Amazon.com CEO and firestarter Jeff Bezos sat down to Charlie Rose's table last night. There, Bezos predicted Amazon's new e-reader Kindle will in the near future lead to new forms of art — like serial novels! — and render books made from "dead trees" as relics for "cabinets of curiosity." Bezos also gets in a characteristic maniacal laugh or two. Rose impersonates a tree.
Rob Beschizza over at Gadget Lab made an important observation about Amazon's new electronic book reader: It's terrible. At least 38 percent of customer reviews on Amazon.com douse the Kindle with a 1-star rating. Perhaps Jeff Bezos should consider adopting Apple's old policy of automatically assigning top ratings to its own products.
Amazon's new e-book reader Kindle was released today to great fanfare — and a Newsweek planted story "exclusive." The Kindle — supposedly named after the "crackling ignition of knowledge" — holds 200 books, each downloadable for $10 over a works-anywhere-sort-of EVDO data connection, fetches the New York Times for $13 a month, and generously allows you to pay a subscription fee to have blogs like Huffington Post and TechCrunch pushed to your Kindle. That's all well and good, but how does it stack up to the book? You know, the thing that Amazon has made billions of dollars shipping to you? Our easy-to-read chart is after the jump — and you don't have to pay $2 a month to read it.
