Why Not the Kindle 2?
Until the Kindle 3 (Amazon doesn’t call it a Kindle 3, but for the purposes of brevity and clarity in this article I will), I had never really closely examined what kept me from buying a Kindle device. On the other hand, I’m usually quite the fan of uni-tasking items: generally, I like devices that do what they do well and don’t try to do things they don’t do well. It certainly wasn’t the limited functionality of an e-book reader that kept me from buying one. Remarkably, with the latest Kindle, Amazon seems to have telepathically plucked most of those concerns, even the unconscious and subconscious ones, from my mind and addressed them. (A few, mainly regarding the reading experience, I addressed myself by examining other devices in person.) On examination of the Kindle 3 release, what kept me from buying a Kindle 2 were three things: pricing, the reading experience (or my uncertainty regarding it), and the overall aesthetics of the device (and, to a lesser extent, the role the keyboar
