I’ve been eyeing the Kindle for a while. Not that I read as often as I should but the technology fascinates me. Looks like it was good I didn’t take the plunge before now as there are rumours of a larger kindle.
These rumours have been around for a while (since the beginning of last year actually) but the Wall Street Journal in it’s weekend edition ran a story citing people who have actually seen the device. And it will be out before Holiday season apparently!
Hopefully this will be a larger screen version with some sort of textbook support. I guess textbook support will probably require color too but my guess is that color e-ink is still too expensive to make it into a mass market Kindle.
I asked my Sri Lankan friend at the GSB, Chari Ratwatte, who’s been very helpful with all of my questions about Stanford so far, if other students use the Kindle. It seems they don’t but the GSB Jackson library has a free one that they are lending just so that people can get a feel for it, which is cool.
Don’t look too closely at the picture btw, this is NOT the real thing. The WSJ also quoted NPD as saying that the market for e-book readers will almost triple in 2009 to 3 million, which is amazing and I think quite believable. The Amazon Kindle I think will get most of that market share because their delivery system and collection of books is really good and in the end, that’s all that matters.
The only thing that I can think of that could potentially hurt Amazon is if Apple decided to have a go at it or if patent lawsuits hurt Amazon too much. Even if Apple takes a crack I think it will take them a while to amass the collection that Amazon already has today.
Need more textbooks though!
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Engadget has managed to get a hold of what is believed to be pictures and specs of the new larger screen kindle. Apparently the Kindle that will be released tomorrow will be targeted towards the education crowd, will include a 9.7 inch display, a built in PDF reader and the ability to make better annotations, all absolute requirements for a student.
