A Wider Net

The Kindle electronic book reader features many new exciting advances and a few serious limitations over it’s predecessors and competitors. I think this could be a very exciting device for corporate communications if only….

First, the background - The Kindle, launched today, is a small incredibly light electronic book reader that uses electronic paper instead of a backlit LCD screen to create it’s images. Electronic paper uses very little power and produces a natural looking easy-to-read image. It needs the same kind of lighting that a regular book needs. Sony released an e-book reader this year using electronic paper but the Kindle has three killer features missing from the Sony unit: Wireless book download using Sprint EVDO cellular networks (with no monthly fee), the inclusion of newspapers and blogs, and a small blackberry-like keyboard. You can also transfer your own files to the device for viewing later.

Two shortcomings hamstring the device in my opinion - lack of support for all book formats and standards, and lack of support of RSS feeds for free. I track 100 RSS feeds (mostly from blogs) and while this device could have been an interesting way to read them, most of the blogs I read are not even available on the device and they cost around $1 a month per feed.

I have sent an inquiry to Amazon to see if there is a way for corporate communications folks to be able to transmit documents to a sales force or other employee segment privately, and bill the company for each download rather than the recipient. If this were possible, a $400 (or less in quantity, presumably) wireless device that can pull in the latest sales sheets corporate information while in the field would be a pretty compelling offer.

For more information about authoring content for the device, see the Amazon Digital Text Platform page.

P.S. The whole idea behind these things is to make your life easier and slaughter less trees… not to over-technify the world, but I will admit that the trees vs. plastics devices in the landfills argument still applies.