Kindle

Even though it's kind of ugly and has a silly name, the new Amazon Kindle is pretty cool. I seem to be reading quite a few thicker books lately, and it's a bit of a pain packing them for travel or handling heavy books at night when I'm getting sleepy. I like the addition of the keyboard for making notes or searching for text, and the EVDO cellphone wifi is interesting (including the wikipedia support), but I don't know how ultimately useful wifi would be. I think the e-paper technology is the way to go, though, for these types of devices. They look more like real ink-on-paper, cause less eye strain (due to the absence of a backlight), and use much less energy than traditional LCD readers. Unfortunately, the Kindle is way out of my price range.

On a side note, since Amazon opened the Kindle store for ebook downloads, I now have the option of uploading ebooks for sale in the store. Since I own the copyright on my dissertation, maybe I'll put that up for sale. But I think the figures and tables might be a problem. Amazon says that HTML uploads will work the best in their conversion software, so I would have quite a bit of work to do to get my dissertation to look good in that format. I wonder if anybody would want to pay something like $10 for a copy of my dissertation on their Kindle (I would get ~35% of the sale price). Probably not.