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Amazon Kindle Endorsed By Oprah
Oprah Winfrey enthused about the Amazon Kindle on her show today — it's her "new favorite thing" — and had Jeff Bezos on to announce a $50-off offer good till Nov. 1. A plug on Oprah is ordinarily a sign that a product has crossed over into the mainstream. But her show's audience has been slipping lately, and it's unclear how many cash-strapped citizens will be willing to part with $309 (after the special offer) for a new techno-gadget, for which they then have to shell out more money for DRM-encrusted content.
No, the Kindle is fairly single purpose device so its doubtful that it will. When it converts a PDF it reflows it and stores it as text, rather than simply displaying it as a bitmap; this isn't so much a failure in the software as some would make it out to be, but simply that the screen isn't big enough to make it useful. If that's what you're interested in, I think the iRex iLiad (or however its capitalized) is the best bet, even though it is more expensive.
for which they then have to shell out more money for DRM-encrusted content.
Nonsense. There are a ton of drm free books out there. I subscribe to Analog magazine for example, and get more drm-free books than I have time to read from fictionwise.com. If something is released only in crippled formats, then that's their loss, as it means I read one of the many other things on my list instead, or, if I *really* want to read it, as happened recently, I buy used paper. That's only happened once though, and I've been ebooking now for about 3 years (albeit my Treo and Sony Reader, but I know the Kindle supports drm free formats too).
Does it support non-English texts? If I want to read a PDF with heavy use of diacritics, or even completely different alphabets, will those display correctly on Kindle?
I know there are french and spanish books available for Kindle, so it will support at least basic stuff like c-cedilla, n-tilde, circumflexes, accents, umlauts, thorn, etc. I read somewhere the first version only supports latin-1, but that later versions allow some sort of font embedding...
I also couldn't say whether any current existing pdf-kindle software will be able to take advantage of that though... and I wouldn't put high hopes on doing an asian or arabic language on it.
The books you buy from Amazon are associated with your account and can be re-downloaded at any time. Anything you generate or convert yourself can be stored on a removable Micro-SD device (not included). The battery is replaceable, but I have no idea how much it costs, or what the availability will be in the future. Basically you're covered unless / until Amazon goes away.
I saw part of the Oprah show. According to the guy they had talking about them, once you have purchased a book from the Amazon Kindle store, you can delete it from your device (to free up space) and then re-download it again whenever you want. They did not talk about what will happen if/when Amazon goes out of business.
The question was about english text. I have read Spanish, Swedish, French, and Italian on my Kindle, all of them have characters that are not available in English. I have never used eastern, or cyrillic scripts.
And with a netbook you can't sit in the park with the sun at your back and still see the screen.
Umm except it happens to do that job VERY well indeed. I have read quite a few books on my kindle and find that it is VERY nice to be able to carry around several books at once on it so that as I finish one I can start another. I just finished a business trip in fact and while sitting in the airport to LEAVE for my trip I finished a book, browsed\purchased\downloaded another, and then on the return trip having finished the first book I bought two more while sitting in the airport waiting for my flight.
With the Kindle I'm now pretty much always reading at least one if not more books constantly! I read many books before but frankly ran out of shelf space, found it a hassle to carry more than one, and paid MORE than I do now if buying new plus I had to get off my ass to go get them! the Kindle may be a one trick pony but it's pretty good at what it does.
P.S. You know it can be used to browse the WEB right? Play MP3?
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Actually, if the paperback cover price is $10 then expect to pay maybe $6.99 with Kindle - max. The most expensive book I've bought so far on my Kindle was $9.99 and cheapest was maybe $2. they discount off the cover price pretty good, especially if you look at hardcover prices for new books. It's only when you look at tech manuals or perhaps some sort of texbook thing that you begin to see much higher prices. $9.99 is pretty much the most you will see ofr normal books you'd find off a bookstand rack.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org