I installed the Kindle reader on my iPod touch this morning, and
logged in to their Kindle Store via the web and bought two books,
Stephen King's UR and William Gibson's Neuromancer. I'm a huge fan of
King and this book was the only mass market book by him I didn't have
yet (it's a Kindle exclusive, and is sorta about a Kindle like device)
and have always intended to finish reading Neuromancer, which I
started reading back in the 90s and never finished. Neuromancer is
the book that coined the term Cyberspace, and the genre it created
spawned things like The Matrix and Johnny Mnemonic. The interface is
not bad, but I don't know how long I could stare at the device without
a break. I also don't like that you have to go to a web browser to
buy new books, it's a total fail to not be able to buy new books with
Amazon one click inside the app itself. Perhaps in Rev 2.0... Also
the books are all DRM wrapped which sucks, but there are thousands of
public domain classic books also available which is nice. I approach
this the same way I did iTunes: Lets see the vendors make a great
experience and trust that the rights stuff will all work out in the
end. It worked for music, I can now get all DRM free music from
Amazon and Apple, it's only a matter of time before that happens with
Books and Movies too. Apple sucks in that they want several hundred
bucks from me to 'upgrade' my iTunes tracks to DRM free and doesn't
make an easy interface for me to pick and choose which ones that might
actually be worth it for me to do so on, but that's a story for
another day.
I also haven't checked out Stanza, but I will install that later today.
Also, a few books I wanted to buy on Kindle weren't available for the
device yet. I've heard interesting things about David Foster
Wallace's 'Infinite Jest' but that one isn't in the store yet for
whatever reason.
Speaking of the iPod Touch: If you own one (or the iPhone) and want
to try an amazing but HARD game, spend the 99 cents and download a
game called geoDefense. It's a vector based Tower Defense game that
is like a combination of Chess, Tower Defense, and Asteroids. No
playing in class! =)
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