Baby Got Books

Another look at the Kindle

Most of the early coverage of the Kindle was pretty harsh. Salon has a review of the device that seems to be more even handed, although it is also fairly critical. Some interesting bits from the article:

Overall impression: “this thing is very much Version 1.0; it feels like an early-adopter product, like a concept Amazon wants us to get used to rather than a gadget you could live with for several years. ”

The reviewer notes that the interface is pretty old school. How old school? “…like it was made for cosmonauts.”

While text looks good, “pictures look like they were rendered on a circa-1990 dot-matrix printer.”

Subscription web content looks pretty bad, too. The Kindle version of the New York Times “resembles what the Web version of the Times looked like in about the middle-’90s. ”

The hefty price remains the big sticking point for the Salon reviewer, but he has an interesting analysis of what it would take to make the Kindle worth your while. Assuming that you buy mostly hard cover books,

As I calculate it, if you add in the $400 cost of the device, you’ll need to buy at least 40 e-books at $9.99 each to get an average per-book price lower than $20, roughly the cost of a standard bookstore hardcover.

If you’re sure you can read at least 40 books over the life of your Kindle — let’s say five years, so eight books a year — then sure, go ahead and buy one. You’ll save money in the long run, not to mention 40 books’ worth of shelf space.

Eight books a year? My guess is that the height of that bar includes everyone who visits this site. I’m just sayin’…

(Thanks to F.O.B. Frank for passing this along.)

Update: The Wall Street Journal’s widely respected Personal Technology columnist Walter Mossberg weighs in with what should be considered the final word on the Kindle.