Randall Stross’s comments on the Kindle in today’s New York Times reminded me that I’ve been meaning to review the Kindle which I bought myself as a pre-Christmas present in early December. Unlike Randall, I kept my wife’s paws off of mine and I’ve been happily using it for about six weeks. It is a fantastic addition to my gadgets. In the US, the wireless feature works perfectly with books and I can get my daily NYTimes beamed no matter where I am. Even better, I’ve been in Europe the last several weeks where the NYTimes, if you can find one, costs about as much as a Smart Car.

This morning, around 11am in Toulouse, like every morning, I pull the NYTimes off of the Amazon Kindle Store on my PC. The wireless feature doesn’t work in Europe yet, but the whole process of getting into Kindle and downloading is done in less than a minute. I ran out of books to read too and just bought a bunch from Amazon. And it is a lot easier carrying them all on the Kindle than weighing my shoulder down with another 10 pounds. I was dubious about the Kindle because many of the initial reviews complained about flipping pages accidentally due to where the next page button is placed. I’m not particularly coordinated, I don’t think, but I frankly haven’t encountered the problem—certainly no more often than I accidentally flip two pages in an old-fashioned book. Still, I have trouble seeing a mass uptake of this version of the Kindle. If I were sitting at home and had a book handy, I would really prefer a regular book and newspaper. I’d probably even head around the corner to buy one despite the Kindle’s beaming feature. As a form factor the newspaper is hard to beat—your eyes can glide over a lot of stuff and easily pick out what you are interested in. With books, having two pages open at once is a nice feature we’ve had for many centuries—it’s hard to beat—and it’s just faster thumbing through a physical book than using backward and forward keys.

Kindle 1.0 is a great start, but my guess is that outside of frequent travelers it isn’t going to do to physical books what the iPod has done to CDs. It’s going to take some advances in technology and design innovation to leapfrog Gutenberg.