Answering a question from my Dad

[pmb]

Is Kindle the future of reading?Kinda

Comments

[zudini]

I think you're being a little too harsh on the Kindle. I'm much more okay with the "kinda mine, kinda theirs" philosophy when they are footing the bill for my EVDO data access, with no monthly or usage fee to me. I've been trying to decide if having a kindle (wikipedia, Google Maps, etc) would mean I could forgo the $30/month I'm currently spending for GPRS data. If so, the kindle would pay for itself in 14 months

[pmb]

PDFs are basically all I read nowadays, and they are the main format for readable electronic text. I read Kindle's lack of support more like those early digital music players that only played .WMA and not .MP3. Saying that it's okay because they support .TXT as well is pretty weak tea

[mbrubeck]

I basically agree with you (the ebook market is dead to me because of DRM), but:

I'd much rather have content in HTML or some other device-independent, reflowable, openly specified format. I already read far more words in HTML pages day than in PDF (but I realize that things are different in academia). I've read ebooks on a wide range of devices (XO, Nokia 770, Sony Librie, 14" Dell laptop) and print-formatted PDFs are painful at best on all of them.

The Kindle supports HTML natively (you can even download HTML ebooks straight from the web to your Kindle), and I believe its proprietary format is HTML-based.

[mbrubeck]

(If authors publish their text in a way that intentionally locks it into A4 or US-letter paper layouts, they really can't complain when pocket-sized viewers don't provide optimal support for their content.)