Friday, April 30, 2010

ABC7 /Consumer Report look at 9 readers for bookworm mothers. Collections for Kindle 1 maybe?

Now that things are quieter on the Apple front except for the Gizmodo Lost iPhone prototype story (the latest stories in chron order:  Cnet analysisDaring Fireball's John Gruber look at the lawsDilbert's take; Wired's team finds "finder"and CNet finds helpers) with dramatic night visitations apparently encouraged by Apple, reporters are now writing about the Kindle again, without relating it to the multi-function iPad except to remember that the Kindle is a smaller, less expensive, dedicated e-reader for those who like that kind of thing.

Click on the picture at top left or here to see ABC7's videoclip of their news report in which they discuss what they and Consumer Reports found when teaming up to look at 9 different e-book readers, including the Nook, Kindle, Sony, and iRex readers, in order to make recommendations for Mother's Day.

The accompanying story by Ric Romero at KABC, Los Angeles, notes there's "a lot of misinformation" out there.  That's for sure.

They interviewed some people for the story and said that one person, Kate Lombardi, will be adding fewer books to her shelves, but she's reading more books than ever now that she has a Kindle. "It's made me look at books in a different way, and buy them in a different way, so I'm buying more," said Kate.

They found that while the iPad is backlit and people can continue reading in the dark, it weighs twice as much as most e-book readers.  And they noted that it's not easily readable in bright sunlight.  While it gets points for versatility and doing "most things pretty well,"  they found it "not the best choice just for reading e-books" per Paul Reynolds of Consumer Reports.

Rich Fisco of Consumer Reports, one of several testing the Nook, found the interface problematical in that the bottom LCD screen is "little" and is "all you get for navigating around, picking books, moving though pages, and typing in titles for searches and such."

Yes. ABC7 and Consumer Reports recommended the Kindle, a fact I'm putting in for the Kindle-edition readers as it takes longer to follow links on some image-heavy sites when reading blogs via the Kindle.

Much has been made recently of the idea that the iPad can cause insomnia.  Many of us thought this was almost surely not true.   A researcher at the UCLA Sleep Disorder Center told Eyewitness News that no study or research has been done that proves iPads cause sleeplessness.

HOPE FOR KINDLE-1 USERS FOR KINDLE ORGANIZATION/COLLECTIONS?
At the Amazon Kindle forums, 4greatscotts posted a response said to be from Amazon Customer support to the plea that Kindle-1 users also get some type of organization for their first-generaion devices, though the programming and instructions won't be the same because the cursor cannot go to places on the screen as the later model does, due to a slower screen and navigation through rows instead of individual words or alpha characters.
  Here's the posting by about this (no confirmation from Customer Support Team yet).
'Posted on Apr. 29, 2010 4:55 PM PDT
4greatscotts says:

Here is the response I received from customer service today when I asked if they were going to do an update for K1 owners.

We have heard from many of our Kindle 1st generation customers that you would
like to have a better way to organize your growing Kindle libraries.  We are
currently working on a solution that will allow you to organize your Kindle
libraries.

At this time we aren't able to provide you the exact time of when this update
will release, but I'd suggest you to continue checking back our website
regularly.

Thanks for using Kindle!

Best regards,

Prakash T
Amazon.com
We're Building Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company '


 See the ongoing Guide to finding Free or Low-Cost Kindle books and Sources
  Check often: Latest free non-classics, shortcut http://bit.ly/latestfreenonclassics.) Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
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