In my previous blog about e-books I talked about the pro’s and con’s of e-books.  Well, most of the day I’ve been obsessively researching e-book technology and I have to say that I’m really excited about the future.

E-books use e-ink.  They don’t hardly use any power so the battery lasts a whole week.  You turn it on, press the menu and find the book you are reading, and by the way it shows in that menu the page you were on so you don’t have to find where you were at, it keeps it bookmarked from the last page you were reading.  Then you click the book you want to read and start reading.  Once that page is loaded it stops using any of the power from the battery.  You can have it sitting there for an hour on that page and it won’t use any power.  Once you press the button to turn the page then it uses power to turn the page then you see the words change and then no more power usage.  The battery will last basically a week before you have to charge it at all.  And when you do charge it, it takes about 2 hours to charge.

If however you are flipping through the Amazon website and flipping through pages of a e-magazine then yeah, it’s going to use a lot more of your battery and it will probably last 2 or 3 days before needing charged.

I love the idea of waking up every morning and the newspaper is already downloaded on your kindle.

It would also be good if the catalog companies would deliver their catalogs directly to your Kindle so that you don’t have to 1, wait for them to come in the mail and clog up your mail box and 2, waste paper when you throw it out.  This way you can flip through them then delete the file when you are finished reading it.  That is if you decide you want to, you can keep it if you want.

Another thing I want to obsess er um I mean discuss is the hard drive.  The previous Kindle 1 from last year only has a 256mb hard drive allowing you to store 200 e-books but the new Kindle 2 has a 2GB allowing you to have a hell of a lot more.  I don’t know exactly how many but it’s a lot.  Can you just imagine maybe in another year or 2 when they come out with the Kindle 3 it might have 2TB.  Then you will have a crap load of books and magazines and newspapers.  You won’t ever have to delete anything because you will have tons of room.

As I said in my last post, I’m waiting for it to be cheaper, in color and have touch screen.  Well, I watched a video today of the guy who invented Amazon talking to Martha Stewart and she kept mentioning color e-ink and he said it was in the labs.  Not their labs but in labs period.  Well, I’ve been seeing e-books with color e-ink so I know it is possible and I’m sure in Kindle 3 it will have color e-ink.

My other issue is about the touch screen.  I think it is a lot better than buttons.  I saw an e-book from Dvice.com that was touch screen, all you do is press and drag the page and it turns the page, or you just press the right side of the pager to flip it.  And also when you are on the website trying to buy a book you touch the screen for the keyboard and it comes up so you can type the name of the author or book title.  I think the Kindle keyboard is just too much.  Although it does have more of a use than just buying books, you can make notes in your books.  You can also highlight sentences.