Looks like the perfect prop for the next Start Trek convention.

DeadWriter

the next "biege" Kindle with a two...would make great kindle for my um fireplace..well my Virtual fireplace(fireplaces are so outdated)

wilkart

It is absurdly out of date looking but it feels great in the hand and is very nice to read.

Modano

Bezos better put a color screen in the Kindle 2

pdditty

OMG!!! This looks so crappy !!!

prouted

That picture is of the thing that'll deactivate the security thingie inside your Kindle's box...right?

@freakshow1: The boyfriend of a Birbiedle?

You know, Kin and Birbie?

strider_mt2k

Is that the next iPhone?

Oracle989

What is a Kindle?

freakshow1

Is that it? The 80's looking thing in the picture?

They seriously need a product designer, and a UI designer, and......

MINI Driver

The beatings will continue until you buy our product.

heroineworshipper

Maybe they'll follow the iPhone and make it available in Canada.. Not that I would buy or could afford one.

ethanlechcharles

@marcsiry: whoops. you type too fast.

Jomolungma

is it supposed to be as thin as a piece of paper too? or just 8 1/2 x 11?

Jomolungma

The dimensions of a piece of loose leaf paper? That's pretty dang thin!

marcsiry

The kindle is awesome on many levels but suffers from basic design 101. I can't tell you how many times i've accidentally flipped a page due to the idiotic way the buttons were designed. Hopefully they hired someone from apple or at least dell to help with design. Saying that - physical books are dead people...

regexp

Any chance 2.0 will be labeled "Now, with less ugly!"?

FredicvsMaximvs

Bring it to Canada! Please!!!!!!! I'll buy one for every member of my family!

dlomax

Great! Now more, younger, hipper people can not buy this piece of useless technology for new, lower prices.

Pope John Peeps II

Agreed, this thing is a tacky looking contraption. But before a sleek design I'd rather see a writing option available. It would be cool to have this thing replace my textbooks and leisure books, but I ravage their pages with chicken-scratchings and would need an option to make notes, underline, draw pictures, etc, before it could replace them completely. Oh my God it could even double as a generic notepad! Quick, somebody, promote me to project manager!

coketown

I can't wait until they hack this thing for free, tethered EVDO.

markarian

Could the next rev NOT be a ugly, difficult to use, klutzy, piece of shit? I mean seriously, look at that thing.

duffyanneal killed WALL-E

When it is in color, or at least has images and cheap textbooks, I'm in.

[chirp]

bobpence

Wait this rumor has to be bullshit. Since when do young people read? They should make it beige for the geriatrics who are their target market!

Noobs-R-Us

kindle needs a total facelift.
get j. ives on that thing.

extraextra

no don't look at that thing because they've changed the stupid photo after the fact...again.

What gives?

strider_mt2k

Nick Hornby said it best, and recently:

there didn't seem to be too much interest in the 400 quid ebook reader; what was striking, though, was that there didn't seem to be too much interest in the four quid books, either.

Attempting to sell people something for £400 that merely enables them to read something that they won't buy at one hundredth of the price seems to me a thankless task.

[entertainment.timesonline.co.uk]

This is simply a ridiculous product. I cannot imagine any actual reader, any student of literature, who would actually want this.

If the 2nd gen were 40 or 50 bucks then maybe... MAYBE.

Pope John Peeps II

You could never use one of these on a plane without people thinking you have special needs...

acurrie

To those who say that the Kindle is "ugly" and "unfunctional". I'm a very, very happy Kindle owner. Part of how it was designed, it's supposed to disappear in your hands, it's supposed to be a near book analog. I don't think it's klutzy at all, in fact it's very simple to use, and works very well for what it was made for. I, for one, love it that they didn't try to cram everything under the sun into it. It, indeed, is the favorite of all my gadgets.

mewyn dyner

That device is so pathetic! The keys are like a mine-field... You read in bed and you just can't hold the thing without skipping pages etc.... A total disaster. The industrial design kills what could have been interesting!

altus

Please hire someone to do some actual industrial design and not just have an accountant and an engineer have a crack at designing it mmk?

NeoXY

Once upon a time I had a Rocket E-Book reader. It was 1999. I read it at dinner in a restaurant. "What's that?" asked the waitress. "It's an electronic book reader," I told her proudly. "It's really neat." She looked at it over my shoulder for a few minutes and watched me turn the page. "How do you get the book in there?" she asked. "You download it." "No," she said, "I mean, where does it open up so you can put the book in it? I don't see how it would fit." True story.

himself

i just bought a kindle...maybe i should return it now...october isnt that far away

personally i think that the kindle is great for things like newspapers since it gets internet for free (why in gods name doesnt sprint sell that form of internet as a service!?! i would totally pay for a signal like that for say 100 bucks a year) but is crap for books...its too easy to hit the buttons and go to the net page...and you cant really grasp it either without hitting the other button. i may be an XO-1 freak/lover but that aside, i really do think the XO-1 beats the kindle in terms of ease in reading, simply because of its design. all it basically is is a screen with a wide frame that mades it easy to grip, a scroll button, and a gamepad which allows you to go to either the top or botton of the page. i really hope this changes in the kindle 2. i would like to have more free realestate to grip onto rather than dancing around the buttons trying not to hit any of them (am i the only one having this problem?)

jrghoull

It has some great potential in comic or manga reading.

trailingedge

If you're complaining that the kindle is "ugly," please realize that fancier/sleeker designs cost more money, as the designers of fancy/sleek things charge more.

It is valid to complain about design flaws that inhibit functionality, but calling something "ugly" or "outdated looking" really just says that you want the object to be a status symbol. (cough...$600 original iPhone...cough). There are those among us who want a functional device at a reasonable price and don't want to pay extra for an artistic button layout and a chrome finish.

EQC

I like books. Paper books.

Jeffrey Powers - Geekazine

@Jeffrey Powers - Geekazine: I know, right, those things get crazy battery life.

Oracle989

OK. So we have version 2 of the book. Another better book that has batteries that can run out.
Something is wrong here on a very, very fundamental level.

Rustydog

I hope Kindle 2 comes before the end of the year. I was planning on buying a Kindle in September or October, but if the second generation model is coming, I'll hold off.

Personally I don't understand why anyone dislikes the Kindle. It represents exactly what I've been waiting for since I was young. I want the ability to carry around several books at once in a tiny device, rather than literally lugging around several books at once in something like a backpack. I want to be able to download newspapers and magazines into one device instead of getting a bunch delivered to my mailbox that I'll eventually have to recycle. Everything about the Kindle appeals to the futurist in me.

Barion

Hopefully, there will be a much lower price point involved. I can't really see using this as a replacement device until it's less cost prohibitive.

toolverine

The kindle is fantastic, unbelievable. I'm a gamer, I follow Kotaku like it's about to go out of style, I could barely read a novel once every 1.5 years, now I've read two in the past month. The kindle is really what you gadety people need to sway yourselves into reading more, it really is great.

*sighs* Anyone that is complaining about the look is just simply too picky, the look is fine, minimilistic. You're reading a damn book, not trying to draw attention to yourself.

If you're complaining about accidently pressing the buttons, you're doing it wrong. Put the book in the leather binding, and you wont press the button. Put the screen saver on so the button doesn't accidently press when you put it away. Pressing the page buttons is a beginning mistake I got past in the first week, you're savy gadet people, com'on, stop complaining, figure it out.

Coolest feature about the Kindle:
You can have up to 6 tied to an account. I have 3, one for myself, one for my girlfriend and one for my mom. My mom lives across the country, and can share all of my books. I just find that to be the coolest thing. A virtual bookshelf we can access from anywhere.

Rookerith

I've only ever seen one in the wild and that was on the subway. What I've seen so far I like, but what about a backlight for reading in the dark?

knickers

@knickers: backlight doesn't work with eInk technology - the display is essentially a solid block of tiny particles that flip over from white to black when a charge is applied.

I bought a used Sony Reader for $100 after the Kindle came out, just to see if I liked the tech. I have to say I'm a convert. I went on vacation for two weeks and read four books (as well as the NYTimes daily). Battery lasted the whole time. Now if the Kindle is coming out with a less ugly version that is reasonably priced (I think $300 is really my max on this kind of device) I might jump on board with that.

weatherman

@knickers: That's not e-ink. e-ink can NEVER have back backlighting. That's like saying that you would like backlighting on a Etch-a-sketch. Think real hard about why that can't possibly happen. Ridicules and silly no?!

Noobs-R-Us

I've been looking at the Kindle for a while now. I love reading e-books and have been doing it on my Palms for years. My biggest beef is that I have several hundred dollars worth of ebooks purchased from eReader that I will have to rebuy(??) for the Kindle.

That's very annoying to me and is why I will hold off for a while. It would be nice if Amazon would buy them out and allow me access to those books on the Kindle.

Right now I am thinking of turning my old HP TC1100 tablet PC into an ebook reader. It's heavier than the Kindle but it's got built in WiFi and I can read all my current ebooks on it. Plus it doesn't need a light to read in bed.

I work at home and don't travel much so size/weight aren't that important.

AndyMac

I'd be interested if more obscure/out of print/very expensive books were available. I guess it would be OK for newspapers and magazines - the sort of thing that usually ends up stacked on the floor.

propertius

Okay guys... understood about the "backlighting" and maybe that was the wrong phrase to use. But isn't there some lighting option for E Ink? I mean, even in the 1980s my LCD watch and handheld games had a lighting option. There's GOTTA be a way to incorporate lighting on this thing so you can read in the dark. I mean, short of carrying around a book light.

knickers

@knickers: Sure, there are lighting options: front lighting is best, side lighting might work. But most ebook readers will give you the same answer all the time; "books aren't backlit, why do you want ebooks backlit? Just get one of those battery powered reading LEDs!"

I don't necessarily agree that ebooks shouldn't be lit, but when it comes down to it I'd rather have non-backlit eInk than backlit LCD.

weatherman

Pink is just so wrong for this device!

I can stand pink for a Nintendo DS or even say a Playstation Portable. But this?

Ok, maybe if they do a Hello Kitty theme with that

Shipchartering

Everyone, that's not the actual photo of the kindle 2, read the caption jeez!

After the iPhone 3G this is deplorable in comparison. Maybe for old folks who want super-sized text or if you do need something on the side desk for viewing code tutorials or a large .pdf of photoshop tutorials (we want colour w00t w00t)

Plus after the Rogers fiasco I doubt this will be available in Canada. I was tempted (doubtful though) to get one of these but saw many bad reviews and plus, I'm proudly Canadian eh.

basicxman