I was very intrigued by Amazon’s new eBook reader when I first heard about it. I’ve played around with the Sony Reader, and it just seemed like the Kindle had a more refined implementation. E-ink is a fantastic technology - you’ve really got to see one of these displays in person to understand just how readable they are. With its incredibly low battery consumption, I figured the Kindle would be a great device to bring along my tour of the world.
Unfortunately, my enthusiasm quickly died out when I perused the catalog of content available in the Amazon’s proprietary format. Not a single travel guide is available for the device. No Rough Guide or Lonely Planet or Let’s Go. I’ll be traveling through at least 10 different countries next year, and the greatest benefit I would’ve gotten from the Kindle is not having to lug fat guide books from place to place.
Extrapolating from this, the Kindle’s usefulness is directly proportional to the amount of content you need to carry. What I’ve seen thus far from their catalog is a heavy emphasis on novels and non-fiction best sellers. Yet the largest/heaviest pieces of content are reference materials. In this instance, I define reference materials as content which you don’t consume end to end and might not use that often, but when you do need it, its an immediate need.
There are dictionaries and the like available, but I’m talking about a broader set. Travel guides fall into this category, but so do textbooks. My brother is a med student, and he’s regularly forced to carry back-breaking loads of anatomy and orgo books across campus. Imagine how grateful he would be to instead carry a single 10 oz device complete with keyword searching?
Kindle itself is a compelling device, but there are definitely some missed opportunities that Amazon needs to capitalize on. For Amazon, being the content king that it is, there’s simply no excuse for anything less than a complete catalog.