After reading the New York Times Article today on Amazon Kindle - Amazon Reading Device Doesn’t Need Computer along with Conversation Agent's Dead or Alive, Amazon (re)Kindle(s) Book Reading I decided Amazon Kindle will be good for certain types of activities, mainly students or people that have to carry around a lot of books.  Kindle could also benefit travelers, especially if it's easy to update information as your traveling - or wherever you are.

Maybe the only thing I'd like to see added to Amazon Kindle is the ability to process text between books in order to find related information. 

For example, if your a pre-med student and bought all your textbooks on Kindle (and that drives down the prices of the reading material somewhat) and there was some information in more than one book - I'd like the ability to bring up multiple instances of similar information to compare them.

I'm also thinking that most blog publishers, including my own, Know More Media, ought to be thinking about a blog publishing strategy that includes Amazon Kindle; according to the New York Times article:

"…Kindle will also download and display newspapers, magazines and blogs. Among the newspapers available are The New York Times for $13.99 a month and The Wall Street Journal for $9.99 a month. Some 300 blogs are available for 99 cents or $1.99 a month. Amazon shares some of that fee with newspaper and blog publishers. The device will only be available at Amazon. "

I think Amazon Kindle has the ability to spawn entire new industries while revitalizing others - but only if there's enough of an adoption.  For example, I'd lower the price to $199.00 and offer storage for 100 books rather than 200 books - hardly anyone can process 200 books at any one time - why not lower the price if you don't need that much storage?

Conversation Agent suggests that while Amazon Kindle will change the way we read, will we read more?  But also, do we need, yet another reading device when the one's we own can do the job?

"..If reading where truly a service, and not a fashion object like the iPod, wouldn't we be able to download the software online onto our existing devices? What's the advantage of owning and carrying another one for this price? Help me out here, maybe I'm not seeing something you are. I agree that we're already reading a lot on screen, that being able to download books and link through them would be great (here's a review by Steven Levy). Book reading has had some form of serious decline probably because we already spend so much time reading a lot of other material. Will the Kindle rekindle book reading? "

OK, I have an iPod Touch now, but would I want to read War and Peace on it?  I have several laptops I could use - do I want to read long books on them?  No. 

Whatever I come up with to read, better make it easier for me to read a lot of material than what I have now - and I think Amazon Kindle does that, and doesn't need to hook up to a computer because it is a computer and has wireless access.

Why carry a bunch of reading material around when you can carry a tablet that's less than 1 pound.  It's also great for the environment - cutting down on using natural resources for producing paper and cutting down on production costs in terms of labor and transportation.

Chances are, reading material in Kindle will promote reading "snippets" of text over the entire book(s) - but that's the nature of what we're evolving to.  Look at what's happening with Twitter, Facebook, Mobile Communications in general, all of it being focused on small amounts of information transmitted frequently, or as needed.

I find it easier to process snippets of information and read large tracts of text - I think blog posts are often better when not too long - but that's just me, and this is one of my longer posts.