...many book publishers think so.

I can say no more.

For your daily newspaper perhaps, for a monthly magazine (with colour photos etc) maybe not.

Also there are several competing formats and devices:-who would want the Betamax Bookreader?

Do you get a headache reading it for long periods? More quickly/more frequently than with a normal computer screen? If not, it might be a goer. If the answer's yes it'd be hell for me, and for that reason, I'm out.

Most people's reading and listening habits are very different. Pop songs are short and you need lots of them if you are going to listen for any length of time. Conversely, one would tend to carry only one piece of reading matter around. Thus an iPod fulfills the music need admirably as a book, newspaper or magazine the fulfills the reading issue. Ergo, a digital device that holds all your books does nobody any favours.

told me 10 years ago that downloaded files would eventually replace a physical object like a CD or record, I'd have laughed.

So I really don't trust my first reaction to this, which is that it will never catch on as people like books as objects in themselves.

All I can say is that I won't buy one.

As above, when the technology is perfected I can see it taking off. Me personally I love the feel ,the smell and the covers of books..but I think I once thought the same thing about vinyl even though like many of the good folks on here I have been returning to the vinyl a lot more recently. I guess price will also be an issue also. I can't imagine staring at the screen with all its light reflection issues. I think the casual reader will happliy embrace any change. For the collector/borderline trainspotter types (and I reluctantly include myself partially in this group)it will probably be a case of having both formats.
So I guess the final answer Bamber is that it will probably take off. Now I must go and order my Word digital subscription.

People read at a much slower speed when reading on-screen. It's not unlikely that books read using Kindle will take twice as long to finish.

Here's a well-constructed review of the product.

or flick through, as one might a daily paper.

And it's ugly.

Can't in any way imagine carrying this around with me - but I'm not an early adoptite. And frankly my eyes are beginning to regret years of long hours at a computer. Doubtless this Kindle contraption will get integrated into a hybrid phone/music player/ridiculously small movie player/teasmade device that I'll buy at some point and months afterwards my kids will tell me I've been missing all these things on it because, call me old fashioned, but I really only want to make a phone call when I'm on the move , or read (print) or talk to someone, or stare into the distance (which the optician keeps telling me I must do every hour).

No.

But I think this kind of technology always underestimates how people interact with the medium and not just the message.

If you get up in the morning and look at The Times website to catch up with the news you might pick up on, say, a couple of items. If you buy The Times at the tube station you've already absorbed many messages from throughout the paper before the train's even arrived. Obviously you won't read it all but you'll read a far higher proportion than you would of the equivalent website. Your eye has flitted across scores of items before it's actually settled on something you want to read. You've also quite happily looked at the ads rather than having had them thrust at you in the form of what they call "interruptive" advertising. Even the annoyances like having the news print come off on your hands are essential parts of the experience.

I'm turning in now and I shall read my book. Part of that experience will be the way it feels in my hands. I don't think you replace these things easily. Fifty years ago they promised us that traditional food would be replaced by pills. No trouble preparing them or clearing up afterwards and more time to spend with our jetpacks. We're still waiting.

... I'll give up reading.

How can you beat holding a newspaper; turning a page on a great book; or flicking through a magazine, all the time absorbing a wide range of information within your eye-line; and, of course, not being dependent on battery life or the bloody thing "hanging up" on you, all in all giving you a more leisurely experience.

It's just a big bowl of Wrong!

That's what I suspect this will be like. New technology, great idea, but just not good enough. The resolution of the text will be an issue - it'll only catch on when the text is as clear as that of the printed page.

My prediction (it's the internet, so we're all instant experts): In ten years time, we'll all be carrying around something that acts as phone, mp3 player, GPS, e-mail provider etc etc. You'll buy books in much the same way we buy downloads now, and it'll have everything - magazines, newspapers, blogs, diary, phone book etc. And if you lose or break yours, you'll be screwed. It'll be about the size of a paperback and you won't be able to heave a brick down any city street in the world without hitting half a dozen people with a set of headphones being trailed out of a shoulder bag containing one.

Although Nicodemus is right about the feel of a book or magazine... and let's see anyone kill a spider with a Kindle.

...in the bath wouldn't do it any favours.

May I suggest the manufacturers may have forgotten that magazines and papers fulfill a very important social role , You can hide away from other passengers behind them .

This is indeed the Sinclair C5,can't think of anything worse, give me paper anytime, long threads on this site, I just struggle to finish. Nothing worse than looking at a screen for ages.

....I suspect we are anything but random: our postings show we are avid completists and collectors of "hard copy", even if we dally with digitalism. I bet many of us refuse to take pictures with our telephones and disallow owt but music on our i-poddery, or at least I hope I am not alone. (Mind you, I guess the fact that we even have such modern gadgets says something about Canute.)

Crap name: Fixable.
Ugly design: Fixable.
Shit user interface: Fixable.
Requires power: Ah. Oh bugger.

Don't go back to the drawing board guys.
Gutenberg got it right, so don't even bother trying.

The green lobby will make it happen. And let's face it, it isn't much of a step forward given what we all already have.

I would be interested to hear how a magazine like The Word would benefit. When I think about this - ie different advertising opportunities/threats; a more dynamic writer-customer relationship; multimedia opportunities - I just think, ah yes The Word Website (with magazine content added) on the move. Sounds good to me.

10 minute enforced screen breaks from your workstation.....10 minute breaks from your on screen reading material...

Meh - I'll get one when they can install it as standard in my hydro hover car

it's *only* good if you're on the move. Good grief. If you're reading on the Tube it's all very well, i should think, but hells bells, you're not gonna sit by the fire in your armchair reading from the sodding thing, are you?

Thus if you want to continue your commuter reading, you'd have to buy a hard copy of the book as well. Or look like a twat in your own living room, obv.

At least the iPod or any other type of music player can be plugged into your hi-fi or a separate speaker unit so that it can masquerade as a fixture of the house. Can the Kindle do this?

or less. Imagine dipping into the Word on the tube even when you standing. Having your daily paper online. Going on holiday with your 10 books all on one small device.

Clearly this is not the finished article and it will evolve. But the flaws in the review posted by Fraser seem surmountable. No mention of battery life issues whereas 5 years ago that would have been a problem.

It needs a bigger screen, less buttons and to be better looking. I bet people will buy them when apple launch theirs.

the sony one looks better and has had good readability reviews

I get the feeling that it's more of a push from Amazon than a pull from the reading public. Maybe you could have magazines that you download but they would be very different things. Paper and ink is meant for reading and looking at. Screens are for interaction. If I have to look at a web page without having my hand on the mouse I get very uncomfortable. The essential part of the experience is that I'm in charge and at any second I can decide to go somewhere else.

If you could download a magazine like Word it would be a very different kind of magazine. Maybe it would be about speech rather than reading. I could see the appeal of that. But how would the business model work? Would people pay a subscription for something like that or would it have to be funded by advertising?

Personally I equate books to vinyl..

Hardbacks/Paperbacks are singles
Coffee table/reference books are albums.
(Magazines are 12" singles by my reader's ready reckoner)

They're attractive, tactile and lendable.

This has none of those features.

As the great John Prine put it: We're living in the future, tell you how I know, I read it in the papers about 15 years ago.

What happened to this great leisure society that computers were meant to herald?

Essentially this is an item which appeals to the Western geek and requires batteries, like the iPod. And like the iPod/iTunes, the Kindle only works with files downloaded from Amazon.

All the digital ebooks require is a form of xml with various tweaks for different softwares. Publishers are picking and choosing which. So some publishers will tie up exclusively with one device and some will go for everything. The market will sort out the men from the boys I guess.

I can't think of anything worse than having a device like The Kindle. The smell and feel of books is all part of the enjoyment of them.

I am the type of person who will print off a large document that appears on my screen as I can't stand reading it electronically. Having said that I can see that it has some value. If you are able to store several books at once then it would save lugging them all on holiday with you.

However if your battery goes flat at a crucial moment you aren't going to be best pleased if you going to have to wait fro hours for it to charge up. And I wouldn't like to try and read the screen on a bright sunny day down the beach either.

I can remember the smell of the paper of books I had as a child, many moons ago... the feel of them. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

seem to like the tactile nature of a book and equate this to a similar feel for vinyl.

2 points spring to mind:

1. The tactile nature of my ipod is very good - cool even. And it till is after having it for 3 years. Its great product design (which the Kimble ain't).

2. Very little music is sold on vinyl. The vast majority is a digital format and its moving away from the physical to the data more and more everyday.

1.You could read after the lights go out, like when your other half wants to sleep and can't stand having the light on.
2.The screen could be wiped clean easily, should that be necessary for whatever reason (you might also need some kind of keyboard cover if that is likely to be a requirement).
3.Freeing up of space where shelves are already groaning under their weight of literature and the floor is disappearing under piles of magazines.

My main objection is reading on a screen.

and al-Qaeda, with the support of the Taliban, have managed to build their first workable self contained Electromagnetic Pulse Weapons (EMPs).

Using a Toyota Hilux, the only fool-proof and indestructible weapons-delivery platform available to the Third World, an EMP has been smuggled, via the Channel Tunnel, into the south east of England.

Less than 24 hours later, the weapon is deployed and fired from somewhere in the chaotic fug of traffic gormlessly circulating in Trafalgar Square.

With a 25 mile effective range, in under 30 seconds around 50% of the music, book and video collections in England have ceased to exist. Even the backup tapes are ruined by eddy currents and voltage spikes induced in the tape cans.

Similar weapons are going off in cities all across the country.

Somewhere deep in the hills along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border, in a huge underground bunker, Osama Bin Laden has his vast stash of vintage mint-condition vinyl, 8mm films, Penguin paperbacks and Marvel comics.

He is opening an account, under a false name of course, on eBay. His organisation is about to become very, very rich.

Mwah hah-hah-hah.

One niche group of users, that are excited about ebooks in general, are service techs. They'd like a portable repository that would enable them to do away with stacks of tech manuals. This means a device that adeptly and legibly handles adobe acrobat pdf files. This will be a bit of a trick given that the acrobat reader on pc's is excruciatingly bloated and clunky (it started out as an elegant solution, but has devolved badly). The Kindle doesn't do pdf at all. The Sony does pdf's badly -- it reportedly loads slower than the acrobat reader on a pc and will hang completely when trying to open larger pdf's. And it doesn't zoom, so legibility isn't there either. As in all technology, best to wait for the third generation, after they've worked the bugs out and dropped the price.

I've tried one of these and i wasn't impressed. It reminded me of the Father Ted episode where they buy Mrs Doyle a teasmaid to remove the 'agony' of making numerous cups of tea. Mrs Doyle is aghast at the idea as she enjoys the process and ceremony of making tea and sees this as central to the enjoyment of a nice cup of tea. It's the same with books. I like the feel and texture of a book and the more 'hi-tech' my life becomes the more taken i am by the perfect simplicity of a well thumbed Penguin edition of 'The Mayor of Casterbridge'.

and the kids freaked out when we gave them pencil sharpeners to go with the pencils. I dont think a Kindle would be much use to them and it aint any use to me either. Books have been around almost since time began - why screw around with a medium that we all love?
Music formats was a different argument because progression offered improvement in sound quality etc but how can you improve upon the words in a book. Dont tell me, they will be editing them next. Concise editions sponsored by Readers Digest.

As a long time PDA user I must admit that I'm a bit baffled by the huge chorus of dissenting voices.

I probably read more from the screen of my PDA (640x480 pixels) screen than from anything else.

Every morning my PC grabs a variety of newspapers and puts it on my PDA for me to read whenever I get the chance as it's always in my pocket. When I go away its good to be able to take several guide books and then have them with me everywhere I go rather than in a hotel room.

As far as I can see, the main problem is the size of the thing. I think once Apple improve the resolution of the iPhone carrying books in our pockets will be commonplace.

I agree with all the naysayers. But noone asked to get rid of vinyl either - and lots of people still love it! But the biz decided we were having CDs and that was that. As Giles Smith memorably put it "only a business as cynical as the music business could not only sell us something we don't want, but actually sell us something we already own!!

There's something glorious about leafing through a big pile of books (or records, CDs, magazines, comics, etc), picking out the things you might go for later, hunting for one thing and making a glorious discovery or passing physical objects between friends.
And while there are obvious complaints about rooms overflowing with too many books/CDs/DVDs, there's something beautiful about just stepping back and looking at a wall full of shelves crammed with wonderful things.
Let's see those experiences being duplicated digitally.

Two minor events spring to mind: A former housemate spent some weeks burning my entire CD collection to his hard drive (while I was at work, of course). When I pointed out there was stuff there he'd never heard of and would never listen to, he explained that he just wanted to show his friends that he had a huge amount of music.
My best friend had a former boyfriend who, when hearing that I was getting rid of a couple of boxes of books, offered to take them off my hands. He didn't want to read them - never read books, in fact - but wanted a full book shelf to show off to those who might come around to his house.
How soon before we find people coming up with bragging rights on the amount of books in their Kindle (or future equivalent)?

If I get one of these things, will there be a nice routine like SkreemR for mp3 files so that I can get ripped-off copies of books and magazines? With a book there's my copy and I can pass that on to a friend, or give to the Oxfam book shop, but there's still only that copy - others have to be bought. With digital files one copy can become many. As a matter of interest, how big are book files compared to music? Will a flood of P2P activity related to books make a big difference to the Internet?

The one area where I think that they would be useful is when travelling. It would be helpful to have access to reference materials for work, and reading on a laptop is difficult because of the screen orientation. On planes I doubt the Kindle is bigger or heavier than some hardbacks I lug around with me, so it could be convenient.

Personally I like newspapers, magazines, books, and CDs. But people like the idea of having access to stuff - even if they don't use it. And how many of us can say that they will re-read all of the books in their house or even listen to all the cds in the collection? It might take off - even if old fogeys like us don't like it.

A 45 yo book fanatic with a very cool mother who got me one for XMas 2007. I love this thing! Fantastic for traveling...I used to haul 3-4 books per trip. Another feature that makes this completely worthwhile is the ability to download a sample of the book for free. I've bought plenty of books in the past that I gave up on pretty quickly. There are at least a dozen books so far that I got the free sample of and then decided it wasn't for me.

The screen is like an etch-a-sketch (hope that's not too much a US reference) as opposed to a computer screen so eye fatigue is greatly reduced.

As to kids in Africa or underdeveloped countries around the world not benefiting from this...absolutely you're right. On the other hand, they don't have dozens of books to read in general. This is clearly a technology for areas with access to and desire for LOTS of reading, which makes that argument less than germane (not flaming but trying to add context...sorry if I offend).

Happy to elaborate further on my use if requested (say if the editors wanted an article for a future edition of the mag?)

I love books. However, I travel to work and back every day by London underground during rush hour. My train is invariably packed to the rafters and I rarely get a seat. As I stand, one hand on the hand rail, the other clutching a thick, heavy, nearly-finished paperback, I often think how ridiculous it is that I'm having to bear the weight of the 350 pages I've already read. So the idea of a Kindle, or something like it, is beginning to interest me for that reason, (and that reason only).
Oh, 51 by the way, JohnW.

I think I'm right about the age thing - I propose that in future all threads that include references to technology include our ages. I've often been amazed how young some people are that claim that they're just too old for new technology.

John
49⅞

One group that hasn't been considered is expats and travellers - I divide my time between the middle East and the far east, both places where getting something to read can be a real challenge: The kindle, when it goes worldwide, will save me carrying 10 kilos of books everywhere I go (and from having to give them away at the end of stays so I can fill my luggage allowance with 10 more), and presumably from paying a tenner for Word on import. I can forgive a bit of poor resolution for that convenience. Crappy design though, yes.

I don't see this catching on - for one thing, isn't it better to carry a cheap paperback with you than a ludicrously expensive piece of technology? I don't think anyone got mugged for their copy of the latest Martin Amis...

I've not really seen much evidence of a demand for this kind of thing, either. The marketing people are going to have a very tough time trying to convince people that they want an ebook reader. And the genius of books is their simplicity. Pick it up, read it. No installations, no special instructions, battery power etc.