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BURLINGAME, Calif. -- There are a lot of reasons why comparing Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch to Amazon.com's Kindle makes no sense. You can make phone calls on the iPhone. You can read Robinson Crusoe on the Kindle. You can watch video on the iPhone. You can read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash on the Kindle. The iPhone is a multi-tool for the electronic age. The Kindle is purpose-built for the much older task of gulping down big chunks of text.

Amazon has slated a news conference at Pace University on Wednesday morning, where the online retailer is expected to introduce a wide-screen, newspaper-friendly edition of its Kindle reader. The device, along with a gizmo being developed by Hearst Media for launch next year, are being held out as the last, best hope for old media. Big mistake.

Apple's ( AAPL - news - people ) iPhone makes it plain why this is so. Why else would Amazon be so eager to put the Kindle's functionality on the iPhone? So far this year, Amazon has introduced software that allows you to read books you've purchased for the Kindle on the iPhone, and snapped up Stanza, whose software also puts books on the phone.

Maybe that's because Amazon ( AMZN - news - people ) Chief Jeff Bezos knows that Apple is going in a more interesting direction with its slim little tablet than Amazon can. Apple has sold 37 million iPhones and iPod Touches. The Kindle isn't even close.

The problem isn't just that "people don't read any more," as Steve Jobs said last year of the Kindle. Nearly half of the Kindle's users are over 50 years old, according to a survey of Amazon's discussion boards by blog, Kindle Culture. That's not because people under 50 don't read. It's because they read differently. After all, if no one read anymore, Google ( GOOG - news - people ), which made text searchable, sortable and ultimately interactive, wouldn't be worth $126.7 billion.

That's because the real problem with newspapers isn't that nobody reads. Or even that calling information painstakingly written, edited, stamped onto pulped trees and delivered a day later "news" is absurd. It's that reading has changed. The New York Times Co. ( NYT - news - people ) is worth a scant $814.8 million because it just presents information, rather than making it interactive and personal. The New York Times won't host your e-mail, unless you work there. And you probably spend more time reading that than the national news section.

Which is exactly the problem with the Kindle. The iPhone and iPod touch are computers. They can browse video, suck up RSS feeds from tens of thousands of sources, and search and sort messages to you from your Mom. The Kindle, because it is a computer, has some flexibility, sure. But it really is purpose-built to present books, novels and other big blocks of text.

Will the Kindle sell millions of units and make Amazon a ton of money? Possibly. Should you buy one? Maybe. Will it save the newspaper industry? Not a chance.

Amazon.com Inc. has received a lot of attention and respectable sales for its Kindle e-book reader, but it's hardly made a dent in the hardcover armor of the old-fashioned paper book.

On Wednesday, the Internet company revealed another prong of its strategy in making its gigantic e-book library available on a device already in millions of hands: the iPhone.

This is a big step for e-books, which have lingered outside the mainstream for nearly two decades even as digital media have conquered music and film distribution. Amazon's move combines a readily available device that's suitable for reading with a good distribution system and reasonably priced books.

That said, the first version of the iPhone application is crude, and Amazon would do well to release a software update soon to demonstrate its commitment to the iPhone.

But before we get into that, let's take a look at how the Kindle app works. It's free, available in Apple Inc. (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people )'s App Store for U.S. residents. Amazon says it's working on taking it international, though I wouldn't hold my breath because that would involve securing international publishing rights. Apart from the iPhone, it will also work on the iPod Touch.

Once you've loaded the app, you can buy books on Amazon's Web store. You'll have to use either a computer or the iPhone's browser. Unlike some other e-book readers, including the Kindle, the app doesn't have a built-in store. Considering that most people are familiar with the Web site, this isn't a major shortcoming.

New books cost a few dollars less than the print versions, and some public-domain books are available for 99 cents.

Tap one, and its text fills the screen. Turn the page by swiping over it with your finger. If you do something else with your phone, then return to the reader app, it will show you the last page you were reading, so there's no need to fiddle with bookmarks or bend page corners.

That's great for reading short snatches here and there. Whip your iPhone out in the elevator, and your co-travellers won't know that you're ignoring them in the best way by catching up on Danielle Steel. You won't look like a snob in the supermarket checkout line, even if you're reading Stendhal's "The Charterhouse of Parma."

Since the screen is backlit, you don't need a light source.

If you've already bought a book for the Kindle device, it will load on your iPhone for free, and vice versa. If you're reading a book both on the Kindle and the iPhone, the two devices will communicate to keep track of how far you've read.

This sounds elegant, but the app has a mildly annoying habit of freezing when it's trying to communicate with Amazon when your wireless connection is weak.

Most of the other shortcomings have to do with reading comfort.

E-book readers haven't taken off in part because people don't like reading on a computer screen. The Kindle reading device, which costs $359, tackles that by using a novel screen technology known as electronic ink. It's not backlit, so it looks a lot more like paper, but it has numerous drawbacks, most notably that it can't show a bright white or a really dark black. Since it doesn't show any colors either, it looks like gray, unbleached paper printed with weak ink.

The iPhone and iPod Touch screens are nothing like that, of course. They have great contrast and color. But the Kindle app will show all books on a white background that many will find too bright, making it uncomfortable to read. You can turn down the screen brightness, but that will leave it too dark for other applications.

Other e-book readers available on the iPhone, like eReader and Stanza, let you pick a background and text color that won't hurt your eyes. These other reading applications also let you pick the font and set the margins on the screen. The only adjustment the Amazon app offers is the font size.

I also noticed that the app cut off the ends of some indented paragraphs in Max Brooks' "The Zombie Survival Guide," making them impossible to read. The Kindle 2, which went on sale last week, doesn't do this. Hopefully Amazon will fix the app before there's a major zombie uprising.

But the Kindle on the iPhone is still the best e-book reader I've seen so far.

Other applications are hampered by a weak selection of books and inelegant ordering systems. You can probably find something you won't mind reading on the eReader and Stanza, but if you have a particular book in mind from the outset, you're likely to be disappointed. Stanza has the bad habit of freezing for nearly a minute when launched.

A third, relatively new application called Shortcovers gave me frequent connection problems, and perplexingly it seems to emphasize providing samples rather than full books, even when the books are in the public domain.

The eReader does have the virtue of being available for other cell phones, so you're not completely left out if you don't have an iPhone. Another alternative, Mobipocket, is available for practically every "smart" phone except the iPhone. But there are few phones out there with screens large and sharp enough to make reading pleasurable.

The Kindle 2 is four times the size of the iPhone. You might prefer Kindle's screen, but I think most people will be fine with the phone once they get used to it. The dedicated reader has much longer battery life, but the iPhone will last for a domestic flight, and you need a charge the phone every other day or so anyway.

Perhaps the biggest advantage of the Kindle 2 is that it can subscribe to newspapers, which load wirelessly every day. The iPhone makes up for this to some extent through free news applications.

The iPhone costs less to buy than the Kindle, but the monthly wireless service fees quickly make up the difference, so don't get an iPhone just as an e-book reader. For that, get an iPod Touch for $229. It doesn't have any monthly fees.

Try the app. With an engrossing book and the brightness turned down, you'll forget after a little while that you're not reading on paper, and your surroundings will fade as your mind is sucked into that little screen.

Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed

When the Kindle e-reader first appeared 14 months ago, Amazon-watchers were surprised to see the e-commerce giant redefine itself as a gadget maker. But Tuesday, when Amazon.com released a free application for the iPod and iPhone that allows users to read its e-books on those devices, it cemented its original book-selling mission.

In other words, it's all about the content.

The Kindle software for the iPhone and iPod, which Amazon.com (nasdaq: AMZN - news - people ) Chief Executive Jeff Bezos first hinted at during the release of the Kindle 2 last month, allows users to buy and read any of Amazon 230,000 e-books on any of the three devices and seamlessly move them among the gadgets.

While the software gives up the Kindle's exclusive hold on Amazon's digital catalog, it taps into a potentially much larger audience for Amazon's e-books--Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) has sold around 15 million iPhones, while Amazon had sold only around 500,000 Kindles at last count, according to an estimate by Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney. And that, says Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey, means Amazon has definitively focused on selling e-books above selling e-readers.

"This puts a stake in the ground around the idea that they really want you to be able to access the content you buy from them on any platform. And that's something we haven't seen other major media initiatives do," McQuivey says.

Apple's iTunes store, by contrast, has traditionally sold content tied to its music players--a bid to sell more hardware rather than content. Amazon, McQuivey says, has now made clear it's taking the opposite approach. "Amazon is saying, 'This is about books. We want you to feel that you can read our books anywhere, and we want you to buy more of them,'" McQuivey says. "They're saying, 'We're not a Kindle maker. We're a content provider and a content liberator.'"

Amazon may be liberating its content, but it's not liberating its hardware. Even as the company's book-selling platform expands, it's not likely to become compatible with other content providers. That could give the e-retailer a stranglehold on the budding market for e-books, a strategy likely to rankle publishers.

In an essay for Forbes last month, tech publisher Tim O'Reilly criticized Amazon's decision to close the Kindle to non-Amazon content (see "Why Kindle Should Be An Open Book"). Unless the company opened the Kindle to formats like epub, which work across a variety of non-Amazon-sanctioned devices, the Kindle would become irrelevant in two or three years, he predicts.

One thing I've learned in the years I've been reviewing products is that design details matter, even if the eye at first skims over them. The shape of a button or placement of a key can mean the difference between delight and drudgery. So it's not surprising that subtle changes in Amazon.com's (AMZN) second-generation Kindle e-book reader make it a vastly better product than the original.

Introduced in late 2007, the Kindle was a breakthrough in the long-disappointing field of e-book readers. Despite its mediocre hardware design, Amazon's elegant solution for buying and downloading content over an invisible network made it a winner. With the Kindle 2 ($359), Amazon is at last offering a device that is as good as the rest of the system. The combination of the new hardware and its superior book-buying experience puts the Kindle 2 miles ahead of its only real rival, the $300 Sony (SNE) Reader.

Better-Placed Buttons

Using the new Kindle is nothing like reading e-books on a laptop. You can enjoy the device anywhere you can whip out a regular book and not worry much about how you hold it. This wasn't necessarily the case with the Kindle 1. So much of its surface was covered with buttons that I never knew quite where to put my hands, and I was forever unintentionally turning pages, jumping to the menu, or triggering some other disruption.

The Kindle 2's buttons are much smaller and better placed. The ones that turn pages have been redesigned and no longer respond to a stray press on the edge of the reader. The odd scroll wheel on the original Kindle has been replaced by a more traditional five-way navigation control of the sort used on many cell phones. These changes—a cleaner look overall and half the thickness (just over a third of an inch)—add up to a far more pleasant experience.

Amazon also either left alone or improved the parts that worked well. Delivery of books, magazines, and newspapers is done over the Sprint (S) wireless broadband network and requires no user registration or extra fees. Purchases are billed to your Amazon account, and the cost of the network is built into the price. (One downside: Amazon's choice of network technology, along with content-licensing issues, limits the Kindle to the U.S. market, at least for now.) A redesigned keyboard lets you check for titles in the Kindle store, search for text in a book, or add annotations or bookmarks.

There are other nifty improvements: The display, based on technology from E Ink in Cambridge, Mass., supports 16 shades of grey instead of 4. Power consumption, low to begin with, has been cut further, so the battery lasts for days at a stretch. Pages turn a bit faster, and the Kindle can even read text to you—though no one will confuse its synthesized voice with that of an audiobook. There's enough memory to store 1,500 books, so managing your library is likely to be a bigger problem than running out of space. If you have multiple Kindles, new or old, linked to the same Amazon account, downloaded content appears on all of them. And Amazon promises, a bit vaguely, the future ability to load Kindle books onto other devices.

Not Perfect in Dim Light

There are things that could be done to make the Kindle even better. The E Ink display, which relies on reflected light rather than the backlight used by a computer or phone screen, is easy on the eyes, provided the lighting is good. But, as with Kindle 1, the letters are dark grey on light grey rather than black on white and thus a little hard to read in dim conditions. And too often I find that the book I want isn't available, even though Amazon offers more than 200,000 titles. (Prices range from $1 to around $15, with most books going for $10.) One last gripe, which isn't going to change: Unlike a paper book, a Kindle title can't be sold or given away when you're done with it.

Ultimately, the best market for the Kindle may be as a replacement for huge, expensive textbooks. But textbooks need a low-cost, large-format display and, especially for K-12 education, color. E Ink is working on both, but neither is likely in the near term.

I still prefer the old-fashioned pleasure of reading ink-and-paper books. But a couple of weeks with the Kindle 2 is converting me. The ability to carry a whole library in a 10-oz. package makes it a reader's treasure.

 

A new Amazon Kindle is coming out in a few days.

Due to high internet usage, people don't have enough time to read books. To read books is pretty important cause it's very hard to get every different kind of knowledge within finite time and place.

For me, it's a little bit sad for me to make a lot of excuse for having no time to read books.


I used to be kinda bookworms until I was 24 years old.
However, after getting a job, I thought I was kinda tied up to other things.

Anyway, I admitted that we should get indirect experience as much as we can.



Also, this is one way to give publishing company better circumstances to survive and help us to make our lives better.


Second Amazon Kindle has a better shaped, keyboard layout and a little bit wide and longer screen.

:) Enjoy!!!