Kindle in the news - July 19, 2010

Farhan Devji at Canadian site Beyond Robson writes that West Van Memorial Library is Canada's first to offer loans of Amazon Kindles.

Cardholders can now borrow up to 50 books at a time, as the library is offering patrons the opportunity to borrow one of the five library Kindles.   Laura Baziuk, writing for The Province reports that Michelle Sproule, community relations librarian, explains that staff brought them in so people could test them out to see if they’d like to invest in one.

' “I look at my luggage, and it’s ridiculous because I’ve got these 20 books that I want to read and I won’t get to all of them, but I’ll lug them around and wreck my back doing it,” she said.

“This would be a nice alternative.” '

The 5 library Kindles hold a range of titles and include general fiction, cookbooks, travel guides and "kids’ books." Authors include Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Connelly, Sophie Kinsella, Road Dahl and Stephanie Meyer.  Other cities, including North Vancouver, are coming on board.  The new Kindles have been on the shelves for a week or so and as of today, all 5 were either 'out' or on hold.

"Reading pleasure returns again"
Reports on the Kindle these days are more often than not positive reactions after 3 months of gadget-news focus on the iPad as e-Ink-reader killer turning to complaints about the inability to read the iPad outdoors in the sun.

  The Yuma Sun publishes a typical reaction these days:

' I have owned my book reader for about a year now and it has allowed me to regain all the pleasures of reading books. In addition, when I reach a point where it is too hard to read, it will read to me in either a male voice or a female voice. '

 Then there was Clayton Morris (FoxNews) with a complete change of heart, saying that the ipad was "virtually impossible" to read in direct sunlight, so his Kindle gets a workout at the "pool, bench, or park."

 And this week Melissa J. Perenson, for PC World and Bloomberg Businessweek, wrote

' What a difference a display can make. All it took was turning on the Amazon Kindle DX (Graphite) second-generation large-format e-reader to see that Amazon's claims of a higher-contrast display than its predecessor were true.

  To fully gauge the impact of Amazon's enhancements to the Kindle DX--including how it performs in sunlight--I'll be spending some quality time with my imagination this weekend, curled up with a Kindle.  In the meantime, if you were holding off on buying the new Graphite version in order to get the skinny on the screen, well, wait no more: On first blush, it's impressive.'

Contortions on the beach
  And while not an article about the Kindle, here's a quite funny article -- "Sunscreen yes, iPad screen no" -- about iPad sunlight readers as pretzel forms at the beach.  It comes from The Financial Times's Tyler Brûlé (UK) via Paul Biba of Teleread (who owns and enjoys an iPad).

' Excerpts: "...have contorted themselves into such bizarre shapes that they look like they’re auditioning for Cirque de Soleil...

  ...you can now see there are props involved and they’ve changed their positions twice in the past two minutes. The lady is sporting a broad-brimmed visor and has created a shelter with a towel over her head. She also has her knees up; they too are covered with a towel.

  ...The good news for hoteliers, doctors and various practitioners of alternative medicines is that all the twisting and rearranging users need to do in order to read off tablet devices in sun-drenched settings means a boom in spa bookings for 90-minute massage treatments and an autumn’s worth of appointments to see physios, osteopaths and rolfing specialists. '

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