George Parker is the perpetrator of adscam.typepad.com. Every week he shares his opinions on the advertising world with PSFK.

I originally drafted a post about the Kindle about a month ago but I thought I was being mean – so I let it sit and stew for a while. The release of the Apple 3.0 and some recent comments by Jeff Jarvis has made me dust it off with a quick update:
So there it is sat on my desk with a dead battery – 8 weeks after I bought the second generation ebook reader direct from Amazon. Unused, unloved, unnecessary. I feel like I’ve wasted my money.
My reaction to the whole genre: surely ebooks need a cigarette moment? Ebook [...]

Writing in the Guardian Technology blog, Bobbie Johnson reacts to yesterday’s product update announcement by Amazon with an interesting point. The tech columnist wonders if the Kindle can’t be successful while there are no pirates or “criminally-minded” users who are trying to hack the system to get and share free content:
Everyone’s looking at the pattern they’ve seen in music and video – an old medium changed radically by technology – and waiting for it to hit the book world. But the chances of that happening right now are very small indeed. Why? It’s fairly straightforward.
The real reason that the music [...]

After much anticipation, Amazon unveiled their second go at the Kindle this morning, updating their divisive e-book reader with more memory, a new 5-way navigation controller, a better battery life and an upgraded screen (offering 16 shades of gray rather than the previous 4).
The new device is thinner (thinner than a no. 2 pencil in fact – see pic) and arguably less of an eyesore, but it’s still a few steps away from being a serious game changer. Amazon said the device will have the capacity for mobile device-to-Kindle syncing sometime in the future, but no word on when (it [...]