The first full day of the Kindle 2 is in the books. It works well at work; downloads from the Kindle store come through rapidly. This didn’t shock me; Amazon’s Whispernet is powered by Sprint, and my Sprint wireless card has worked well within the confines of my cubicle.
I came across an interesting article today; it makes the claim, backed up with what I think are plausible numbers, that printing the New York Times costs twice as much as sending every subscriber a free Kindle.
Reading daily newsprint is not a custom ingrained in me. I will admit that there’s something comforting in the opening, folding, and turning pages of a dead tree newspaper, but it’s something I just don’t do anymore. If I read a paper daily, I’d consider a subscription via the Kindle.
And there are the Kindle disadvantages:
- One may be averse to reading the Kindle in the
crapperthrone room. - It’s damned hard, and expensive, to either wrap a fish or line a bird cage with a Kindle.
- It’s also hard to complete a crossword puzzle on a Kindle.
-k-
I’m proud to say that the Toilet Test was the second* one (or, “#2″) that I used to test the road-worthiness of the Kindle. It passed with flying colors, in fact I considered it to be just fine there, since the plastic doesn’t absorb odors like paper will. Still, it’s no Jegs catalog.
Tomorrow is the lunch test.
I would no more subscribe to a newspaper on there than I would the Ladie’s Home Journal.
* Test #1 was seeing if TFG showed up in the blogs. It was…$6 to subscribe. Where the Foxtrot is my cut of that, I wanna know.