While you can access blogs for a cost, newspapers, and some magazines, I consider this more icing for people who don’t mind spending a few extra bucks, Business travelers who dont wanna lug a laptop everywhere come to mind. Sure you can convert PDF and DOC files and import for free with just a few minor hoops to jump through. And with the new e-ink, you want to read large files, its not a strain. The web browsing and such are listed with the kindle as experimental.
To me, what this means is, if its the main reason your buying his device, don’t, get a small laptop instead. This is for reading.

There are some minor design issues I would change, I suspect we will see a better designed cover out soon, and a different layout for the side buttons, sleeker look etc. But the bottom line is when you read a novel, you sink into it like you do in a paperback.

The kindle and its like may not come cheap, but with no monthly fees, a free Internet browser you can use anywhere you get a sprint cell phone signal, discounts on novels and the amazing e-ink, I think your not gonna be finding these on the discontinued rack, at least not until the Kindle 2.0 comes out.
Bottom line, this is a device for people who read books, not for websurfing

Something the Kindle does that the iPhone doesn’t? It downloads the entire Journal at 4:00 in the morning and lets me read the whole thing while I’m inside cast iron tubes underneath the Hudson with no cell signal.

In my opinion, Amazon is on the right track with the Kindle. I don’t have mine in hand yet (it gets delivered tomorrow), but I know that they’ve tried to replicate real books to the greatest extent possible. That’s why there’s e-ink, a larger screen, long battery life, etc. I cannot imagine trying to read a book on an iPhone or a PDA, and I can’t imagine what people are thinking when they suggest this as an option… except that these folks must not read books very often!

http://exacteditions.blogspot.com/2007/11/being-kind-to-kindle.html

Back to my above point: I want access to multiple books while on the road and in odd places where I really don’t want to lug around a duffle bag full of books (that’s why I started carrying my laptop and rely a lot these days on scanned documents and…

Don’t know how many people’ll buy blogs on Kindle (mine’s available there); would guess that more’ll buy books and perhaps newspapers for more convenient reading on a train or plan than either paper or a laptop. Maybe subscribe to their favorite blogs for convenience. For what it may be worth to some people, the blogs sold through Kindle have to be ad-free.

Blogged more about it at http://blog.tomevslin.com/2007/11/kindle-free-int.html

As for the blog fees, I immediately figured out they could be greatly reduced by simply creating your own script that pulls data from whatever RSS feeds you want and outputting them to a Word doc that gets emailed to your Kindle address — which has Amazon process it, beam it to your Kindle, and charge you 10 cents. For $3/month you could technically subscribe to 10,000 blogs and have all the latest posts delivered in ONE large document that gets added t your Kindle each day. You’d want to format the ‘order’ of the data somehow to make it easy to navigate, but this is definitely one way to greatly reduce the cost involved with reading a lot of blog content on the Kindle.

I think the other thing that’s being missed here is that reading a lot of content on the iPhone stinks. I have one and only use it for short reading bursts. It’s not that easy on the eyes to read for a long period of time. On the other hand, one could read an e-book on a laptop, but that’s a joke. When are you going to sit around on a beach somewhere, or on a train, on an airplane, or anywhere else for a long period of time and try to read from your laptop? That is definitely NOT a good “consume large amounts of content” solution.

I think the Kindle is making an effort to “bridge the gap” between a tiny cellphone that does a good job of bringing us small amounts of news and content, and a laptop that’s more of a computing station.

I would much rather have a Kindle on an airplane and be able to switch between several different books rather than lug all of those books with me.

And if college textbooks can eventually be purchased on the Kindle… WOW. Just think of a student being able to have all 12,000LBS of his/her textbooks loaded onto one small, lightweight device.

I think, ultimately, we’re talking about “what’s the solution for being able to consume a lot of content COMFORTABLY?”

The iPhone? NO WAY. Spend more than an hour trying to read on that thing and you’ll have experienced some major eye strain.

A laptop or tablet PC? NO WAY. Those are overkill. Too big and clunky.

It’s not always about having the best device that will “satisfactorily” do everything, it’s about having a device that does the BEST JOB for the purpose it was created for.

Is the Kindle the answer? It’s too early to tell. But it’s definitely moving in the right direction.

On my Kindle that arrived today, I surfed the Internet and visited blogs including this one. They all looked great, though obviously rendered in just 4 shades of grey. There is no charge for this surfing. I had more mixed results with more graphics heavy news and newspaper sites but some now have special mobile or text-only versions. I used gmail to read and reply to messages. It was a little clunky but it worked. All of this is free (anyone remember the uproar over the iPhone’s required monthly access plans?).

And as far as the complaints about getting stuff onto Kindle, I loaded text, Microsoft Word and PDF files from my laptop. For teh PDF and Word files, this required me to email the files to Amazon. Within 2 minutes in each case, I got a download link. AT NO CHARGE, I downloaded the converted files. I plugged my Kindle into my laptop’s USB port and dragged the new files on. Total elapsed time for a dozen files — less than 5 minutes. I know that Amazon is not listing PDF as a supported format but it works fine. Another way to accomplish this without any emailing is to get the free Mobipocket Creator software, which imports PDFs, HTML and Word formats and outputs in a format Kindle can read directly. The 10 cent charge only kicks in if you email a file you want converted directly to your Kindle via wireless.

And one final comment - Amazon/Bezos recognize that the the consumer is getting less value for an ebook with DRM and they are charging less than a print book. To pick a somewhat silly example, Clive Cussler’s new thriller The Chase is $16 in hardcover at Amazon, $21 as a Sony ebook and $9.99 at Kindle. Older titles are much cheaper. An old William Gibson novel that sells for $8 in paperback was $5 on Kindle.

The problem is that we’re moving away from dedicated devices. Everyone wants a phonemp3playerwebbrowserPDAvoicerecorder, so eReader manufacturers try to cram features onto the readers to compete. It’s stupid. I’m not going to read blogs on eInk. I’m going to read a book on it. So either they knock it off and sell a cheap, open eReader that’s just an eInk display and a hard drive, or Apple will eventually come up with an eInk display that they can snap onto an iPhone and the other players will be buried.