I’ve been looking at getting an eReader, with the idea that maybe carrying my books around with me might be a good idea. Especially since I’ve been needing something to assist me with carrying textbooks. Yes, I know the Kindle isn’t big on textbooks (Although they are starting to play with the idea…) but I do need something to help with the shitload of PDFs that I will be getting next semester.

But there are a few things that concern me:

Difficulty with conversion

Kindle does do PDF, DOC, and a few others, with two options: You can pay a fee of about 10 cents a page to have Amazon convert it and send it to your Kindle, or you can convert it yourself and upload it to your USB drive. I have a ton of PDFs that I have to read for my classes, and when I can’t carry them, I can’t read them, which means I get screwed. Amazon should make this better.

No such thing as a free book?

Kindle allows you to download free chapters, but I’m a little concerned with the view they’ve given on free books sent via Kindle. Seth Godin made several comments on his blog on kindle opinions, the big thing being Amazon refusing to let him put up old books on the Kindle:

My first thought is that every Kindle should ship with $1,000 worth of free books on it. I offered Amazon rights to as many of my books as I control if they would just agree to put em free on every Kindle. They declined. I can think of a hundred authors who would be delighted to put one or more of their backlist books in front of this book-hungry audience.

As someone who wants to author books himself, this also makes me a little nervous, as I might want to release a few eBooks for free for people to download, so they can see my work. It won’t be cool if I can’t get a book or two on the Kindle for people to preview before they buy my good stuff.

The Price

The price, at about $350, is insane. Sony’s eReader is 50 bucks cheaper, and I know it can read PDF. No, it doesn’t have Sprint 3G Amazon Whispernet, but it is cheaper. As a student, I would be taken a bit back at the price, unless any textbooks were available at a significantly lower price. Why it’s so high I have no clue. If it’s because of Whispernet, I don’t think people would mind a few unobtrusive ads to cover for the 3G goodness.

It costs money to subscribe to a blog?

So if I subscribe to a blog, it’s 99 cents a pop, and the blogger sees none of it. Amazon says that it’s to cover the price of sending the stuff over the internets, but with ads, I don’t think they’ll have a problem. Furthermore, amazon shouldn’t take money from someone else’s hard work without just compensation. It’d be like someone taking your blog entries, putting them on another blog with a shitload of ads, and keeping it going…thank god nobody does that, right? /sarcasm.

All in all, I’ll probably get one anyway…those long trips for the speech team from the LBC to the SFO get real boring, and it’s good to have a book or ten. Still, Amazon could really benefit from these improvements, making it an effective choice for reading and textbooks at a good price.

Of course, there’s always the The Swindle…