QUILLBLOG

Kindlemania

By now you’ve no doubt seen the long press release – er, sorry, Newsweek cover story – that announced the launch of the Kindle, Amazon.com’s new electronic reader. Elsewhere, though, bloggers and commentators have looked at some angles that Newsweek‘s Steven Levy somehow didn’t get to in his nearly 5,000 words of “gee whiz.”

These include Amazon’s apparently heavy-handed approach to digital rights management (more on that here), the reader’s various technical and design limitations, and Amazon’s weird plan to charge Kindle users a subscription fee to access blogs, in some cases without telling or paying the blogs’ actual creators (more on that one here and here). Meanwhile, Q&Q art director Gary Campbell notes that in Amazon’s own demonstration video, “each line is fully justified, with no hyphenation! That makes for very gappy text, which is evidenced throughout the video.”

Watch Q&Q Omni later this week for a news item about what the Kindle doesn’t mean for the Canadian market.

Comments are closed.