On Feb. 9, Amazon.com unveiled the Kindle 2, the second generation e-book reader, calling it "Still amazing, only better."
Amazon extensively promotes the new gadget with short video ads including customer testimonials ("I'm a bibliophile and I love my Kindle!") and voice-over informational clips that demonstrate the Kindle 2's many capabilities.
While the e-book reader's features improvements over the first generation model (thinner, sleeker design; faster page turning; sharper display and greater storage space), it also boasts new capabilities, such as the "text-to-speech" option that can read anything out loud.
Users can also annotate their texts, send personal documents from their computers to their Kindles and access Wikipedia.
More than 230,000 books are available for the device, as well as more than 1,000 blogs, in addition to major newspapers and magazines from around the country.
The new model offers about two days' worth of battery life, which is more than the original Kindle, as well as more storage space and a "sharper display," according to the Amazon ad.
Curious, but not enough to shell out $350 for the sleek, smart gadget, I sought out an expert to help me get my head around the latest news in the book world.
Haley Wauson '09, an English and psychology double major writing her senior thesis on digital print, explained some of the finer points of Kindle technology to me the other night in Collis. Haley put her name on the waiting list to borrow a Kindle from Hanover's Howe Library this fall, but, after four months of waiting, has decided to treat herself to her own Kindle 2. The device, her reward for wrapping up her thesis, should arrive sometime after Feb. 24, the product's official release date.
Though she loves books and hopes to go on to study book history at the graduate level, Haley said she has fallen victim to Amazon's ads for the gadget. Still, she can still see Kindle 2's shortcomings.
"People who are reading e-books can't exchange books with friends," she said. "All that social aspect is taken out with the e-book reader."
As Haley explained to me, e-books represent only one-half of a percent of book sales today. Amazon has a lot of work to do convincing consumers to replace the centuries-old codex book format.
"Eventually -- way, way eventually -- I think this is going to be what people use," Haley said. "For now, I think it's going to stay as a small proportion of readers, but I think that pretty rapidly we're going to see a big take-up."
