Blayne Sucks

One of the latest gadgets to hit the market with massive fanfare is the Amazon Kindle. It was on the cover of Newsweek, where it was hailed as the future of reading.

It hit Slashdot twice. The first time was as a part of the initial hype wave. The second time was after it sold out in under 6 hours. There are many good comments on the Slashdot threads. In particular, there are some reviews of users of various electronic book readers and some thoughts on the hype surrounding the Kindle.

I am very interested in a good electronic book reader. The Kindle’s major competition is the Sony Reader. However, I just don’t think there’s a single product out there that could meet all my needs, even when I look at a few other readers.

Here’s my list of needs from an electronic reader:

• Must NOT include DRM crap. This may be the most important criteria for me. I don’t want to find myself in ten years with an entire library of books on a device that is obsolete with no control over what to do with them.
• Must allow me to sync with PDFs and other common electronic formats on my computer for free. I can pretty much convert anything I need to read into a PDF, so that’s the key. This is another important criteria for me. As an academic, I spend a lot of time reading academic papers and almost all of them are in an unrestricted (i.e. non-DRM’d) PDF format.
• Must have decent battery life. I consider 3 days of normal use to be a minimum and a week to be about the ideal. I’m really not sure about this criteria, but I think that this seems feasible given what I know about the technology
• Must have a library of books from which I could purchase and download. I don’t think a lack of an internet connection on the device is a show stopper as long as it wasn’t hard to sync from a computer, but it would certainly be nice. (Note: Bonus points if it can work with something like O’Reilly’s Safari, but that would probably require an active Internet connection.)
• Must allow me to sync news sites and RSS feeds for reading. I would strongly prefer if this would not require an active internet connection to read any of these feeds.
• Must have an open interface. I really think products like this are best when anyone can build their own applications to interface with them. I would probably prefer an entirely open source product, but I would settle for a decent open interface.

There’s nothing out there yet, but I think the Kindle might be proof that this is simply a matter of time rather than a pie in the sky idea.

[Edit 2 Dec 2007: I wanted to provide a link to this interesting article on Ars Technica that compares e-books and paper books.]