Kindle puts library in palm's reach

A couple of comments: Editing documents on a Kindle would be painful given the slow response rate of the screen (about 0.7sec). It's fast enough for casual entry, not fast enough to do real work on. That's not what it's designed for, so I wouldn't expect it. The ability to read MS Word documents is another thing entirely, although it is made much more difficult by Microsoft's tight-lipped-ness regarding the format. It's been mostly reverse-engineered, but nobody does a perfect job. I think it's likely we'll see at least a basic MS Word document reader in the near future; the Kindle is designed to be easy to extend with new document formats. [continued in next posting due to 3000 character limit]

PDF, on the other hand, I wouldn't hold out a lot of hope for. PDF is terrific for building documents that render on in a static (fixed-size) format, but is absolutely horrible whenever the format you're trying to read it in is different than the publisher intended or expected. H-O-R-R-I-B-L-E. It's painful enough to read them on a computer screen where scaling and moving around is easy; in a relatively static display like a Kindle it would be beyond painful. PDF really needs to be transcribed into a more malleable format, and doing that on a limited capability device is not the wisest choice. Amazon's transcription service is easy to use, inexpensive (or free if you're willing to do a little extra drag-and-drop), and effective. Lastly, you're one of few reviewers who admit that books sell for less than $9.99 each, but even you fail to acknowledge that the $9.99 price is set for *current best-sellers*, i.e. books that are currently selling in hardcover. Books in paperback usually sell for $5 to $7, and some even less expensively. Overall savings versus paper are usually 20-50%, the larger number being for current best-sellers. But even this doesn't tell the whole story: There are tens of thousands of *free* books out there, from sites like Project Gutenberg. I know a couple of Kindle owners who have bought a sum total of one book, even though they've been reading on the devices for seven months. "Renting" e-books is just silly from the vendors' point of view; it's just more management for zero gain. If selling for less money means greater profits through greater volume prices will drop. As it is they don't lose potential sales through hand-me-downs or used book markets, and their production costs are dramatically lower. There are arguments as to why they should be cheaper yet but if you're an avid reader the device will pay for itself in a few months even at the current prices (mine took only four months; I expected around 10). I don't see any good reasons to complain about book prices. The device itself needs to be less expensive to really be accepted by the mass-market, but the books ... not so much. I'm looking forward to the new models because I think they'll solve the ergonomic issues (which, with use, are not as bad as usually claimed ... but are certainly an unnecessary annoyance) and a bigger format will be a boon for textbooks and references. Overall, though, I have found the Kindle to be a remarkable device -- a good value even at the $400 it cost me on day one of sales, given the low cost of books, but I am mostly pleased because it offers a superb reading experience. When I'm reading it disappears, and that's the best possible ergonomics if you ask me. jim frost jimf@frostbytes.com

[note to readers: my comments below are in reverse order. sorry about that, the posting system has a 3000-character limit.]