Quote:
Originally Posted by acidzebra
Perhaps the Kindle users will be the type that want to press a button, get a book over EVDO, and see the automatic charges on your credit card. No muss, no fuss.
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My decision to buy the Kindle was driven mostly by features like book search, dictionary lookup and annotation. If Sony had those, I would've had one long before the Kindle came out. I was considering the Cybook because it at least had dictionary lookup. I was hoping they'd expand it to full content search eventually. Aside from adding Web & Wikipedia to search capabilities, the wireless thing was a big ho hum for me. Now that I have the Kindle and have experienced how nifty the store is, I think it's great but I would've bought the Kindle even if I had to download stuff to my computer like all the others. I'm a geek. I like to tinker. I'm certainly not afraid of the big bad USB cable. I'm sure the Kindle also appeals to those that are, but it's not necessarily the driving factor.
The reason the Whispernet download thing is so cool for me is the samples. When I hear about a book I might like, I click one button to send myself the sample. Later on when I feel like it, I give it a read. If I like it, I click on a link at the end and I have the rest of the book in seconds. It doesn't break the rhythm of the reading that much. I don't need to put down my cup of tea or dislodge the cat. It doesn't matter if I'm out at a cafe or on the train. The alternative to this would be buying books ahead of time. I know from experience that I'm not exactly the world's greatest at figuring out what I'm going to want to read a week from now. I have a lot of unread books because of this. I have probably paid for the Kindle in what I've saved not buying books I either didn't like enough to finish or never even got around to reading. I'm fickle. My fancy for a book often passed before I even opened it. Big waste of money and paper.