There goes that Kindle I wanted for Christmas.

 This morning I got to read the New Yorker article by Nicholson Baker which tears the Kindle to pieces. It didn’t seem all that devastating until I got to the end:

If you want to read electronic books there’s another way to go. Here’s what you do. Buy an iPod Touch (it costs seventy dollars less than the Kindle 2, even after the Kindle’s price was recently cut), or buy an iPhone, and load the free “Kindle for iPod” application onto it. Then, when you wake up at 3 A.M. and you need big, sad, well-placed words to tumble slowly into the basin of your mind, and you don’t want to wake up the person who’s in bed with you, you can reach under the pillow and find Apple’s smooth machine and click it on. It’s completely silent. Hold it a few inches from your face, with the words enlarged and the screen’s brightness slider bar slid to its lowest setting, and read for ten or fifteen minutes. Each time you need to turn the page, just move your thumb over it, as if you were getting ready to deal a card; when you do, the page will slide out of the way, and a new one will appear….

Forty million iPod Touches and iPhones are in circulation, and most people aren’t reading books on them. But some are. The nice thing about this machine is (a) it’s beautiful, and (b) it’s not imitating anything. It’s not trying to be ink on paper.

My wife has an iPod Touch, so we did precisely this. [It turns out the application is actually called "Kindle for iPhone." It works the same on both devices.] Then we downloaded a free sample chapter of a bestseller I might actually want to read some day. And guess what? It worked exactly the way Baker described. You can even change the print size like on an Kindle and it looked perfectly fine to me.

The root of Amazon’s problem is then not necessarily that the Kindle works badly. I’ve played around with other people’s to have previously coveted one. The problem is why should anyone go out and buy a Kindle when there are other devices out there that work just as well AND do other things besides display books? The only way I can see around this is to come out with a Kindle phone, but people will look pretty stupid hold a page-shaped device up to the ears.  Read the original posting here http://moreorlessbunk.wordpress.com/2009/07/28/there-goes-that-kindle-i-wanted-for-christmas/