The Amazon Kindle: The Edsel of the Internet Age

And, as much as I'd like a good e-reader, this doesn't look like this is it. But Amazon is going to push it hard.

Talk about the Edsel of e-book readers. The Amazon Kindle is Amazon's first hardware product, their first real product launch, and it looks, uh, bulky and wonky and . . . I don't think so.

It's got great features--more than Sony's somewhat more attractive and less bulky, but still not quite "there" e-book reader--but it's both uglier and $100 more. For an e-book reader. Wireless? Cool. The ability to subscribe to RSS feeds (but only ones that cost money? Is that right?) . . . and qualified "cool". Amazon.com intergration? Pretty groovy. Tons of titles in the Kindle format, and books in the Kindle format are attractively priced. All good.

But Fake Steve Jobs sums up the problems, and the probable flop that version 1.0 of the Amazon e-book reader will be, in this blog post. Gotta love Fake Steve.

As Fake Steve says:

Amazonians, remember this: people have to put these things in their homes! It's called design. Have you heard of it? Apparently my dear friend Jeff Bezos hasn't.

Here's hoping that Kindle becomes what it oughta be with version 2.0.

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Forbes has a pretty comprehensive article on the Kindle here.