Mobil Learning Device -- Kindle

In this week's IDE611 discussion part, a classmate introduced a wireless electronic reading device named “Kindle”. It looks similar as a PDA—light, thin, and portable. The price of this device is approximately $400. Besides light, thin and portable, there are many other features about this dedicated device:

· Sharp, high-resolution screen that looks and reads like real paper.
· Wireless connectivity
· People can mark on it
· Buy a book in less than one minute.
· More than 190,000 books available,
· Free book samples. Download and read first chapters for free before you decide to buy.
· Top U.S. newspapers: The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, etc.; top magazines: TIME, Atlantic Monthly, and Forbes, etc., and top international newspapers.
· More than 1000 top blogs from the worlds of business, technology, sports, entertainment, and politics
· Long battery life. Recharge approximately every other day, and fully recharges in 2 hours.
· Includes free wireless access to Wikipedia.org.
· Be able to Email Word documents and pictures (.JPG, .GIF, .BMP, .PNG) to Kindle for easy on-the-go viewing.

I’m very interested in this product. Kindle plays the similar role as the paper-based book, but it functions are much wider. While, in my point of view, the only weak point of this product is that there are only about two hundred thousand books available for readers. If people could download all the books which they can buy in the bookstore (e.g., out textbooks), it would be perfect. After all, the copyright fee for downloading each electronic book is less expensive than that of paper-based book. I hope the economic electronic book would become a new future and save our next generation from heavy school bag.