Future Post: Kindling for the Kindle
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What’s the point of having a blog if you can’t get on your soapbox once in a while and talk about your passions? I’ve decided to add a segment called future post – the things that I’d love to see as upgrades to existing products or as a new trend/device of the future.
The device that has occupied my daydreams for the last two months is my Kindle2. As I’ve already posted, it has become my travel companion and to have my personal library instantly accessible is a luxury that I’m not sure I could give up. Here are six things that I’d like to see on the Kindle in future:
- Comic books – The watchmen was a great book and a fantastic film (it’s not for children). There are a large number of graphic novels out there that deserve a better distribution model. If someone could just come up with a standard for resizing images like they have for text, I’d appreciate it.
- Sheet music with a metronome that turns the page – This one may be a bit fanciful, but the screen is perfect for music (perhaps a touch small) and I’d love to have my sheet music available on my Kindle. An even better idea? Add a metronome that turns the page for you at a set beats per minute (BPM). If I’m jamming to Mozart (wow that makes me chuckle) at 120 BPM, I’d hate to have to stop to turn the page…
- Book of the month clubs – They sell subscriptions to magazines and to newspapers, but I’d love to get a selection of really good books chosen and sent to my kindle each month. The next step: an online kindle book club social network might be nice too…
- Better integration of pictures in books. This is related to 1 and 2, but I’d like to see better image and text combinations. If there were one thing that I could change immediately about the Kindle, it would be to make graphics a. appear with text wrapping the image and b. without a single link to another page. Although the pictures are pretty, some kindle editions require that you switch back and forth between pages with links. This is convenient (you always have a link to the image being discussed) but it’s slower than a paper book, where you can glance between the image and the text as necessary to understand the passage.
- Make the keyboard better so that I can type long notes on my reading. Amazon learned so many lessons from other ebook manufactures, but why didn’t they learn anything from the cell phone industry? Why is the keyboard annoyingly small with wasted space on the perimeter? I love the idea that I can annotate sections, but I don’t think the kindle will break into the college text book market until they can make a better keyboard.
- And finally, my favorite one – flip the pages by twisting the device right for forward and left for back. The iphone does it and it’s cool. It’s totally pointless, but very cool.
As I said, the Kindle is a superb little device.  However, nothing is perfect and this is my two cents…  Shout out any innovations that you’d like to see in the comments…
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~ab
can the kindle get rss feeds or does it work with google reader?
The Kindle cannot receive RSS feeds directly, but there are two good options:
1. you can navigate to google reader on the device (pretty decent speed in NYC at any rate)
2. you can subscribe to a service like feedreader that sends your RSS feeds to your Kindle email address (and therefore your kindle) every day.
I’d love to see a kindle RSS reader though… Good thought!
I can’t believe it’s not backlit. I understand that this would drain the battery, but why not give an option to turn on the backlight with the unit plugged in?
Meanwhile I wanted to point out that I belong to a book club on Facebook where there are a lot of Kindle users. No, there’s no integration with the Kindle, but we sell Amazon books! If you belong to Facebook, you can find it in the App Directory under the name of Book Clubs. Or you can use this URL: http://apps.facebook.com/bookclubz/. Thanks for checking it out.
I’m not sure how I feel about a backlight. One of the best parts of the Kindle is that it feels like reading a something like paper and not a screen. A backlight would change that, making it harder on the eyes. That said, it would be great to be able to read without having to use a book light… I could be persuaded either way.
Thanks for the link to your book club!
is it possible to download books from the library onto the kindle 2?
The answer there is … sort of. Here is a link to a great site of all the things you can do with the kindle (in terms of getting content). To summarize: You can download books from a library online that has books in the right format… Or you can go to sites like project guttenberg, where they have free books to download. I like manybook.net for this purpose, as they have titles in kindle format.
Hope this helps :)
~ab
Do you ever think Kindle will handle commercial business news on line such as WSJ, Barons, newsletters etc.
[...] the end, my thoughts haven’t changed much since I reviewed the kindle for the first time. The graphics and layouts are the next step. For the web, we have CSS (cascading style sheets), [...]