Digital reading with Kindle

I recently heard about the Amazon Kindle e-book reader. The article I read about boosted the ease of use and, most importantly, the ease of reading thanks to a paperlike quality of the screen. I was really excited about all this and wanted to have one. I'm an old school book lover. I just love having a paper copy, flipping the pages, rummaging through the bins in bookstores. However, I also read quite a lot of papers on the internet, mostly in pdf format which I don't intend to buy. Printing all of these would become expensive and would not be very friendly to the environment. So, an e-reader would come in handy. I wanted to write a post about how nice it would be to own a Kindle for that particular purpose. And then I did a quick check up on the internet. Instead of going the open source route, Amazon has opted for DRM proprietary software (read: Big Brother). The only non locked-in formats the device will support is html and txt, which can only be converted by mail at 10 cents a pop. Too bad, it seemed like a good idea. Yes, it's easy to buy books from their store, but if I want to buy a book I'll buy the paper version. My studies in records management have taught me one thing: digital media cannot be trusted, pc's crash, get corrupted by viruses, formats get outdated. My books are paper, my music is vinyl. MP3's and e-books are the things you find as torrent files to back up the other formats. Which reminds me, I really need to make hard copies of my pictures.

I hope Amazon will see the light in the future, or that some other company will. Apparently, the screen is really all that. So the product in itself seems amazing. But it's best to wait a little bit longer until the 2.0 release (and for the price to go down). In the meantime, here are some reviews: Paul Thurrott's in depth review, the Kindle Swindle, Gizmodo's Real Life Review, Wired's (Sony) Reader vs. Kindle, Technology Evangelist's video about the design features.