Thought Process : Process Thoughts

Is it the greatest rock and roll swindle? No, I don’t think so, but it made a nice headline.

I have to start off with a disclosure - I’ve read very little about the Kindle; next to nothing in fact. Dave Winer twittered a link to Become a Kindle Author on Crave and Cliff Gerrish twittered his post, a great “what if” around it, and John Gruber twittered a link to this post on Daring Fireball and I watched the videos and executive interviews at Amazon’s product page. One person on twitter even quipped “I hear there’s a hack coming out that will let you run old Pippin @World software on the Kindle”; OK, that was me.

So I guess I’ve read a couple things. I just can’t buy into it. As much as I’d like to, I think it’s going to let the shareholders down in fairly epic proportions. First off, the name of the product sounds like it’s going to start a fire like ones tyrants and despots throughout history have used to burn books; not a nice connotation.

Admittedly, I’m a bit of a book freak. Amazon is by far my most visited site. I’d say I go there almost every day and I buy a couple books a week. I own books that are family heirlooms, I have fiction and non-fiction which can’t be sold for enough to cover postage, and I’ve spent way to much over the years on expensive computer books that go out of date before I’m done with them. I sell my used books on Amazon and keep the money in their Gift Certificates to “reinvest” in more books, CDs or DVDs (usually guitar instruction DVDs). Pictured here are a couple photos of my unruly bookshelves, disheveled because I’m really trying to cull through and sell some more.
I also have a penchant for the tactile. Cliff (who also just posted his perceptive take on Kindle) and I frequently trade links to sites about pencils. Yes, Pencils. Pencil sharpeners too. Sad, I know. In fact, one of my favorite books “Thinking with a Pencil” is prominently displayed in the photo to the right, and I currently covet “Sketching the User Experience” - guess I’ll have to sell a few books over at Amazon.

So, why no dice on the Kindle, besides the unfortunate name? For some books, I’m sure it’s fine - New computer manuals, yeah, maybe. They could have taken that a lot further if the author could designate segments to be beamable and equip it with infrared , so you could beam code snipits to your computer. Business titles, one’s you really don’t need to keep. Yeah, maybe, but most of them are so boring I tend to get them at Audible. Businesses could also use it for training or on-boarding as it matures. For fiction? maybe for someone, but not me. For classics? Nada - I just don’t see myself reading Sherlock Holmes on a we computer screen.

One pro, is it uses SD cards; so does my Treo and my Elf, so that would work. Fragility. Books are pretty durable, and they have to be; they get tossed around, say on, slept on. etc. and, the price tag… $399? over an iPhone, well, that toy’s gonna have to wait. I’d rather wake up Christmas morning to find a Chumby, by far.

Riiiiing… Rrrinnngggg.

Hey Hugh, it’s me, Lawrence. I gotta talk to you about this new open standard that’s going to revolutionize the way we drink: It’s called the Dixie Cup.

It’s really great. What we’ve done is wax coated a plain old paper cup, and now it’ll hold more types of beverages… it’s almost universal! I mean, from Grapefruit Juice to a Gin and Tonic, this thing holds up. It’s going to change the way companies think about distributing and consuming fluid.

Right out of the gate we have agreements from Rubbermaid, PG and Acme Co to modernize their fluid distributions to be transitionally contained by this exciting open standard, and Saul’s working on a logo as we speak.

We also see an expanding market for dispenser apparatus; think about it: every house in America with a Dixie Cup dispenser in the kitchen. You could show up at a party with Dixie Cups and KNOW they’ll fit in the hosts dispenser apparatus.

Oh yeah, we turned the cone shape into a flat bottom to increase lateral stability thereby extending its intra-usage utility. Ted’s doing some R&D around optimal radius to metacentric height ratio to maximize stability.

Please sign your emails
You know what annoys me. People who put include really handy signatures in their e-mail, but only now and then, so when you try to find their number by looking at the bottom of the last mail they sent you you have to sort through 6 months of posts.
No biggy, just a peeve.