Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

Let’s start, as usual, with the free book in the kindle store -

1. Executive Privilege by Phillip Margolin. It’s a suspense thriller and it sounds really good -
   

   When private detective Dana Cutler is hired to follow college student Charlotte Walsh, she never imagines the trail will lead to the White House. But the morning after Walsh’s clandestine meeting with Christopher Farrington, President of the United States, the pretty young coed is dead – the latest victim, apparently, of a fiend dubbed “the D.C. Ripper.”

   A junior associate in an Oregon law firm, Brad Miller is stunned by the death row revelations of convicted serial killer Clarence Little. Though Little accepts responsibility for a string of gruesome murders, he swears he was framed for one of them: the death of a teenaged babysitter who worked for then-governor Farrington.

The cover layout and design is quite similar to Shadow of Power by Steve Martini (also free) and it took me a while to convince myself it’s a different book.

Kindle to be available in all Target Stores starting June 6th

Andrys at Kindle World brings us news that Kindle will arrive at all Target Locations on June 6th. It must have been a very good trial run for Target to decide to expand to all stores this quickly. Perhaps it was planned all along.

The news of Kindle’s Target expansion was first reported by Reuters -

It is also set to offer Amazon.com Inc’s (AMZN.O) Kindle in all of its stores on June 6, the lone bricks-and-mortar retailer to offer the top-selling product in the growing electronic-reader market.

If the expansion is fuelled by strong sales in the pilot stores then Amazon certainly cherry picked their stores. South Florida would be the perfect place to sell Kindles. It’ll be interesting to see what happens once sales have expanded to all Target Stores.

Are $0 apps and $0 books judged more harshly than higher priced equivalents?

It’s difficult to do an actual comparison for the Kindle Store -

1. Book prices fluctuate so there’s no way to know whether a review came in when the book was $0 or when it was $9. 
2. Public domain books often get bad ratings for the lack of good formatting.
3. Indie authors tend to get generous reviews (at least it seems that way to me).

However, for the iTunes App Store it’s easy to see the difference in reviews and ratings between free and paid apps. In fact, it’s pretty surprising - nearly every free app gets mostly 2 star and 3 star ratings.

People seem to have higher expectations from free apps than from paid apps. Perhaps it’s a case of people not valuing apps they don’t pay for and therefore dismissing them quickly and giving an average rating. Perhaps it’s that when an app is free lots of people who wouldn’t normally be interested in it download it just to see what it’s like and then obviously don’t like it.

What’s the probability you break your Kindle if you drop it?

At the official kindle forum someone was talking about dropping the Kindle twice on the same day and it surviving. Have had a drop or two myself.

Would be interesting if there were statistics – Average number of times people have dropped their Kindle. For people who broke their Kindle was it usually the 1st drop? Perhaps it’s usually the 3rd drop that’s the killer. Probability of breaking the Kindle as height changes.

Business School Kindle test says its great for personal reading, terrible for school

Ars Technica reveals what Darden Business School students in the Kindle DX University trials think of the Kindle DX -

1. 75% to 80% of students would not recommend the Kindle DX to incoming MBA students. 
2. 90% to 95% of them would recommend it to incoming students as a personal reading device.

Guess this is what happens when you pretend a dedicated reading device is a dedicated textbook device.

You also have to wonder about the relative placement of those questions. If a lot of students have just said No to Kindle DX as textbook reader they might feel the need to balance things out and recommend it as a reading device. Which would mean the actual percentage of students recommending Kindle DX for personal reading would be more around 75%. This only applies if the Kindle DX for personal reading question was immediately after the Kindle DX as textbook reader question (or soon after).

Plastic Logic probably never heard of ‘Under Promise and Over Deliver’

After making us wait a year and a half for a device that hasn’t yet materialized, Plastic Logic are back to making huge promises (courtesy Electronic Weekly) -

Plastic Logic aims to have a manufacturable colour display by the end of 2011 and to move it into volume production in 2012, according to Achim Neu, Director SCM, at Plastic Logic …

“We have built a colour display and it is working at our Cambridge laboratory”, Neu told the conference …

You’d be hard pressed to believe this is the same company that has just delayed their black and white Que – a device that was originally announced 1.5 years ago.

Dear Plastic Logic, Could you please release the black and white $649 Que Reader before you start talking about having a working color version in the Cambridge Lab.

Closing Thought

All the latest Facebook and Apple-Adobe drama is really surprising. Adobe’s founders or principals (or whatever fancy term they have) wrote a letter talking about the importance of openness. That’s rather hypocritical considering Adobe documents can’t be edited unless you buy their software.

Then you supposedly have IMs from 6 years ago that show Facebook’s founder offered user data to his friends and called users at Harvard who trusted him dumb and other 4 letter words. If it’s true then it would certainly go with Facebook’s attempts to offer users’ data to his new friends (advertisers etc.) and treat his (its?) users as if they were dumb.  

People are still not ready to accept the truth that every single company cares a lot about money and profit – more than they do about people. It’s much easier to cling to the fairy tale that Internet companies are ‘good’ and would never become ‘SkyNet’ or ‘Evil’.

Facebook’s founder is in hot water because someone saved an IM exchange for 6 years?

The irony is delicious. The guy who’s claiming that there’s no danger in opening up your information to the world just lost most of his and his company’s credibility due to sharing too much over instant messenger.

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