Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

The Kindle Store just added a free book -

• The Twelve Sacred Traditions of Magnificent Mothers-in-Law by Jaywood Smith. It’s rated 5 stars on 5 reviews.

Here’s a snippet of the product description -

A very Southern mother-in-law’s humorous advice to mothers-in-law everywhere. From the multiple New York Times bestselling author of The Red Hat Club.

Bestselling author Haywood Smith and her pals have lots of personal experience in the joys, sorrows, pitfalls and flat-out hysteria of Mother-in-Lawness.

Now Smith offers a handy and fun booklet of pithy advice to mothers-in-law everywhere. Smiths sassy observations and gentle wisdom are delivered with her trademark southern charm, packing the sweet, heady punch of bourbon ice cubes melting in a mint julep.

What’s happened to TeleRead?

Apparently TeleRead now has a New York Editor and he thinks a ZDNet post titled iPad killed Kindlenomics is excellent.

By a random coincidence its the exact same post that I didn’t write about last night because it’s really, really negative and makes the most random assumptions. 

Well, let’s see what the new TeleRead NY editor considers ‘a really smart, incisive look at things’ –

• The post starts off with an image of a tombstone that has amazon kindle engraved on it and 2007-2010 as the lifetime. It’s a bit corny and makes you wonder if the post has had more thought put into it than the hastily photoshopped image. 
• ‘Faced with inexpensive, multipurpose tablets like the iPad’ – Wait a minute. How is $499 inexpensive when compared to the Nook and Kindle’s $259?
• Random assumption – There’s probably a very small group of people who want eInk around.
• Random assumption – Kindle DX price has to drop by $100 and Kindle 2 price has to drop to $199.
• Random assumption – iPad is going to have a little brother that will compete with Kindle and sell for $349.
• Most Random Assumption - $200 to $300 dual-mode Android tablets will force Amazon to drop Kindle price to $100 to $125.
• Bold Prediction – Facing such extreme competition Kindle and Sony Reader and Nook will be extinct by 2011.

ZDNet’s user comments vary from the unrealistic -

A more correct retail price point for the e-book devices should be $50. And they should add the capabilities of an HP iPaq 210, including the color screen.

The second issue i ran into was the light weight of the Kindle.

To the rational -

All these columnists seem to have one thing in common – they have no idea of the pleasure of reading for its own sake.

I’m getting pretty irritated with people who never liked something telling the rest of us that we shouldn’t like what we want, because something else will do something entirely different better.

It’s also interesting to see one anti-eReader person comment that eReaders should move to $50 and then another anti-eReader person comment that they wouldn’t buy it even at that price because they can read magazines for free with the iPad.

It goes to show that a lot of the people saying a Kindle should be $50 are the exact same people who are not going to ever buy it. There are more than enough people buying eReaders at $259 - A $499 iPad that is not optimized for reading isn’t going to kill the Kindle or even the Nook or Sony Reader.

Don’t know when TeleRead became TeleMoreThanRead. It’s almost comical that an ebook blog doesn’t get that people buy eReaders because they want to ‘read’.

Common Traits of iPad will kill the Kindle posts

Every ‘iPad will kill the Kindle’ post seems to use the same few tricks -

1. Compare the iPad with the Kindle DX but then apply that analysis to Kindles in general. 
2. Not mention eInk or write ‘you can’t read eInk in the dark’. Not mention reading in sunlight.
3. Bring up one or both of - ‘only thing you can do on them is read’, ‘eReaders ought to be $100′.
4. Forget to compare battery life.
5. Never mention free Wikipedia and Internet access. Never mention the price of the iPad’s 3G plans.
6. Predict the extinction of dedicated eReaders by 2011 or 2012.
7. Throw in ‘openness’ and Android and vague references to Android powered magical devices.

You almost imagine that all the blogs outsource the writing of these anti-Kindle articles to the exact same vengeful mystery man whose father was killed in an accident in a Kindle factory.

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