Other weaknesses of the Kindle are the book price, the pay/download of free content, the lack of wifi, the lack of a browser—I think some of these have been hacked around, but if I wanted to hack, I’d have bought a Sony Reader. OTOH, e-ink is slow and black and white only which is fine for books, but poor for periodicals and the web which is where a lot of my reading has gone.

I’m really excited about what the Kindle can represent and am disappointed that Steve Jobs dismisses this product with the statement that nobody reads anymore…

Then again, he said that there’d never be a headless mac, flash is inferior to hard drives, and nobody would want a music player in their mobile phone.

The Kindle isn’t whiz-bang like the iPhone, and it’s not going to give you the same delusion of being cooler by association. Would a bookshelf? Would a paperback?

A lot of the Kindle’s advantages are shared by any digital book, and I’d probably be just as happy with most of them. However, the look of the device hasn’t mattered at all in actual use. The integration with Amazon and free (instant, wirelessly-delivered) sample chapters of thousands of books has been the real treat for this avid reader.

In addition to coursework, I also think that periodicals would be great on the Reader.

But then again, I guess that is what newsreaders are for.

Sadly, the eInk display, while lovely, is dooooog slow — you don’t so much ‘flip’ pages as you wait for them to slowly render. Once they amp up the speed, and add some obvious things like annonation capability, it’ll be a killer product. Basically, we’re talking next-gen on these things, but the Sony Reader and the Kindle stand to become the Rio PMP300’s of their time; all they are right now are very very cool toys. There’s so many places this could be a killer app — imagine as a college student never having to carry a huge-ass reader again (or having to visit three or four copy stores to collect their syllabus); you simply log in, pay the licensing fees and download your entire course-load to your reader. Ten to twenty years later when the book publishing industry clues in, you could download your entire courseload, including textbooks.