Amazon Kindle: Magic Device from an Alternate Reality

If you have a 3G Kindle and you are outside a WiFi hotspot, you can use the 3G connection for content delivery for an extra charge. This can vary and at the time of writing I have yet to find out how much this will cost me should I ever use it. You can set the maximum permitted charge per delivery in your Amazon account (default is £2.50) but you can set this to zero to avoid such charges altogether.

It is unclear to me if these are local or global charges. Will it be more expensive to have content delivered via 3G when I’m abroad? Or am I thinking too much inside the box here? Maybe I should read the rest of the Getting Started guide before jumping to conclusions here…

Kindle’s Future

Amazon have already released the KDK (Kindle Developer’s Kit) so hackers and coders can get to work writing apps for the Kindle. Who knows if you’ll be able to play Angry Birds and Grant Theft Auto on this thing soon – I wouldn’t be surprised if the Amazon MP3 store and Spotify will be integrated next.

In the meantime, authors can self publish their books to the Kindle store! It works on a revenue sharing principle (30/70) and authors can set their own price between 99p and £250. That’s a superb alternative to the high print-on-demand costs self publishing authors have to put up with at Lulu & Co. This can only be a good thing for authors!

Conclusion

Kindle is much more than I had thought it was. I’ve come to expect complicated interfaces, adverts that promise me the world and don’t deliver, cheaply made gadgets that ultimately aren’t designed to do half of what they’re sold as (yes HTC, I’m talking about you). Kindle is different.

It’s like the Mac experience I’ve never had, with built quality and features made for human beings and daily usage. A device like this could easily sell for twice as much considering what it has to offer – so I guess part of Amazon’s business plan must be to recoop some money via purchases you’ll make through the Kindle store. For me as the customer that’s fantastic: it means I can afford a Kindle much more easily.

That said, we’ve learnt from Sony that Content is King – and this will ultimately make or break new technology like this. With a huge catalogue of already available Kindle books (and those being cheaper than their paper counterparts) and very up to date newspaper and blog content it already looks very attractive. The screen looks awesome and it’s such a relief to read NOT on a computer screen (which we look at 12 hours a day anyway).

Kindle is the device you didn’t know you needed until you buy it. It will have its place both in my rucksack while I’m on the go and on my desk for constant references guide, with Wikipedia and Google at my fingertips.