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:

1. 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.
2. 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…
3. 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…
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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…

 

~ab

There has been a flurry of articles recently by new kindle owners, desperate to reinforce the permanence of paper and to cynically point out that the new Kindle still isn’t perfect. The Just an Asterisk perspective? Well the first thing I downloaded to read was Malcolm Gladwell’s new book “Outliers”, in which he describes an outlaw that was “just dumb enough to be fearless, just bright enough to be dangerous and a dead shot”. I think we can describe the Kindle with the same terms.

Dumb enough to be fearless
There are a few different ebook readers out there and the Kindle was by no means the first. That said, why did all of the previous devices fail? Were we (as in everyone) simply too happy with paper? I think the answer is (and I’m not the first to suggest this) that the ebook industry was confused. What were we getting from these readers? (More chargers? Eye strain?) What was enhanced by reading a digital version of a book? Rival products by Sony and others had tried hard, introduced too many frills (like being able to play MP3s and silly desktop software) without actually improving the reading experience. In this environment, for an ebook reader to succeed, it just had to be a little bit better than the previous attempts. Amazon needed to dive in, looking perhaps a bit dumb (Amazon does not sell any other hardware) and more than a little bit fearless. Perhaps this was a gamble, perhaps the company was going in a strange direction, but Amazon seemed “just dumb enough to be fearless” – and that was essential to the success of the device.

Bright enough to be dangerous
Once Amazon was in the game, you could easily argue that they were a touch brighter than their colleagues. Amazon had become the definitive noun for an online bookstore. It only made sense that their product be a portal to their proven online shopping experience. Moreover, offering free access (via “Whispernet” from Sprint’s network) resulted in a “wow” factor (I can surf the web for free??) and a heavy hit to my credit card the first week (you can buy a book and start reading within a minute – my wife is going to kill me). Was this earth-shattering technology? No. Was it “just bright enough to be dangerous”? Yes.

A crack shot
Amazon had enhanced the reading experience, but what about the standard ebook reader features? They are actually great! One can easily convert PDFs, consult words with the built in dictionary, add annotations and bookmarks and highlight passages for later use. Oh yes, I almost forgot – you even have great internal memory so that you can carry a ton of books around. These are similar features that we’ve seen in most ebook devices. The Kindle does them well, but without flair. It’s for reading books, after all, and as required it’s “a crack shot”.

So why the post? It’s hardly full of advice, tips and insight (as I presumptuously assume my other posts provide). The real reason is because the Kindle crowns the content as king. This is not a flashy device, it’s a functional one and that’s what we’re all about :).  This is not a toy but a useful device for everyone.  I hope you’ll investigate a bit further and here are some links to get you started:

• Buy one
• Read about one at CNET
• Gizmodo’s Kindle Review Matrix

~ab