Making the Amazon Kindle 2 Better
The Amazon Kindle 2 is a good device. No question about it. Almost everyone who has one seems to love it, and indeed, there’s a lot to love. But no device is perfect, and that’s what keeps us members of the tech media in business. Molly Wood from CNet provide some suggestions on how to make Amazon Kindle 2 Better.
Allow sharing on the Amazon Kindle 2
The Kindle 2, or any electronic book reader, marks a dramatic change from the way we normally read books. Sure, the reading is solitary, but books are fundamentally social in nature. You share books. You recommend them, you loan them out, you pass them around, you mark pages for each other. The Kindle 2 takes all of that away.
Learn from iTunes and allow authorizations. Let me authorize multiple Kindles on a single account so that I can share subscriptions and purchases between them.
Learn from the Microsoft Zune and allow one-time content sharing. Let me use the Whispernet to send another Kindle user an entire book that will expire after two or three days, as a sample. Or, heck, if you want to be stingy, just let me send a chapter.
Make the Kindle 2 more social
Books equal book groups. Sure, if you’re in a book group now, there’s a good chance you all buy the book individually. But Amazon has a great chance to encourage all-Kindle book groups (don’t laugh: it’ll happen) to register on its site, and even to roll out a book group-based social networking product that lets groups discuss, collaborate, review, suggest books, and send each other notes or highlights from their Kindles.
Make it easier to switch
I’d like to see Amazon offer a "conversion" discount. If you’ve bought a book from Amazon within, say, three months of buying a Kindle, it would be awesome if you could buy the Kindle version of the book for a very small fee–maybe $2 or $3–just as a little incentive. Sure, you’d have to get publishers on board, but how hard would that be, considering that they’re basically selling the same book twice?
Offer an Internet version on the Kindle 2
Amazon should consider a data plan for the Kindle that would include some subscription content–a small selection of the blog content they currently charge for individually. I totally understand that Amazon doesn’t want to give me a browser and unfettered Internet access, since they’re footing the bill for the data, but I would probably pay $10 a month for a version of the Kindle that included a full browser plus some delivered blog or newspaper content.
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