David Pogue Hearts Jeff Bezos
The New York Times has had a chance to play with Amazon's new Kindle e-reader device, version 2.0, and it's fair to say that personal technology writer David Pogue is now officially in love with Jeff Bezos. Pogue's NYT headline is "The Kindle: Good Before, Better Now," as he reviews the gizmo. The Kindle now holds about 1,500 books, though Pogue says that when you select Amazon's read-to-me feature, the narrator sounds Norwegian. (Ergo, you should download Knut Hamsun's Hunger.) And Kindle isn't only for books. Pogue writes, "You can have any of 30 newspapers, including this one, wirelessly beamed to your Kindle each morning ($10 to $14 a month)--minus ads, comics and crosswords." (Pogue, Will Shortz is so totally going to kick your ass for that.) The NYT is among the papers that Amazon has allowed onto its premium new device (priced at $359 per unit). So, too, The Seattle Times. But not the doomed Seattle P-I? And not Seattle Weekly? Wait, Jeff, call me! I take back everything I said before!
UPDATE: David Pogue himself objects to our ludic exaggeration of the nation's sweeping Kindle-mania; click on the comments below to read. It seems his original product review is not quite so gushy as we, tongue in cheek, suggested. (Though we linked to it above, thereby steering literally half-dozens and half-dozens of clicks to his paper's small, obscure Web site.) Moreover, Pogue seems to have some sort of trained helper monkey that surfs the Internet late at night to find instances of his name. Where could we get one of those tech-savvy simians? Perhaps on Amazon?
1 comment(s)
David Pogue says:
"it's fair to say that personal technology writer David Pogue is now officially in love with Jeff Bezos"?
Um, no, it's not. Did you read the same article I wrote?
I remember writing something far more mixed. Did you skip over these parts?
"The new, square plastic joystick is homely and stiff. You can no longer expand storage with a memory card. The battery is also sealed inside, à la iPhone. If that battery ever needs replacing, Amazon has to do it ($60).
"Kindle voices have some peculiar inflections and pronunciations — they sound oddly Norwegian, sometimes — and, of course, they’re incapable of expressing emotion. They read Hemingway the same way they read Stephen Colbert.
"Amazon is still a long way from its “any book, any time” goal. You don’t have to look far to find important titles still among the missing; they include all Harry Potter books; “An Inconvenient Truth”; “The English Patient”; and “The Associate” (the #1 fiction bestseller) or anything else by John Grisham.
"An e-book reader is a delicate piece of electronics. It can be lost, dropped or fried in the tub. You’d have to buy an awful lot of $10 bestsellers to recoup the purchase price. If Amazon goes under or abandons the Kindle, you lose your entire library. And you can’t pass on or sell an e-book after you’ve read it"....
etc?
--Pogue
Posted On: Tuesday, Feb. 24 2009 @ 8:25AM