a Kindle in Japan
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Today I got my mitts on a friend's "Kindle", the Amazon e-reader. I have to say I was impressed.
The things aren't cheap, and I'm not blown away with the pricing of the e-books, but it was the technology that really worked. The e-ink surface was very readable in the moody light of the restaurant, doing as good a job with monochrome images as it did with text. The controls made sense.
The friend who showed me the thing is a guy who's spent a lot of time on commutes, and who's developed a major reading habit. He figures that instead of getting by on whatever English books he can find here in Japan, he's better off getting whatever he likes immediately off of Amazon.
It was show and tell all 'round. I'd brought not only my two photo books, but the small set of silver-and-zircon rings that I've been photographing. There were four of us present, all classmates from a Japanese class two years ago. The only female in the group really took to the rings, and asked me to dig up some prices for her.
It's funny how often that happens when I show off our wares.