Comments on New Kindle: Bigger, Dumber, Less Angular?

Nobody carrrreeees about these things, dood

You're talking about the new Kindle and you used dumber. Heh.

Wow, that's...really bad. With the keys, they're trying to turn it into a laptop, which is the opposite of where they should be going. Is Amazon succumbing to featuritis? "What if we had a...."

The new iPhone is bigger than the original one. So, that's one.

what the hell is that POS?!

I'm sort of excited for the new Kindle. From what I hear, the e-ink has been much improved (more scale levels, faster), and I would assume they have a reason for a size increase, like a larger battery? I thought the original was a little boxy/klunky-looking, this looks more like a modern device.

A criticism of the Kindle is that it isn't round? Now anything with rounded corners is an iPod knock-off?

Really?

Also, smaller is better, unless you're talking about a screen. Monitor sizes grew over time. I would look at thickness and weight.

The screen is the same size, even though it looks smaller due to the surrounding mass.

My guess is that it is larger in order to address the problems users had with holding on to it and using the paging buttons. Before if you held it by the edges, you inadvertently pressed the buttons.

this thing makes me want to never turn on a computer again.

It's true, the old Kindle had a little bit of a kit-from-Radio-Shack look to it, like it was maybe cannibalized from other bits and pieces.

Can't we just get an iPone app. Do we really need a dedicated platform for books only?

There IS an "iPone" app already -- several of them, in fact. But the Iphone is a terrible book-reading tool, because its screen is tiny and its battery life is abysmal.

I don't own a Kindle, but I've used one. The e-ink screen is pleasing to the eyes and easy to read, and the device itself feels more or less like a book in the hands. Sure, the plastic device doesn't look like much, but I don't think it needs to since the screen is what matters. If they drop the price, I'll probably get one.

Kindle (no 'the' actually) is a solution without a problem.

Books are already portable, so having a separate device doesn't really work. The vast majority of people are single-threaded on books - they're reading one at a time and rarely are in a situation where you'd need another immediately. That same vast majority is unlikely to reread the same book over and over again.

There's no real desire to load your entire library like you did for music. Why? Because you're not going to access it. So it's all about current and future reading.

So, armed with that knowledge you then think about the price. The actual Kindle is expensive, and the downloads aren't that much cheaper than than the paper version and you can't resell it to reduce the final cost.

Yet, the real problem is the perceived cost is still amazingly high versus music. It's the per use cost that doesn't add up. Each time you listen to a song the per use cost goes down. Over time, that cost becomes extremely small. That just doesn't happen with books.

The e-ink technology is nifty but you'll need to do much more (e.g - Fforde's UltraWord http://usedbooksblog.com/blog/the-well-of-lost-plots-by-jasper-fforde/) to disrupt the normal pattern.

Kindle is so last century.

Seriously.