E-books, e-magazines and newspapers can piggyback on each other, so it’s good to see Conde Nast demoing a Wired Magazine edition for the ever-rumored Apple tablet.

I hope the idea evolves the right way, with such features as customizable, reflowable text. Didn’t Shakespeare say, “Kill all the designers”? More seriously, shouldn’t smart designers learn to live with reflowability?

Needless to say, Conde Nast’s concept and similar ones could be used with hardware from other vendors.

I continue to believe we’ll see an Apple tablet in time, but if not, then other vendors will fill in the gap.

Significantly, Comcast and other cable interests are starting to set up shop on the Net, with movies and other offerings for subscribers. The more enticing the content, the more market for hardware. And movie-capable hardware could work great for e-books—perhaps displayed in double-page format.

And speaking for twin pages: When the devil is the new Kindle for PC app going to have them? That would be high on my list, along with other wrinkles such as a choice of fonts and optional all-text bolding, which can be useful even on many LCDs.

Would Gary Price—the founding info-maven of ResourceShelf—buy The Case for Books in an electronic or paper edition?

TeleRead promised an answer, and directly from Gary himself, here it is. – D.R.

The winner? The e-book version, which I’ve been reading on Kindle for iPhone. A few of the reasons why:

1. In all of the last-minute stuff I needed to do before a trip, I didn’t have time to go to the bookstore.
2. I purchased the book the night before my trip. I could have even bought the book in the taxi on the way to the airport or while I waited to board at the gate.
3. Like it or not, Price. It was about one-half the cost of the print edition. By the way, some/all of the essays are likely available for free via New York Review of Books.
4. It seems I’m always losing things so this way I had nothing to lose (except my iPhone, which I would be taking with me anyway) and one fewer item to place in my already-overflowing carry-on bag.

Have I read any of the books on my actual Kindle device (1st gen) since I returned home? No, I continue with my iPhone.

I still have issues with low-light reading. An Amazon rep suggested I could buy a book light and attach it to the Kindle cover. Well, I have a book light and have attached it to the cover. It’s a mediocre experience at best.

Alas, Project Gutenberg and most other public domain sites aren’t optimized right now for devices with small screens and slow browsers.

And free Kindle download guides—with links to public domain books—are not as easy and convenient to use as they could be in my opinion (TeleRead Co-Editor Paul Biba offers his thoughts later in this post).

What’s more, free editions of more than a few public domain books are AWOL in the Kindle’s bookstore. To my surprise, I couldn’t dig up one for A Journey to the Center of the Earth, the Jules Verne classic.

The glories of FreeKindleBooks.org

Enter FreeKindleBooks.org.

It will take you to thousands of Kindle books organized by author. I don’t know the exact title count, but the site at least passes the Upton Sinclair Test, as I’ll call it: I could find 21 of his books such as a The Money Changers.

Jules Verne (right photo) showed up with 34 titles. including Journey.

59 Dickens works, 49 by Twain and 7 by Austen

Fifty-nine works by Dickens (left photo), 49 by Mark Twain and seven by Jane Austen (less prolific than the other two) appear on FreeKindleBooks.org. Simply put, for people who like major public domain authors, this is more than just a vexingly abbreviated collection.

On top of that, you can use the site’s “experimental” mode and locate books by PG number—apparently all of the catalogue. Just go to the real PG and search for the title and accompanying number, then return to FreeKindleBooks.org’s experimental mode to download the actual book. If a desktop or laptop is handy, that might be a faster way to look up the PG numbers.

FreeKindleBooks.org, granted, has flaws. For one thing, there’s a lot of verbiage at the top, rather than the lists of writers (leading to title lists). But just keep scrolling down and you’ll find the lists.

How Kindle owners can use the Web browser with FreeKindle.org

Don’t be scared if you’ve never used the Kindle’s Web browser before or don’t mess with it often.

From the Home menu, just hit the Menu key, scroll down to Experimental, press joystick-style button, then go to Basic Web Browser if you’re not there already, which you should be. Press the joystick button again.

If the enter-Web-address rectangle is cluttered with a previously made entry, hit Menu again and choose Enter URL, using the joystick. Type in FreeKindleBooks.org and hit the return button (under the DEL on your keyboard).

Other possibilities for free easy Kindle downloads…

• Mnybks.net: Unfortunately I found it harder to use for direct Kindle downloads than FreeKindlebooks.Net was.
• Feedbooks.com: Yet another. Use http://feedbooks.com/?format=mobile. Neither it nor Mnybks.net will give you as many selections as FreeKindleBooks.net will with the “experimental’ feature in use. But Feedbooks does offer some of the best-formatted books online.

…Plus a reminder that you can copy books directly from your desktop machine to the Kindle…if the desktop is handy

With the above methods, you don’t need to have a desktop machine handy.

But with a PC, Mac or Linux machine, you can use your Firefox or other browser and download a book directly to your Kindle’s solid-state storage via a USB connection.

The Kindle comes with a USB cable. Plug it in between your Kindle and your desktop. Then do the download from your desktop browser after specifying that you want the file copied to the e-reader (a Documents subfolder) rather than the desktop.

The e-reader might show up as something like Drive K. Whatever is a drive you normally don’t see!

If you use a laptop instead of a desktop, just substitute the word “laptop” for desktop.

Additional thoughts—from Paul Biba: He favors download guides over a FreeKindle.org approach

After this post appeared in its original form, Paul kindly shared his own thoughts:

“There are two Kindle catalogs that I, personally, find more convenient to use than the web browser method that David mentions above.  These are actual catalogs of the holdings of MobileRead and Feedbooks.  You download them to your Kindle, either by using the browser or by downloading them to your desktop and then adding them as a book, and then you can open them and use the search function of the Kindle to find what you want.

“Both catalogs are updated frequently, I think weekly, so you can re-download them whenever you want and keep up to date.  They are especially easy to update because both of them have links on their front page which will automatically fire up the Kindle browser and download the latest catalog to your Kindle.  The only thing you have to do, then, is to delete the old catalog as the new one does not overwrite it.

Needed: Easy downloads off the Gutenberg site

I would strongly urge Project Gutenberg to build a mobile site for Kindle-style machines, if that isn’t already planned—yes, more than just for the Kindle itself. PG seems to be moving in that direction. While cellphones are important, Gutenberg shouldn’t forget owners of Kindles and similar devices. Ideally the post I’m making now will soon be obsolete.

Granted, Sony and other vendors have Google Books ties, but PG is special because volunteers can choose which books to digitize (a plus that I wish Gutenberg would play up more often).

The ePub issue: I would vastly prefer that the existing FreeKindleBooks.org use the ePub standard. But meanwhile TeleRead will continue to serve the here-and-now needs of Kindle owners.

My discussion of The Money Changers: Here, on my Solomon Scandals site. Upton Sinclair’s expose of the financial industry is still terrifyingly timely.

(Updated 10:28 a.m. EST to include Paul’s thoughts.)

Well, the secret is to use the Manage Your Kindle page. At the very least it can send a day’s worth of postings to the app—I don’t know about blog subscriptions on a permanent basis. You might also try this for newspaper and magazines, although there may be problems.

Within the “Manage” page, scroll down until you see the “Deliver to…” options for individual purchases. Go with “Transfer to computer.” When your browser comes up, you’ll probably be on a “downloads” page. Arrange for the file to be saved or sent to your Kindle for PC app.

I tried this with an old Washington Post edition and got an error message, either because this won’t work with the Post and other newspapers or because something had expired. That’s why I don’t know about magazines and newspapers.

The “Deliver to” tweak worked fine with a day of posts from the TeleRead blog subscription, however (except for some weird formatting).

Of course, you could read blogs directly for free with RSS feeds, but for those who prefer the paid subscription approach, maybe the above tip will help. Anything to modify or add?

Related tip—for people wanting to email book to their Kindles: If you’re having trouble getting your Kindle to pick up books mailed to it—including those to be converted from Word, PDF, TXT, etc.—don’t forget to specify your sending address within Manage Your Kindle. Cost per item is 15 cents.

The PC App is free, and people testing it are filling their PC hard drives with dozens of titles from among the 19,890 free book listings in the Kindle Store. Why wouldn’t they?

Of course, they can also use the Kindle for PC app to download thousands of other free books from several other third-party sources, thanks to a new "we play well with others" approach from Amazon. But the Kindle Store is still teeming with traffic from lovers of “free.”

On the Kindle Store’s list of bestselling books—the one that updates hourly and really reflects the comparative velocity of unit sales regardless of price over various recent chunks of time—77 of the top 100 titles were free at one point yesterday or were priced at one cent.

Seventy of the top 81 titles fit one of the free or near-free categories. The number of freebies in the top 100 often hovers around 50 per cent, but 77 per cent of the top 100 and 87 per cent of the top 81 amounted to dramatic new highs. The top 100 bestselling Kindle books included 28 free promotional titles, 47 free public domain titles, one title that was free until yesterday,  one title for a penny, and 23 titles for more than a penny.

Meanwhile, the relative sales rankings of the top-selling paid blogs and periodicals are plummeting, strictly in relative terms (and not, necessarily, in units sold). For instance, the Kindle edition of the Kindle Nation blog, the #1 bestselling paid blog among the 7,453 listed in the Kindle Store, has fallen to an overall multimedia sales ranking of 534 from the 250-to-450 range where it usually hangs out. This is also natural, since blogs and newspapers are not available from within the Kindle for PC App. That may make sense for newspapers, by the way, but why blogs?

None of this is bad for Amazon, the Kindle, the Kindle for PC App, or even for Kindle-available blogs such as Kindle Nation Daily or TeleRead.

There are over a billion PCs in use in the world, and perhaps somewhere between 1.8 million and 2.25 million Kindles. It’s natural to assume that, as word spreads about international (but not universal, right, Canada?) availability of a free Kindle app for the PC, there will be hundreds of thousands of new Kindle readers each day. And this is in addition to many existing Kindle owners who are trying out the additional device.

A natural thing to do, while test-driving the Kindle for PC App before investing much in a library for it, is to scarf up free books. Then, if people like it, they can think about spending actual folding money on a few Kindle books and, perhaps, they might even consider buying a Kindle if the combination of price point and portability work for them.

Anyway you slice it, it seems likely that the number of people reading Kindle content on any kind of device is going to have, at the very least, doubled from Tuesday morning November 10 to, say, December 31, 2009. Sometime between now and Thanksgiving the launch of the Kindle for Mac, Kindle for Blackberry, Kindle for Droid (am I getting ahead of myself) and other Apps will only add fuel to a well-kindled fire. Oops, there’s that word again.

If one out of every 100 PC owners tries the Kindle for PC App, that’s another 10 million people browsing around the Kindle Store. Sooner or later one of them is going to make an actual cash transaction, wouldn’t you think? So the Kindle for PC and all those free Kindle titles are loss leaders, except that since it is all virtual, there is no loss involved.

Let’s pretend your name is Jeff and you want to do a little magical thinking….

If one out of every 50 of those browsers decides to buy a Kindle, that’s 200,000 additional Kindles sold.

And if even half of this comes to pass, authors and publishers will be beating down the door to Kindle publication, and the folks at Barnes & Noble are going to have a new name for Jeffrey P. Bezos.

"Daddy."

Magical thinking?

Maybe not so much.

Editor’s note: Just a reminder that these are Steve’s personal views, adapted with permission from Kindle Nation.  Thanks, Steve! – D.R.

I did on Comcast. Yes, Ondigo, the commercial was horrible but, mercifully, rather forgettable.

Interesting, isn’t it—how Amazon is advertising on the tube, after having focused so much on its Web site and word of mouth.

Hey, I’m not knocking the Kindle in this case, just the over-cute commercial. I found a commercial done on spec (left) to be far more interesting even if it may terrify more than a few Luddites.

What I want from Amazon for the holidays: ePub and more books with no DRM—or how about social DRM as a compromise? Time to be serious about educating publishers? Harlequin’s already getting religion.

So who typically buys dedicated e-readers right now? “…a 47-year-old married man with a college degree and an average household income of $116,000. About 30 percent of e-reader owners use them on business trips, while about 17 percent rely on e-readers during commutes. They read about 3.5 books each month, more than the average Internet user. About 83 percent consider themselves ‘technology optimists.’” The article is rich with other statistics even if we’ve seen a bunch of them before.

Post retail writer Ylan Q. Mui’s article is also notable for the concluding words: "Sony’s Haber argues that if it’s women you’re after, technology is man’s best friend. Pull out a book in a bar and you look lonely. But whip out a Sony Reader and watch the magic happen. "If you want to meet a girl," he says, "don’t get a dog, get a reader." Agree?

An aside: It’s nice to see a Post writer with a decent WordPress site (with help from a friend). I just hope that the Posties’ guidelines don’t inhibit her. They might. The site seems mostly a collection of repros of Post stories. Still, with the articles presented by topic and organized in a certain way, you at least can get a sense of where Ylan Mui is coming from.

Related: The best of today’s e-book readers, in PC World.

Image: CC-licensed photo by Ed Yourdon.

Even so, I remain a gung-ho ePub backer. Publishers such as Hachette will tell you of the economies that ePub has achieved as a distribution format. And if consumers care more about books than about brand names, then they’ll go for ePub, which will increase the number of reading choices. The new Sony wireless reader will eventually let you download from a whole bunch of e-stores. And standards will make that possible. Already many more books exist in the ePub format than the Kindle format, especially with public domain titles included. Just recently, as chronicled by Fran Toolan and picked up by if:book, the Internet Archive announced that all of its 1.6 million books were available in ePub format—ready to be read on anything from a Sony Reader to an iPhone. That’s a proud Brewster Kahle, archive founder, in the photo. At the same time, Google, the archive’s big rival in the public domain area, continues to offer ePub, not just PDF.

Meanwhile Ross Rubin of the NPD consulting group has observed that "It is all but assured that any other major consumer electronics vendor that enters the e-reader market moving forward will support ePUB." Rubin raises the issue of Amazon continuing to sell proprietary-format books even while supporting ePub in its hardware, but I think that in the end standardization could offer too many economies and other advantages for Amazon to resist. Notice how the Sony eBook Store has ditched its proprietary format in favor of ePub? To put it mildly, ePub has already shown up the skeptics and couldn’t be more relevant to the future of the e-book industry.

So why is the Kindle 2 is faring well without ePub? Because Amazon offers good ergonomics and other wrinkles such as wireless downloads and text to speech. And because many consumers and journalists have not yet fully caught on to the follies of proprietary formats. Why should my eternal access to a book—read on machines I buy in the future—depend so heavily on Amazon or its treatment of e-books or me? The more sophisticated e-booklovers become, the more likely they’ll demand ePub, ideally nonDRMed, so they can own ePub books for real.

Let me also add that, regardless of the successes of ePub, it could be faring still better if the big publishers were not such tightwads when it came to supporting the IPDF. I don’t see ePub developing as rapidly as it would, technically and commercially, with proper backing. But perhaps in a sense that’s good news. Imagine what ePub—with such touches as better ePub promo, a logo and reliable interbook linking—could do for e-books. I hear that the IDPF is at work on such matters. Good, as long as it’s less sluggish than about the logo. Go ePub!

Related: Is ePub important for an ereader? Maybe not, says Amazon Kindle Review.

The Rubin-related link: Big thanks, Felix (even if I know we don’t always see eye to eye on format and DRM issues)!

“Kindle for PC features Amazon’s Whispersync technology that automatically saves and synchronizes bookmarks and last page read across devices. Whether you read Kindle books on a Kindle, Kindle DX, or one of the free Kindle applications, you can always have your reading with you and never lose your place. With Kindle for PC, you can read some on your PC, read some on your Kindle, and always pick up right where you left off. Whispersync helped make the Kindle for iPhone application the most popular books app in the Apple App Store.” – News release.

Ahead I’ll reproduce the full release, for convenience’s sake. Download page is here. It isn’t ready yet, alas, but you can sign up for notification. Your thoughts? Hey, didn’t I write earlier this morning that I expected a PC Kindle app—part of Amazon’s efforts to steal some thunder from the Nook?

Unfortunately I don’t see a mention of the ePub standard. Are you or aren’t you doing it, Jeff? Or are you simply trying to get your proprietary format readable on many devices—so you can use the “everywhere” excuse? I’m dlelighted to see the PC version. But don’t stop there. Standards, please!

=========

Introducing "Kindle for PC" — The Free Application for Reading Kindle Books on the PC

Latest Kindle Application Brings over 360,000 Kindle Books, Including New York Times Bestsellers and New Releases, to the PC

SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Oct. 22, 2009– Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced "Kindle for PC," the free application that lets readers around the world enjoy Kindle books on their personal computers (PC). The U.S. Kindle Store (www.amazon.com/kindlestore) currently offers over 360,000 books, including New Releases and 101 of 112 New York Times Bestsellers, which are typically $9.99 or less. The Kindle Store is the only place to find some of the most popular books of today in digital format. Kindle books can now be read on the Kindle, Kindle DX, iPhone, iPod touch, and PC.

Kindle for PC features Amazon’s Whispersync technology that automatically saves and synchronizes bookmarks and last page read across devices. Whether you read Kindle books on a Kindle, Kindle DX, or one of the free Kindle applications, you can always have your reading with you and never lose your place. With Kindle for PC, you can read some on your PC, read some on your Kindle, and always pick up right where you left off. Whispersync helped make the Kindle for iPhone application the most popular books app in the Apple App Store.

"Kindle for PC is the perfect companion application for folks who own a Kindle or Kindle DX," said Ian Freed, Vice President, Amazon Kindle. "Kindle for PC is also a great way for people around the world to read the most popular books of today even if they don’t yet have a Kindle."

With Kindle for PC, readers can take advantage of the following features:

• Purchase, download, and read hundreds of thousands of books available in the Kindle Store
• Access their entire library of previously purchased Kindle books stored on Amazon’s servers for free
• Choose from over 10 different font sizes and adjust words per line
• Add and automatically synchronize bookmarks and last page read
• View notes and highlights marked on Kindle and Kindle DX
• Zoom in and out of text with a pinch of the fingers (Windows 7 users only)
• Turn pages with a finger swipe (available in a future release for Windows 7 users)

Microsoft demonstrated Kindle for PC for the first time ever at the Windows 7 launch event today in New York City. “Customers have told us that they want access to a wider variety of content and an increasingly diverse set of form factors,” said Mike Nash, corporate vice president of Windows Platform Strategy at Microsoft. “With the announcement of Kindle for PC, Amazon is making its massive selection of Kindle books available on the world’s most widely used platform. The new Kindle for PC’s use of Windows 7 features such as Jump Lists and Windows Touch demonstrates how Windows 7 makes new things possible.”

Kindle for PC takes advantage of capabilities in the new Windows 7, including Windows Touch technology. In addition to Windows 7, Kindle for PC will also be compatible with Windows XP and Windows Vista. Kindle for PC will be available to customers around the world as a free download next month. Sign up to receive an email when Kindle for PC is available for download at http://www.amazon.com/KindleforPC.

About Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth’s Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as Books; Movies, Music & Games; Digital Downloads; Electronics & Computers; Home & Garden; Toys, Kids & Baby; Grocery; Apparel; Shoes & Jewelry; Health & Beauty; Sports & Outdoors; and Tools, Auto & Industrial.

Amazon Web Services provides Amazon’s developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon’s own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Examples of the services offered by Amazon Web Services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS), Amazon Mechanical Turk and Amazon CloudFront.

Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.com,www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, and www.amazon.cn. As used herein, “Amazon.com,” “we,” “our” and similar terms include Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

Forward-Looking Statements

This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ significantly from management’s expectations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others, risks related to competition, management of growth, new products, services and technologies, potential fluctuations in operating results, international expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center optimization, seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategic transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption, indebtedness, inventory, government regulation and taxation, payments and fraud. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com’s financial results is included in Amazon.com’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings.

A message in Kindle for iPhone 1.2, also for Apple’s iPod Touch, says:

“With Kindle for iPhone 1.2, you can now tap and hold a word to create a note or highlight. Whispersync will back up and synchronize annotations with your Kindle device.”

The update also will recall, from session to session, whether you last used the iPhone app in  landscape or portrait mode.

The TeleRead take: BookServer, from Archive founder Brewster Kahle (photo) and colleagues, is a worthy project. I don’t want any company, Amazon or Google, to dominate book distribution.

Even so, the Archive will have to work hard to equal Amazon’s interface and its rich collection of customer-written reviews. Here’s an example of the issues at hand. Will BookServer capabilities be built into hardware e-readers, so to speak, the way the Amazon catalogue is part of the Kindle? Update, 12:32 p.m.: The existence of an RSS-style spec (draft here) is a good start, but that’s still not a full solution.

Might an Archive collaboration be possible with OpenInkpot—which provides software for users to install on dedicated e-reading devices? Imagine manufacturers including OpenInkpot from the start. Jeez, Brewster, you need to think more about the user experience—whether the device is an E Ink tablet, a commercial netbook, an OLPC laptop or regular desktop. This could mean anything from OpenInkpot to browser-plug-ins to dedicated apps.

There’s also the pesky DRM question. Will the master searcher provide detailed rights information, and what if publishers insist on DRM, which is anathema to Brewster? How to handle server-dependent DRM, or will such file be hosted on publisher sites?

On top of everything else, at least for now, there’s the downloading speed issue. When I tried to download an ePub file of a Dickens collection I found via the BookServe search box, it was taking forever. This was on an Archive server. What about files hosted on publisher servers, over which Brewster has no control?

I’d urge publishers to try BookServer, just as O’Reilly and Feedbooks are; but it would appear that this project is still very much in beta stage.

At this point, as I see it, the Kindle is better suited for enjoying novels—straight-through, linear reads—as opposed to textbook use. I’m rooting for better technology to change that.

More encouragingly, as documented by PrimeImageMedia, someone thinks the DX make a cool teleprompter.

“On Monday, the Kindle 2 will become the first e-reader available globally. The only other events as important to the history of the book are the birth of print and the shift from the scroll to bound pages. The e-reader, now widely available, will likely change our thinking and our being as profoundly as the two previous pre-digital manifestations of text.”

So writes Esquire’s pop critic, Stephen Marche, in the Wall Street Journal. This isn’t satire, but rather his serious opinion.

In real life, Kindle owners like Affiliate, seen in the Creative Commons photo above, would probably express enthusiasm but show far more commonsense and restraint. Here’s my own take on the Kindle 2. It comes away a number of negatives: onerous Digital Rights Management, focus on a proprietary format, high price, less than perfect contrast between text and the screen background. I myself took great pleasure in knocking the original Kindle (right photo below) for its adding-machine looks and ergonomic challenges such as hair-trigger page controls. What’s more, Amazon needs to treat writers and publishers better—much better.

That said, I’m pleased to give the Kindle 2 (left) its due. The positives:

1. The hair-trigger problem is gone and page turning controls are mostly just where I’d want them—in fact, better positioned than those on various Sony Reader models. While my fingers are over the controls, I feel as if the 10-ounce weight is distributed well. I like the controls off to the side rather than on the the bottom (or present in the form of minuscule buttons). One improvement for me would be to put both the previous-page and next-page controls on the same side.

2. A simple unofficial font hack for the Kindle 2 can now helps with the contrast problem by making the characters bolder. Hacks exist for the Sony Reader—I haven’t tried them. But the Kindle hack seems the easiest.

3. The text-to-speech capability is great for walking or other forms of exercise, or in the future for long drives. Shame on Amazon for knuckling under to misguided publishers, when TTS is one of the 2’s best features. This feature will boost e-book sales to the point where the increased revenue will more than compensate for lost audio book sales.

4. Amazon’s prices and book selections could be better—but remain competitive. This may not be true in the future if the company keeps walling itself off from the ePub world. More and more publishers will focus on the ePub format if current trends hold up. Jeff Bezos has hinted the the company might do ePub; time for a little action.

5. I love the dictionary, even though it would be wonderful if I could simply use a stylus to point at the appropriate word.

6. My most-often used reader remains my iPod Touch, but at least now I can use the K2’s synching feature to keep my place in a book while going back and fourth between machines. WhisperSynch isn’t perfect, sometimes it loses track of where I am, but it is a good start. Believe me, the IDPF or someone else needs to come up with an inter-device page-synching standard that would work across a number of brands. It should even coordinate text and audio books (yes, real audio books, as opposed to those created in effect by text to speech).

As for the aesthetics, the adding machine look is gone, though it would be nice for the case to be darker, which, as others have noted, would improve the perceived contrast.

Hey, I call ‘em as I see ‘em. I can’t wait to see what Amazon does with future Kindles—starting, I’d hope, with the inclusion of ePub.

(Gushy WSJ article via Kindle Review.)