All Kindle, All the Time

Thibaut Sailly at well... has my favorite post yet on the Amazon Kindle e-book reader. After highlighting the stylistic tics and missed opportunities of the existing reader, Sailly makes an astonishingly sensible wishlist for the electronic reader of the future, including a protective booklike cover (w/ matching color and casing), streamlining of any design features that distract from the text, and waterproofing.

No crazy pie-in-the-sky prognosticating, half-baked futurism/conservatism, idiosyncratic enthusiasms, or poorly motivated kvetching. Just simple ideas to make reading a doc better.

The best part: there's a sketch!



It's so lo-fi. I love it.

Anyways, just wrapping things up. I will post later about the unacceptable abuse of poetry
by the Kindle (the formatting needs a left-flushed line). And also about how maybe the best test for an e-document reader isn't how it handles a Dickens novel, but a take-out menu, a political pamphlet, and a crossword puzzle.

The only other turkey-addled thoughts I've had is that the only possible advantages I can see to a dedicated book reader, as opposed to a more versatile handheld computer like the iPhone, are

1) Battery life (iPods and laptops gobble them up)
2) Viewing angle (again, they suck on computers)
3) In principle, waterproofing.

More later.