Chamber Four

Kindle 2.0 is still pretty ugly but at least it's... thin?

Jeff Bezos did indeed unveil the new Kindle today, with the help of authorial sellout Stephen King. It looks like Amazon has been sitting on this thing for a few months now (and it won’t ship for another 2 weeks); the original leaked pictures were spot on.

So what’s different? Unless you’re blind, not much. The design is exactly what we expected, and Kindle still doesn’t offer any native support for non-Amazon-proprietary formats like PDF. PDF support was the single most-wanted feature going into the announcement; so much for Amazon’s rich customer data.

The bottom line: if you’re primarily a magazine/blog/newspaper reader, the Kindle and its whispernet are definitely the ereader for you. If you’re blind or have very bad vision, the Kindle 2.0, with it’s text-to-speech capability, is the device for you (and kudos to Amazon for text-to-speech, that kind of consideration is usually a labor of love).

However, if you read primarily books, Kindle is still not your machine. Buying books in a proprietary format, crippled with digital restriction measures (DRM), is asking for a bookshelf disaster at some point in the future. I didn’t expect Amazon to open the door to DRM-free books in this iteration, but it would’ve been nice if they’d left the side window unlocked like Sony did.

For all my griping about Kindle 2.0’s looks and form factor, I would sell my PRS-700 and buy a Kindle today, if only it could read library books. Until publishers figure out all this DRM nonsense, I’m buying as few ebooks as possible, and that means copping books from the library. If you read novels only, I’d consider waiting a few weeks to see if an open ereader like the PRS-700 drops its price.

TOMORROW: How I did on last week’s Kindle 2.0 predictions (I might as well have been in the design meeting, which isn’t good news for Kindlers).