{"id":2023,"date":"2008-04-29T14:35:27","date_gmt":"2008-04-29T18:35:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/?p=2023"},"modified":"2008-04-29T14:35:27","modified_gmt":"2008-04-29T18:35:27","slug":"kin-and-kindle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/kin-and-kindle","title":{"rendered":"Kin and Kindle"},"content":{"rendered":"

Once upon a time, Robin Williams said, “Cocaine is God’s way of telling you that you have too much money.” This week I bought a Kindle<\/a>\"\". It costs $399 (but I had $150 in gift-credit, so I pretended it only cost $250), can download books wirelessly from Amazon, is perfectly readable in daylight, can take a 2gb SD card to store a couple bazillion books, has some neat internet functions, is a butt-ugly monstrosity of design, and is almost certainly God’s way of telling me that I’m earning too much.<\/p>\n

(And it’s proof that I’m a tremendous geek, but it’s not like we needed more of that.)<\/p>\n

Click on the image for pictures from the unboxening:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

That’s an excerpt from Chelsea Handler’s new book, Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea<\/a>\"\". She is<\/em> an awfully funny writer.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I’ll play around with this thing for a while and report back. If it manages to become a book-version of the iPod, I’ll be a happy man. This will be predicated on how comfortable I get with reading off an e-ink screen like this, and how insecure I get at not having “the actual book” in my hands.<\/p>\n

(Man, it sure is an awful piece of design. Makes you realize how amazing Apple is with this sorta thing.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Once upon a time, Robin Williams said, “Cocaine is God’s way of telling you that you have too much money.” This week I bought a Kindle. It costs $399 (but I had $150 in gift-credit, so I pretended it only cost $250), can download books wirelessly from Amazon, is perfectly readable in daylight, can take … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Kin and Kindle”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[27,4],"tags":[127],"class_list":["post-2023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-business","category-literature","tag-kindle"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4C7K-wD","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2104,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/kindle-part-1","url_meta":{"origin":2023,"position":0},"title":"Kindle, part 1","author":"Gil","date":"June 18, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Ahoy, dear readers! I'm awfully busy at the BIO show in San Diego. But rather than leave you without your daily dose of my ramblings, I thought I'd post this e-mail I wrote a pal in response to his query of, \"How do you like your Kindle?\" I have more\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Big Business"","block_context":{"text":"Big Business","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/big-business"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=virtualmemories-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B000FI73MA","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2833,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/me-and-e","url_meta":{"origin":2023,"position":1},"title":"Me and e","author":"Gil","date":"November 2, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Virginia Heffernan has a nice piece in the NYT Magazine about Amazon's Kindle e-reader. The biggest complaints I hear about the Kindle from tech geeks is that it needs to have an color touchscreen with a high-powered browser, cellphone service and maybe a camera. Which is to say, they miss\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Design"","block_context":{"text":"Design","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/design"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3519,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/kindleicious","url_meta":{"origin":2023,"position":2},"title":"Kindleicious","author":"Gil","date":"February 26, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"To celebrate the arrival of my new Kindle (I sold my first-gen model for $270 on Amazon last week), here are a bunch of articles about e-book pricing and why publishers are scared crapless by the example of Apple and iTunes: Kassia Kroszer, who writes wonderfully about this stuff on\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "literature"","block_context":{"text":"literature","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/literature"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2293,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/catch-a-fire","url_meta":{"origin":2023,"position":3},"title":"Catch a fire","author":"Gil","date":"August 21, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"I don't agree with all of this guy's points about the future of digital books vis a vis the success of the Kindle. I'm optimistic that the presence of the Kindle and other e-readers will help drag book publishing out of the horrifically dysfunctional returnable bookstore model that it's currently\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Big Business"","block_context":{"text":"Big Business","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/big-business"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=virtualmemories-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B001CBMX7Y","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3998,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/bea-0-fer","url_meta":{"origin":2023,"position":4},"title":"BEA 0-fer","author":"Gil","date":"June 2, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"This NYTimes article on Book Expo America was pretty funny. On the one hand, e-books on the Amazon Kindle are ridiculed by Tina Brown for costing \"that paltry, pitiful sum\" of $9.99. On the other hand, Sherman Alexie is a complete douchebag: At a panel of authors speaking mainly to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "0-fer"","block_context":{"text":"0-fer","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/literature\/0-fer"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2876,"url":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/cant-start-a-fire","url_meta":{"origin":2023,"position":5},"title":"Can’t start a fire","author":"Gil","date":"November 11, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"I meandered around a Borders store for the second time in a week! This time, my wife was getting her hair cut on Saturday afternoon, and I figured I could spend a little time among the books to feel guiltier about not participating in National Novel-Writing Month. (I really meant\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Big Business"","block_context":{"text":"Big Business","link":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/big-business"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2023"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2023\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}