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Amazon is the best place to buy books, cds, electronics and other memorabilia. But what happens if you want your hands in all the pies?

After a sloppy launch of Kindle 1, a year ago, Amazon released Kindle 2, hoping that it would be the next best thing, something of a revolutionary device like IPhone. Dreams. Stephen King introduced the product at the launch; I was waiting for Kate Perry next, who would sing “I read a book, I sucked at it.”

Amazon — please respect people’s intellect. We are not buying acne creams.

Ok. Some features:

• No Touch screen.
• Larger screen? It’s smaller than a book. the screen is double that of your IPhone. 35-40% real estate wasted on the device. Just look at the picture once. Why? Because there’s a keyboard on it. Yes — A KEYBOARD.
• Too many buttons. There are seven buttons on the device. Remember Microsoft Vista? There were seven options too — logoff/sleep/hibernate/shutdown/whatever1/whatever2/hangMyself.
• Displays in B&W.
• Operating System? Inspite of being based on Linux, this still is one black box where you can read a book, one at a time. More cameras are going to have built in wifi, smart phones are becoming mini computers, cars can park themselves. If someone thinks they want to make a “revolutionary” product that will change the landscape of the world and there is no software to manage the device. What is the point of having an OS when you can’t have software running on it?
• No API for third party applications. Imagine the applications built around reading books, social networking, custom viewers, virtual bookshelves or even mini applications to store your favorite quotes from books. I expect a dedicated ebook reader (the one that claims “version 2″) to be smarter than just displaying books in black and white pages. If you had inbuilt wifi, and a browser, you could probably get “recommendations” or lookup a dictionary or even sort your library according to genre. It’s quite naive that Amazon limits the device to such a small scope. Imagine Playstation releasing PS4 and it only plays Sony games downloaded from Sony store and all the games are arcade games, single player. And they are 16-bit color.
• Stylus? Don’t you want to mark your favorite sentences? Or do you want to click menu->highlight->cursor down (12 times)->press spacebar (on the keyboard!) 17 times->press another button to “highlight.” Now, did I say, there was another button to save it?
• foldable lcd screen or flexible displays? No. It looks good for a 1999 ipod equivalent of an ebook reader.
• Doesn’t read pdfs or any other format.
• No Wifi or browser.
• Can you do anything apart from reading books (bought from amazon?) – No. Same reasons as above.
• Does it read books in your own voice? No. There’s a robotic voice which is worse than the “your call is important to us. Please hold, while ….”

Fine, this is a book reading device. I get it. But what’s special about it? What’s so “groundbreaking” about it that I should stop buying books and buy a Kindle? I haven’t seen a single Kindle in subways, libraries or Starbucks, in the last one year. The original Kindle sales are not disclosed to public, clearly seems like a catastrophic failure for a product that had hopes of “changing the way people read books, forever.”

It seems like a step back to the lalaland with outdated technology and mediocre features. For 350$ and seven buttons and a keyboard and a black n white display and lack of add-on software, its a bad investment one could ever make. Amazon raves about saving 5-10$ on a book, but never counts on the 10$, one would get when the same book is sold. We read books. We share books. We give it to our friends. We distribute them. Reading & sharing books is a culture. We need products that can enhance this experience and add more value, not redefine it for someone to be a monopoly. I can’t believe Amazon thinks that “Kindle” is still the future of reading … I just can’t. The worst strategy than Microsoft. They thought, that the whole world will “browse the web” in IE.

As for me, my admiration and honor goes for a little unknown company that developed Stanza for IPhone/IPod, for FREE. If only Amazon had 1% of their passion …

Some pics here.