Monday, February 09, 2009

New Kindle? (updated2)

The next generation Kindle ebook reader should be coming out now.

Irritating that even at this late stage, neither the original Kindle nor the Sony Reader are sold on the Eastern side of the Atlantic. Come on, people.

Update: The new Kindle (NYT article) has text-to-speech! I've been asking for that! See my post "Kindle, I wish it could read to me".

I hope it's a good voice. And I hope the screen is significantly more contrasty. They say more "crisp", I guess that means contrasty, since the sharpness was already excellent.

Update: As usual, TidBITS gives more solid data: no, the contrast isn't higher, sadly, but it has 16 shades of grey instead of 4. (In my experience 8 or 16 shades of grey is all you need to display line art or text perfectly.)

3 comments:

Dibutil said...

Sony reader _is_ sold in Canada. However, about 20% of the books available at the Sony store are still restricted to Canadian readers, for instance Anti Terrorist Act can not be downloaded. Imagine copyright implications for the East of Atlantic...

Timo Lehtinen said...

Yes, the new Kindle is very interesting. I am skeptical about the text-to-speech feature, though, but it sure would be nice if it was listenable.

Of course, there is still the problem of "Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S."

Timo Lehtinen said...

Un-fucking-believable: Book publishers object to Kindle's text-to-voice feature.