The Kindle 2.0....

For those of you who don't know, the humble authors of this blog use their spare time in various pursuits outside of blogging. Both of us are students. Neither of us have vocations, but we both hit cups like its our job. And we both happen to be avid readers of, well, anything. This post goes out to all those like us.
Today, Amazon Inc. released the Kindle2, a product no bigger than the average periodical that Amazon hopes will save its slowly deteriorating company. Just like the music industry is slowly collapsing due to the availability of electronic versions of it product, so is the "paper and binding" book industry. No, the publishing industry will never cease to exist, but like everything else, books and periodicals are feeling the affects of the technological revolution. The iPod revolutionized hand held media, the almost universally owned product did so in less than a decade (it took the PC nearly 25 years), while completely transforming the music industry into what it is today. Amazon hopes the Kindle will do the same for the book industry. The Kindle 2.0 is about as large as your average Reader's Digest, but can store thousands of titles and periodicals. Much like the iPod interface, users can select from a menu of purchased titles, or hourly updated versions of publications (i.e The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post) and then read for hours; in fact, days: one charge of the Kindle 2.0 can last up to two weeks. This has been one of the most hyped about changes to the new Kindle, which has garnered much more acclaim than its predecessor. In addition to sustainable battery life, the new Kindle has a joystick function for easier reading, a dictionary look up that allows the user to click on any word and learn its definition, and a function that allows the Kindle to read to you. To top it all off, the Queen of capitalism herself, Oprah Winfrey, has given the Kindle 2.0 her shining seal of approval, turning the product into gold. This probably explains the November back orders, but not to worry, the Kindle 2.0 will be available in mass in the coming days. Now only if I had $400 dollars to spare...