Further speculations on the Amazon Kindle

At this point I'm emboldened to speculate a little about the Amazon Kindle.

To begin with, Jeff Bezos has always placed the highest priority on a good customer 
experience.  For this reason, I would expect the Kindle to be available in quantity 
immediately after its announcement, so customers who order one will get it in 24 to 48 
hours, with no frustrating weeks of delays as production is ramped up.  It's not likely that 
we'll see people buying up the first ones to relist on eBay for a profit.

I would also expect the hardware and software to be glitch-free, unlike the Franklin 
eBookMan some members of this group may remember.

Because Amazon is so strongly associated with books, I expect that consumers will 
perceive the Kindle as a way to connect with Amazon to purchase ebooks, just as they 
perceive an iPod as a way to connect to iTunes to purchase music.  The ability to load 
content from other sources will be secondary.

I expect that all ebooks sold by Amazon for the Kindle will indeed be DRM-protected, at 
least for the time being.  The reason for this is that Amazon has been in the business of 
delivering digital content in the form of videos and music as well as an earlier iteration of 
ebooks and has been using DRM for these types of content.  However, Amazon is certainly 
well-aware of the debates over DRM and recently began offering non-DRM protected MP3 
music downloads.

On the matter of the backlight, I expect that the Kindle won't have one, for the same 
technical reason that the Sony Reader doesn't--eInk uses reflected light, not transmitted 
light, so the display is opaque.





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