Amazon Kindle

Rumors had been swirling about the imminent release of an e-book reader and service from Amazon, and Steven Levy has the scoop on "Kindle" in the latest issue of Newsweek. You can read the epic article or your favorite gadget blog for the particulars.

Update: Or you can get the particulars from our own Nanoflux, who wrote:

Amazon will be releasing Nov 21, 2007 a new e-book reader using digital ink called Kindle for $399. I'm not sure I'm bothered by or not bothered by the fact that it is entirely closed. It is closed and only uses EVDO to get content. It's about the size and weight of a "large" paperback but at 600x800 167ppi it's still not the same resolution of a similar book.

Could it do what nobody has yet been able to do? From Levy:

Though Bezos is reluctant to make the comparison, Amazon believes it has created the iPod of reading.

I think it will be a while yet.

Set aside the not-so-physically-attractive hardware and price, since they will surely improve. Some of the features — annotations and highlighting, text search, the ability to load your own PDF and Word documents, and wireless Wikipedia access — are steps forward, compared to what's on similar devices now.

Content is the key, though. The Kindle store may not revolutionize its industry's sales and distribution as quickly as the iTunes Store did, since "Search Inside the Book" and free first-chapter previews are not quite substitutes for the bookstore experience. The iPod also caught on because people already had enough content with which to fill the device, since music can easily be ripped from CDs. Not so with books. There's also no denying the role of file sharing in the nascent days of digital media players. Can't share Kindle e-books like you could loan out a book (which is just the way the publishers like it). You can burn your iTunes Store purchases back onto CDs, but you can't print out Kindle books. The list goes on.

Still, some of the aforementioned problems may not be show-stoppers. There may be enough people out there who only read books once, don't loan them out much, and read mostly new and popular ones, which people might look hard at the Kindle, especially if the wireless features live up to their potential.

What do you all think?