— unpredictable thoughts

Amazon.com: Kin­dle: Amazon’s New Wire­less Read­ing Device: Kin­dle Store

Rea­son one. Excuse me but why would I want some­thing that looks like a cal­cu­la­tor to read a book instead of a book? Can’t think of a rea­son why. I also think that the folks Ama­zon seeded these devices to won­dered why too. (Although it appears they put all the pos­i­tive reviews up first) If you look at their web­site there are 505 cus­tomer reviews and the device has barely crept above 2 and, is that a half, stars. Only 97 peo­ple give it 5 stars. That’s the peo­ple that were inter­ested enough to beta test.

Rea­son two. Just because you sell books doesn’t mean you under­stand books. Ama­zon isn’t a book­store they are a dis­tri­b­u­tion center.

Rea­son three. Phys­i­cal­ity mat­ters. You can’t pass a book you read on to some­one else. You can’t take it to a book trader or used book­store. You can’t use it to hold your ticket on the train while you wait for the conductor.

Rea­son four. Peo­ple that pro­vide read­ing mate­r­ial call them­selves con­tent part­ners.

Rea­son five. Dumb name. Ever heard of kin­dling? Do you want to start a fire with an e-book? Wrong metaphor.

Rea­son six. Why pay for access to things you already get for free or through your cur­rent isp?

Rea­son seven. A book is about its cover, paper, type­face, and illus­tra­tions — they are part of the expe­ri­ence. If not all books could have a black cover and be the same text face using the same illustrator.

Rea­son eight. How many books could you buy for 400 dollars?

Rea­son nine. I own my books and I have access to them indefinitely.

Rea­son ten. The elec­tronic prod­uct isn’t cheaper than the phys­i­cal product.

Rea­son eleven. The old­style books were wire­less from the begininng and still are.

Rea­son twelve. UGLY.

I love good tech­nol­ogy. I love good design. I think that the need for devices that allow the reader to change the con­trast of the page and the size of the type are needed. I’m wait­ing for some­one smarter to make a smarter device. This isn’t the device to make me an early adopter and I love the bleed­ing edge.

I’m going to head over to Joseph Fox Book­sellers and buy a real book.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: kin­dle, books, read­ing, tech­nol­ogy, ama­zon, e-books,

I have been fol­low­ing the trip of two friends at their web­site : seek­ing texas. Shortly into the trip they men­tioned a land­ing spot Marfa, TX. I decided to take a vir­tual voy­age there. First, I went to google maps and searched for the city.  You can check it out here: google map. This is what my first view of Marfa looked like:

Not much con­text eh? Ok lets step back a bit and look again.

Does that give you a bet­ter idea? I also searched for the town on the web. I found this web­site which enlight­ened my per­spec­tive even more.  From the website:

Where is Marfa?

Marfa, Texas is a small town in the moun­tain­ous Trans-Pecos region of South­west Texas. The Trans-Pecos is con­sid­ered all ter­ri­tory lying west of the Pecos River and east from the bor­der of New Mex­ico down to the con­flu­ence of the Pecos and Rio Grande River. Located equal dis­tance from the major cities of El Paso (189 miles to the north­west) and Mid­land (188 miles to the north­east), Marfa is an incor­po­rated town in the county of Pre­sidio, edg­ing the Mex­i­can Bor­der by the town of Oji­naga 60 miles to the south­east, Jeff Davis County on the north and Brew­ster County on the east.

Now I know a lit­tle bit more. It’s near Big Bend. I’ve always wanted to take a camp­ing trip there. But I would actu­ally have to go back to Texas. Hmm. I’ll be check­ing out their next land­ing pad soon.

Marfa
now has a pop­u­la­tion of around 2400. The largest employ­ers are the
Bor­der Patrol, the U.S. Depart­ment of Immi­gra­tion and Nat­u­ral­iza­tion
and U.S. Cus­toms. As Marfa is the seat of gov­ern­ment for Pre­sidio
County, a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of res­i­dents are employed through the
county offices.

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Tags: texas, travel, voyeur, Marfa, friends on the road, roadtrip