Search Engine Optimization

There is a lot of buzz around a new Amazon Kindle book reader / news aggregator and since we did not mention it, here is our review.

If you are not familiar – Kindle is new brainchild of Amazon, set out to be released on December 3rd according to the official line. It’s primary purpose is to download and read books from 88,000 Amazon digital selection – wherever you are, whatever you do. Kindle also awards users with the ability to aggregate blogs and news feeds from across the net, giving it a title of a self updating newspaper. This flexibility is achieved through the Sprint’s EV-DO network, and due to their agreement, Kindle users will not have to worry about wireless bills – it will be a part of Amazon service called “Amazon Whispernet”, weird name, but I guess it’s more appealing to women.

Amazon Kindle – 2 minute introduction.

Amazon Kindle features a full QWERTY keyboard and a scroll wheel on the upper right hand corner, for an easy navigation through your books and Amazon e-book store. Before downloading, you will be able to preview demos and read a couple of chapters to get a full feel of the book.

Its electronic paper screen gives you a sense of real life book, and eliminates the problem of sun glare. There are a number of usability tricks, like auto bookmaking, dictionary and so on, but those can be considered “standard packaging” for a device of this nature. Kindle also features access to Wikipedia via its EV-DO link.

Positives:

• Big screen
• Wide Selection of books (88.000 and counting)
• No monthly plans
• Can purchase and listen to audio files – songs and audiobooks
• Can upload PDF, Word and other documents via USB or email

Negatives:

• Who designed it? Boy it looks ugly(in my opinion)!
• Cannot browse regular internet
• Black and white display

I guess Amazon almost hit the target, and it should have been a long time we had a similar device(lets leave out sony reader). I believe the biggest setback of this Kindle wonder is no access to regular internet. People want to ride on the beloved super highway anywhere they go and if you are getting this close, why not let us? This is probably the question many people are asking, thought of course we have to take into account the fact that Amazon does own the network and Sprint has to make money, but heck do we care? =).

Kindle got a lot of good stuff jammed in it. E-books on Amazon range between $1-3 dollars and 10 dollars for bestsellers, so Kindle will do a wonderful job for what it was designed – reading books, a lot of books.

I had a question of how to add the news feeds and RSS subscriptions to the device, since there is no direct access to the internet and was a little bit disappointed after reading:

“More than 250 top blogs from the worlds of business, technology, sports, entertainment, and politics, including BoingBoing, Slashdot, TechCrunch, ESPN’s Bill Simmons, The Onion, Michelle Malkin, and The Huffington Post—all updated wirelessly throughout the day.”

It seems Kindle will be limited to a preselected set of feeds so we’ll not able to get Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land on the run =) Bad.

Give it a minute, it might change the way you read!

P.S.
It will cost $400 USD.