Welcome to the Kindlemonk Blog

I've always been a heavy reader, first English, then Russian, lately Chinese. But with the advent of the Amazon Kindle I've gone back to reading a lot of English for the first time in twenty years. I am constantly wandering around with this little plastic tablet in hand, reading newspapers, reading books, reading blogs. I have become, in short, a Kindlemonk.

The implementation of the Kindle, it's exterior look and interface design, are hideous. I don't deny that. It looks like a Kenmore refrigerator, circa 1972, miniaturized. The ergonomics aren't bad, but there are interface moments that make you wonder if the designer really put any thought into it at all. Every time you go to the home page you can view your books in the order in which they were last read - latest on top. The scroll bar, naturally, is set on menu...completely at the bottom of the page.

90,000 books is hogwash, of course. There are perhaps 90,000 items, but many of them are garbage articles put up by flakey authors who see this as their moment to make it big. If you look for books by Jorge Luis Borges, there are none. This in itself shows the shallowness of the books available. They can add more books, and do seep a few new items in every week, but Amazon is being cautious in investing in the most labor intensive part of the Kindle, digitizing books and marketing them.

This and many other clunky moments do not take away from that fact that I have dreamed of having something like the Kindle all my life. I like to know that whereever I am I have a library with me. I love the ability to do light Web browsing when needed (though it depletes the battery mercilessly).

I've sent a batch of ideas in to the Kindle feedback team, on marketing, software, hardware, etc. I'll post some here as I go along. The first and foremost thing I see as a tremendous area of growth for Kindle is audio books and music. People tend to use audiobooks in cars more than elsewhere, so this is actually not a major item for Kindle. But a lot of people do like to listen to music while reading, and there is the potential of a whole new medium here. Imagine if you could read a Patrick O'Brian novel (none available on Kindle yet, of course), and when you are reading about Aubrey and Maturin playing a classical piece that very piece is playing in your ears. As you read a sea battle described, you hear the sounds of it, mixed with martial music, etc. Or perhaps you are reading a favorite novelist while listening to her favorite music, as licensed with the book. The possibilities are endless, and profitable.

If you haven't discovered it yet, this is an enormous library of free ebooks you can download to your computer and move on to a memory card for transfer to Kindle (you DO have a memory card in your Kindle, don't you?): http://manybooks.net/