Its a review about this product
I requested and received a Kindle from my wife as a birthday gift. I wanted to love this device; conceptually it is something I have desired for a long time. It turned out to be a disappointment to both myself (because the device didn't live up to expectations) and to my wife (because I ended up wanting to return the gift that I asked her for).
I've read many reviews that complained about button placement and the overall shape of the device. I had expected that these complaints were execrations. Wrong! If anything they fail to properly illuminate how problematic the design is. It is physically impossible to hold the device without repeatedly mashing the page forward/back buttons. If you hold the reader at the bottom, in the right hand (as one would hold a paperback) the point at the lower right of the device pushes painfully in to your palm.
Secondly the display... I spend my life working in front of PC displays. I love reading but dread recreational reading on a monitor. E-Ink is a superb answer or should be. I was under the impression that the kindle used the exact same sourced display as the Sony reader. Now I am not so sure. The kindle seems to have a far grayer background vs. what I remember the Sony had. This of course leads to a diminishment of the available contrast between the background and the text. With my eyes this is problematic, within half an hour of reading on this device I had a blazing eye strain headache. I did however read far longer on a Sony reader in a local bookstore with no ill effects.
Wispernet... The promise of untethered access, to an endless supply of reading material. WHEN IT WORKS... Let me explain. I own a Sprint EVDO smart phone. My smart phone in my left hand had an EVDO connection with a full 5 bars of signal strength. The Kindle in my right hand was bouncing between 1 bar of 1x (1xRTT Data: Much slower connectivity then EVDO) and NOTHING. I would get constant error dialogues that no connection was available while browsing the Kindle store. Meanwhile I could play a streaming video on the EVDO smart phone, no signal issues at all. By the way I am on Long Island in New York, where we are completely saturated with wireless, the issue is NOT the wireless provider.
I could overlook all of these shortcomings, I want a device like this so badly I could but not at the current price. This is a two-fold issue. Firstly the device itself... The most expensive parts of the device would be the display, the cellular radio and the battery, combined and in bulk together cost far less than $100. Yes I understand that currently it's a niche product and there are design costs to recoup. However the sale cost vs. the production cost just doesn't seem realistic. That combined with the second price issue, the cost of books it is downright abusive.
Printing, Binding, Shipping, Cataloging and Inventorying physical books is an expensive process. ALL of that is eliminated in the electronic process. Lookup almost any title that is available in the Kindle format vs. the physical, in most cases the e-book is within 80 to 90% of the cost of the physical book. So almost none of the expense saved by the publisher, is enjoyed by the consumer. Plus of course with a physical book I have an almost indestructible (with care) object that that will always have some intrinsic value. I can lend a book to someone, I could give it away or sell it. Not so with the e-book. The draconian DRM won't allow that. I challenge anyone at Amazon or representing the publishers of e-books to justify their price. Any book more than 6 months old should not cost more than $3 to 5 dollars, even at that price the profit margin would be grossly higher then what they earn on a paperback.
So you have an awkward uncomfortable device, at an unfathomably high price. The cost of media is also high; it costs nearly the same as a physical book but is loaded with DRM that strips you of the freedom that a regular book inherently grants you. Yet I still want one. If any one of these objections were corrected, I could live with the rest. As it stands now, my Kindle is re-boxed and ready to be handed to UPS for a return. My greatest regret is I never had the opportunity to see one in person before I told my wife I wanted one, if I had, I wouldn't have had to disappoint her, by returning what she thought was a perfect birthday gift.
