I don't own a Kindle, but I would surely like to. I am the type of person that owns shelves of books. Many of them are reference books. I like to be able to find knowledge and I like to have it at my fingertips. The internet is a great resource for that (although caution is recommended). I would love to be able to carry a library around in my satchel. It would be nice to be able to grab a newspaper or blog wherever I am and read it, too. A number of obstacles has always prevented ebook readers from success. One is that people don't like reading lots of content on screens. Another is the availability of materials in the device format can be a problem. Amazon has seemingly addressed both of those concerns. The Kindle screen is supposedly very reader friendly. And the volume of titles Amazon can make available to the reader is something they should have no problem providing. Amazon has already started to digitize many of the books they make available for purchase on their site. This is merely another step in that direction.

A lot of talk about the kindle has been generated since it first came out right before Thanksgiving. Many online blogs have already either panned it or given it the thumbs up. I'm somewhere in the middle, but leaning toward the wow side. I think it is a cool device with a lot of promise. I do think it is very overpriced at the current time. Perhaps after the initial wave of first adopters goes past, the price will drop, just as it did with the iPhone.

What I see is needed is for Amazon to provide many of the resources that are what would be considered, less than retail oriented. The books I see that would be great to have on a Kindle are reference and educational oriented. I work at a University. I see the students lugging around 80 pounds of books on their backs from class to class. I could see how great it would be to have their textbooks on a device like this.

I would like to have computer programming books available on the device. Sure I would like to have a copy of Jeffery Deaver's The Sleeping Doll: A Novel or Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. But more importantly to me would be the reference books.

The fact that the Kindle is a wireless device is nice. And having free reference to the Wikipedia is very cool. Hopefully, Amazon will open this up to other important web resources as well.

The types of books I am looking for on the Kindle are still out of price for me. I did a search on the computer programming books I would like to have. I found a number of them, but the price was still above what I would pay for a pdf version of most of them on the publishers sites. I'm thinking another thing that would be nice to provide to Kindle users would be a way to print pages from their device. Perhaps the usb cable could also be used to connect to a laser printer in the future. While I see that there are shortcomings to the Kindle, I have Kindle envy. I would like to own one. Perhaps, in time.

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