first Kindle sighting

Living in Seattle as I do, I've been expecting to see someone with an Amazon Kindle 
eventually, and today was the day!  I noticed a woman who was, I'm sure, in the over-60 
category, sitting fiddling with one outside a Starbucks.  I asked her how she liked it and 
she was both enthusiastic and quite familiar with its selling points such as being able to 
subscribe to the Wall Street Journal for $9.95 a month and to get sample chapters.  She 
did say that she was frustrated with hers at the moment because it had stopped working 
and needed to be reset, but she'd had it since December or January and seemed to be 
taking the problem in stride.  I had the sense that she was quite computer-savvy and she 
told me usually browsed the Kindle Store and purchased ebooks using her desktop 
computer.  Despite the problem with was experiencing with it, her main complaint was 
that Danielle Steele's books aren't available for it.  She does use it to read James Patterson, 
however.

As others have reported, it was actually quite attractive--it's just unphotogenic in the 
extreme.

As it happens, I had earlier this morning talked with a young woman whose husband 
works for Amazon and who'd been as frustrated as anyone else not to be able to get one 
at Christmas time.  She told me something I hadn't heard before, which is that the Kindle 
is finding a market among older people who like to read current bestsellers because they 
can get the Kindle edition right away and view it at the large print setting, whereas for the 
paper books they have to wait for the large-print edition to come out.  As we all know, an 
instant large-print edition has long been a key advantage of eboks, but I hadn't thought 
of the delay in issuing the paper large print edition of bestsellers.  I presume publishers 
wait to see how strong sales are before investing in a large-print edition.  Apparently 
Amazon hadn't realized this either, because she said this particular selling point had come 
as a surprise to them.

John Landahl
InfoStrategist.com
Seattle, WA


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