Today Amazon officially announced the Kindle E-Ink based digital book. It ain’t pretty but it packs some impressive features.

• EVDO wireless connection with included service. That’s right, no wireless bill.
• Access to Wikipedia and dictionary included. Reading Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver on your Kindle and want to learn more about bastinado? Cake. Select it and off you go. Wirelessly and for free.
• Your library remains your library for as long as Amazon keeps the service around. Supposedly the device holds about 200 books and has removable storage support as well. If that’s not enough, simply clear out some space on the device so you can hold your new books and revisit those old ones at your whim.

Unfortunately, it’s not perfect yet.

It’s hideous

The form factor will change for revision 2. It has to. This is meant to be a replacement for a book, yet the actual reading area is perhaps half of the front panel surface area. The keyboard takes up a significant amount of surface area and yet the buttons are small. We’ve had sliders on cell phones for years, this product cries out for it. Make the entire front panel readable with a comfortable bezel for the next and previous page buttons.

There are good things: they’ve really thought out the page buttons. The weight and size is about right.

It’s limited

Amazon has a stock of about 90,000 books you can purchase to read on the Kindle at prices ranging from $0.01 to over $1,000. You can read the first chapter of any title for free before deciding to buy. You can purchase subscriptions to magazines, newspapers and blogs (?).

That’s pretty cool and all, but the breadth and depth of titles obviously isn’t there yet. Chances are if your reading tends off the beaten path you might be out of luck right now. Amazon aims to build the library further, of course, and I’m sure they will. But it will always lack something given the entire output of humanity since Gutenberg’s time.

Note also that there’s seemingly no support for personal PDFs which seems like a grand omission.

It’s expensive

The biggest shot against the device is the initial buy-in price of $399. No doubt, people paid more for their iPhones initially. The iPhone is meant to replace a host of separate electronic gadgets: phone, music player, video player, PDA. This thing is meant to replace a cheap commodity, the paperback book. You can walk into any used bookstore in the country and there will be a book to read for $1. Only the hardest of the hardcore book reader will find this proposition even remotely appealing.

Books seem to be priced reasonably — I can buy Peter F. Hamilton’s entertaining and sprawling Night’s Dawn trilogy for $8 — though one could make the argument that since there’s no physical medium being produced, stored, or delivered we should expect to pay far less but Amazon still has to subsidize that data plan in the background, too. Your 400 clams and ~$10 per book doesn’t just buy you that reader hardware and something to read on it. That always-available EVDO data plan that Amazon is footing the bill for is a large investment. They have to plan for customers to use that thing day in and day out for a long time. Especially given the Wikipedia access, some customers might buy one book a decade and ring up charges for Wikipedia access.

I’ll take rev 2

I’m interested, actually. I’m a voracious reader and I go through books pretty quickly. I also tend to re-read books, often in the same year like I recently did with “The Baroque Cycle”. I actually purchase a lot of books as well and the thought of finishing a book and being able to browse a bookstore, read the first chapter and buy the book from wherever my ass happens to be planted is exceedingly appealing. There are a few things that have to happen first.

• Looks aren’t everything, but I’ll wait for rev 2. I think we’ll get a bigger display with the next revision of E-Ink. Color? Maybe.
• A larger library and a deep and expansive technical reference library. I’m thinking of something with a catalog like Safari with cross-references and web links.
• The price must drop below $200.

It’s a very good first effort, but the steep buy-in will deny it “grand slam” status. Hopefully Amazon will be able to survive the initial pains and do what needs to be done to make it succeed.

Faced with an Imperial Smoothie Cruiser — the stalwart silver ‘98 Dodge Intrepid ES — sporting over 100,000 miles I chose the only rational option. Buy a 2008 Mazdaspeed 3! Ah, the glories of a car payment.

Julia picked out the color, by the way. According to Mazda literature that color is “True Red”. According to the ColdForged household that color is “Eye Searing Red”.

An aside

It’s been so long since I updated the site with any regularity that I just happen to be re-reading The Confusion so I don’t have to update the sidebar. What perfect, wonderful harmony!

Way back in the waning days of 2006 I embarked on a mission to get my wife a Nintendo DS Lite. I remarked that finding one was quite akin to tracking a fabled beast, where various signs lead you in directions that end invariably in failure. Then one day in early January I caught a scent near the riverbank: an online retailer claimed to have some! They could ship within 48 hours!

That retailer, GoGamer.com, accepted my order at 1:38PM and confirmed it. Of course, nothing goes smoothly and they updated me 2 hours later that day that, by gum, they didn’t have any in stock and that the item was back ordered. They should be able to get me one by the end of January. How lovely! What timeliness!

I cancelled precisely 2 minutes after they informed me of their little stock glitch. They confirmed that they’d gotten my change request and were processing it. I thought nothing else about it and my wife is currently enjoying her new DS that I scavenged in an eBay auction when it seemed that was my only hope for getting one before the end of our lives.

Congratulations, it shipped!

Until yesterday when I received notification that my order had shipped. Eh? I cancelled that. I kindly informed GoGamer of this faux pas.

Hello,

This order was cancelled the day it was made. You confirmed the “change request.”

Regards, CF

I marvelled at the response.

Dear CF, The cancellation request was not met on time and we did ship out your item by UPS with the tracking number 1Z9526AR030[stuff]. If you need to send it back for a refund please let me know once you do receive the item to you.

Really? I await the response to my next question.

It wasn’t received on time? I cancelled the 5th and you shipped it the 30th. 25 days before shipment isn’t “met on time”?

Dumbfounded I am.

UPDATE: It should be noted that GoGamer has offered to pay the return postage which is the Right Thing here, so my ire is significantly reduced.

ColdForged’s $1 Question of the Day

ACK! Forgot the question of the day!

ColdForged’s $1 Question of the Day: Which popular Hurricanes power forward did not play in the Carolina Hurricanes outrageously embarrassing loss to the Toronto Maple Leafs last night, January 30th?

First correct answer in the comments wins $1 in their Paypal account. And no, they won’t always be hockey questions .

Winner! Javahead claims the buck with the correct answer of Erik Cole, who didn’t play due to a “lower-body contusion”.

You knew I had to comment on this thing. Had to. Steve Jobs waltzed out and quite calmly smacked the cell phone — and MP3 player, for that matter — market on its collective ass with the announcement of Apple Computer, Inc.’s iPhone. Packing a widescreen touchscreen, a 4 or 8GB iPod Video, “free” push email through Yahoo and “visual voicemail”, this thing takes aim at every other phone out there and waggles its svelte form their way. In one fell swoop every phone on the market looks dumb and antiquated. All those devices with QWERTY keyboards dangling ponderously off the side suddenly are ungainly and ridiculous. Okay, they looked that way before yesterday, but there was no other option before. Now there is, and everyone will want one.

Almost. They’re not perfect. For one thing, you’ll have to switch to Cingular if you don’t already use them. That might kill the deal for many, and it would for me. At a $499 starting price for the 4GB version they’ll sell plenty to the Mac-faithful and the gadget heads. That’s a premium pricepoint and I think the uptake from the business people and executives could take a hit as companies try to swallow that pill on an expense report. Using Cingular’s EDGE service seems… limiting. With the rich experience Apple demoed yesterday there will be significant bandwidth required which might be throttled a bit under the EDGE limitation.

All that said, it’s sexy. As I mentioned to a friend, I don’t want to want it but I want it. Damn you, Apple.

I WON!

Admittedly, I’ve been using Blingo for my searches for a looooong time. I’ve never won anything. Javahead has, after I told him about it which seems so unfair. Well my day finally came, as evidenced by the picture above. A $25 Amazon gift certificate which immediately went to acquiring The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks and The Diamond Age from Neil Stephenson. Two absolutely free books for no effort.

How do I get in on this?

Easy, just do your searches from Blingo. Tell them I sent you since this is — apparently — where you heard it from (full disclosure: if you use that link to create your account, you become a “friend” of mine so that I win if you win. It doesn’t change your winnings only provides me the same gift for sending you their way). You can do it from your quick search button in your browser so you always use it. It uses the Google search engine internally so your searches are every bit as accurate as Google’s. But for every search you do — well, technically the first 10 searches per day you perform through the service are eligible — you have a chance to win a prize… from an iTunes gift certificate to a Mustang.

I can’t believe I actually won something. I probably shouldn’t drive today as all of my karma has been used up.