Kabuki bought me a Kindle for xmas this year. I know it’s not xmas yet but she’s been generous enough to let me use my present early and early indications are that this is a great little device. I guess with less than 24 hours behind the wheel I shouldn’t be too definitive in my praise but the text is very clear and comfortable to read (it really does feel like ink on a page), the convenience of free wireless downloads is really nice particularly when it comes to reading magazines or newspapers, and the one criticism I’d heard in the past – that the screen refreshes were very slow – is much, much better than I had expected. My one gripe? European pricing and restrictions relative to US. For instance, newspapers are at least twice as expensive! These kind of price points really raise questions on value for money. Furthermore the network deal that Amazon has for non-US countries is apparently much more expensive and therefore they have blocked access to the built-in browser and blog access. The former I could probably have lived without but the latter would have been a really nice benefit. For those interested, I found a good summary of some these differences here: Amazon Extends Kindle Beyond United States.

I guess e-books are still in their infancy and with the introduction of the Barnes and Noble Nook and looming Apple Tablet there threatens to be far greater competition coming which should be good for consumers both in the feature and pricing department. I’ll look forward to that as I don’t think today’s prices will allow me to subscribe to the amount of newspaper content I’d like to. The one worry I have right now is that Apple, Amazon, and B&N are US companies and will naturally favour US markets over EU markets. Sony, the other e-book reader, is also likely to focus on the scale of the US market first too. I guess the EU will have to continue to live off of hand-me-downs until one of the parties decides to really go after the EU market share.