs of many students, but suddenly they can run text search through their books instead of having to leaf through, distribution is streamlined and uses less materials, so the books should come down in price. I really hope that technologies like the Kindle can eventually redefine the textbook industry.
