Kindle 2 International and actual UK vs U.S. book pricing - Update

UPDATE - Oct 12 - Australia's The Age just copied The Guardian story without checking Amazon's Australia country-info on product page for the International Kindle.
  The Age and other repeating-newspapers claim it's $13.99 for books in Australia and a 40% increase while the product page says $11.99 unless marked otherwise.  Whatever happened to first-level fact checking?
  Meanwhile MediaBistro understandably picked it up and reports that "Jeremy Fisher, executive director of the 3,000-member Society, thinks Australian writers should avoid the Kindle for these pricey reasons."

---

Main blog entry from Oct. 10
Well, a column by writer Bobbie Johnson that I briefly referenced yesterday for citing an unreasonably-high pricing calculation for the cost of providing a book for UK residents via 'roaming' mechanisms (at the same time that a sibling Guardian-column quoted an Amazon spokesperson saying there would be "no" roaming fees for UK residents in the UK) was updated by Johnson to report that, per a conversation he had with an Amazon rep, Amazon "confirmed" they will be charging a "premium" for UK residents and then he linked us to another column of his that said "International Buyers to be charged 40% more per book" than U.S. customers are - an alarmist column that did anger readers who believed it.

  I bring this up because today Twitter is alive with 'tweets' about other newspapers picking it up, one after the other, and just repeating it as fact.  That's nothing new but it's unnecessary and definitely misleading.

  Ironically, that was an update to a column in which Johnson originally opined that American customers were subsidizing the UK customers' higher costs for Amazon.

  Johnson cited the one UK price of $13.99 despite the Amazon product page for the UK Kindle specifically saying, from the announcement day:

' Free Wireless: ... No monthly fees, service plans, or hunting for Wi-Fi hotspots.  For non-U.S. customers, there are also no additional charges for wireless delivery in or outside your home country...

  Low Book Prices: New York Times® Best Sellers and New Releases are $11.99 to $13.99 (prices include VAT), unless marked otherwise. You'll also find many books for less - over 70,000 titles are priced under $5.99. '

First, Value Added Tax charged by Great Britain is *included* in the book price.  That's not an Amazon premium charge.
  As of January the VAT will be nearly 17% over the cost of the book.
And the base price of the range is $11.99, not $13.99. In the U.S. bestsellers are $9.99 and up.

So, no, it's not generally 40% over the cost in the U.S.  Even at the $13.99 range, U.S. Kindle owners are aware some bestsellers are not selling for only $9.99, too often going for as much as $15  And, again, the int'l pricing includes the government's value-added tax and is not a charge for the book. (Edited per correction by Jim.)

However, the UK will not have the experimental web browser, which some of us value having.  And I guess they won't have it unless or until the wireless-provider pricing is low enough in affected countries to cover the cost of that as Sprint does here in the U.S.   Countries which WILL have the web-browser enabled are Mexico, Hong Kong, and Tokyo.

For added irony, Johnson linked us to another Guardian article, this one by Charles Arthur, who spoke with Amazon's SVP in charge of the Kindle, Stephen Kessel, who reiterated Amazon's policy (I quoted this yesterday) that UK residents won't be paying roaming charges at home nor in the U.S.  This was why Johnson's first focus was that it seemed to him that U.S. residents would be subsidizing UK Kindle users.

  The problem for those in the UK is that they can buy books for now only from the U.S. Amazon store.  This means a possible import/customs fee -- these don't apply to hard-cover books but somehow appear to be in the mix for e-books (which the government can change).  However, those also are not Amazon book charges.  But prospective buyers will need to factor that in.

So, as this 40% added Amazon-charge for UK customers rumor percolates around the globe, maybe some will know it's not true, even if repeated by 50 newpapers and online sites.

  The basic price difference in the bestseller price-range for both U.S. and U.K. is 17% - near the cost of the Value Added Tax charged over there.   And here are additions from knowledgeable people commenting to the article.

===
"Pricing sounds quite logical, VAT will be 15% or 17.5% from 1 January which does explain part of the price differential vs. a print book. Why is this?
Surely the EU should be promoting E-books from a green perspective and allow no VAT like the paper format?

It would also make sense that from a scale perspective that costs in the other countries will be more than the US where there is a bigger market."
  [ by jimbob70 ]

_______
"On the pricing thing. A lot of it has to do with UK publishers charging higher list price for their ebooks than US publishers.

For example Audrey Niffenegger's new book Her Fearful Symmetry...

US list price $26.99 (approx 17.02)
UK list price 21.84 (approx $34.63) "
  [ by BrianEb ]

_______

Photo credit: L.A. Times

Kindle 2 International - Follow-up news 10-09-09 - Update

Follow-up news on the Kindle 2  International after the big splash on Tuesday.

Mildly updated the "kindlecountries" file of country-specific Kindle information formatted from the Amazon page to include the news/rumors in New Zealand and Canada.

NEW ZEALAND
Kindle may yet come to New Zealand per New Zealand PC World's James Heffield.

Vodaphone's Paul Brislen says that Vodaphone is in "deep discussions" with Amazon to bring the K2i to New Zealand. However, he wouldn't speculate on how likely a deal with Amazon is or when it might happen and wasn't sure whether other telecommuications providers were also in negotiation with Amazon.

Telecom spokesperson Rebecca Earl was non-commital about ANYthing, confirming nothing but saying the company could "see the appeal of the Kindle" and was exploring options for "a device of this type."


AMAZON IN NEGOTATIONS WITH 3 CANADIAN COMPANIES?
The Globe & Mail reports that Amazon has 3 possible partners in Canada now while Amazon is shopping around for the best deal on the cost of providing Kindle owners wireless capability there.

If the problem lay with the inability to find a wireless carrier at a doable price, Amazon could have offered Canada the same non-wireless option it offered other countries, but someone in the know says it's a matter of time and deciding which company will handle it.
Rogers, an AT&T partner, had seemed the only source (maybe causing it to keep its pricing higher?) but Bell and Telus are going live with their next generation network earlier than expected, in November, which has implications for the holiday season.
The article ends with yet another report that a Canadian Kindle user reported to the newspaper that he has been able, in the last month, to download wirelessly in Canada.


UK/EUROPEAN MOBILE PROVIDERS DESCRIBED AS SURPRISED BY KINDLE INT'L
According to Mobil Phone News's Luke McKinney, Vodafone and O2 are "in charge of wireless signals" in the UK but they seem to have been caught off guard, judging from their press releases, by Amazon's latest news. McKinney feels it's "especially odd considering Amazon’s previous statement that they couldn’t unleash their equipment in the UK until extensive negotiations with telecoms companies were complete."

He writes that UK mobile service is "notoriously provincial" with "various networks having hotspots and not-spots."


THE GUARDIAN (UK) ON ROAMING CHARGES PAID BY VISITING AMERICANS
The writer asks why Amazon UK didn't launch it -- I think it's because they don't have the serving technology, Kindle billing and Kindle customer service support setup there yet. But the article references another Guardian article in which Amazon SVP Stephen Kessel spoke with the Guardian writer and mentioned the Kindle Int'l is not shipping until after the Frankfurt Book Fair, where publishers work their deals). I'm not sure how that relates to the question.

But the import tax situation then for UK residents is not attractive. The UK Value-Added Taxes are included in the cost of the books there.

Kessel did say, ""In the future we plan to introduce a UK-centric experience to allow people in Britain to purchase Kindle and Kindle books," Kessel said."

In connection with the puzzlement of UK wireless providers, The Guardian adds:

' Another mystifying question: which mobile network is Amazon going to use? AT&T, its partner in the US, doesn't have a presence in the UK. So who is Amazon's UK mobile network? Its earlier statements this morning were models of non-clarity:

"Kindle with international wireless uses advanced 3G GSM technology to power Amazon's wireless delivery system 'Whispernet' over the AT&T Global Network."

Could Kessel elucidate? Is Amazon going to be a mobile virtual network operator in the UK, like Virgin, renting airtime from the main four networks (O2, Orange, Vodafone and 3)?

"AT&T is through their network of partnerships providing 3G network coverage to Kindle and Whispernet across 100 countries." Er, OK, so which network in the UK? "You'd have to ask AT&T." We intend to. But he said that there will be no "roaming" charges; if you're a UK Kindle buyer you won't get any charges using it in the UK from a mobile network. What about a UK Kindle owner in the US - would they see roaming charges? "You pay no roaming charges."

[ What ? ]

Then there's the final question, relating to books and publication rights, which has exercised publishers and authors and agents. You'll know that some books are published in some countries, but not in others. These are often the subject of big rights bids.
. . .
Even so, we've heard that if you subscribe to UK papers on a Kindle in the UK that you may not be able to get images downloaded (there might be copyright issues). We're seeking confirmation on that. '

The commenters to that article are not overenthused about e-readers in general.

Returning to the article about "Roaming Charges paid by Americans" - that takes official customer-rates for 'roaming' rates to a situation in which the wireless will be provided by partners who are right there in the UK and comes up with an unreasonably high figure for costs there as a result, and even U.S's Sprint is said to charge relatively little to Amazon for unused bandwidth relative to what they'd charge individual customers.

Every article referenced from the Guardian has wholly different points of view on this.


FUN MUSINGS by JIM CRAMER on AMAZON
This is Cramer's intro to a story for which have to sign up to read it in full, which I didn't.  Since it's used as a lead and lure for a 14-day trial, I'll expand the possible audience here.  Cramer writes:

' Do you know that Amazon is closing in on its all-time high? Do you know that what was once considered the most overvalued stock in the world is now starting to be viewed as cheap, even as it goes higher, because of the tremendous scale it is reaching and the company's effort to drive down product pricing?

When I heard about still one more price cut for the Kindle, it dawned on me. Amazon is Ford, and Jeff Bezos is Henry Ford, without the cranky anti-Semitism and braggadocio demeanor, although I never heard Ford laugh, so I don't know if they have that in common. Ford decided to make cars for the masses, and with it, he broke down the price barriers and grabbed market share and mind share and scale, making it so that his company was so rich that he could afford to pay... '

OFF-TOPIC, BUT INTERESTING BEZOS/GOOGLE STORY
'...Kara Swisher at All Things D has details from Ken Auletta’s upcoming book, “Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, says TechFlash.
  Among the juicy tidbits: Bezos invested $250,000 in then-startup Google in 1998 at 4 cents a share. The Amazon CEO told Auletta that he “just fell in love with” Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at their first meeting in a Silicon Valley garage.  While it’s not clear what Bezos did with his piece of Google, Swisher notes that his stock would be worth $1.6 billion today. '

 Ouch!  The article also mentions Amazon's Google-search-challenger A9 which did not do well.  The A9 unit still provides the searches for its ecommerce sites.  The Amazon forums had no searches for the last 2 years but added a very fast, effective one last month.
  Jeff Bezos was an early investor in Twitter too.

KINDLE DX
Several articles quote Amazon as saying they'll make an international Kindle DX also, but how could they not ?  They say only that it'll be sometime next year.

US/INT'L Kindle for release Oct 19 '09 Update9

UPDATE 6 - Added "kindlecountries" file of country-specific Kindle information formatted from the Amazon page for easier browsing of where Kindles or Kindle content can be shipped and where wireless access is available for Kindle owners, as of October 6, 2009.

UPDATE 7 & 9 - The experimental web browser and blogs are NOT available in almost all the countries I explored, including the UK, France, and Italy.

  This is said explicitly for most countries, but Japan, Hong Kong, and Mexico do not have the negative wording, so they may well have the web browswer capability.  I didn't check the entire list for that though.

Check the detailed pull-down menu at the Kindle Int'l page for your country.  Book prices are different and there are such things as the VAT or value-added-tax being included in the UK pricing but also purchases in some countries being subject to customs duties, import taxes and other fees levied by the destination country. Those fees will show upon upon checkout.

UPDATE 8 - Clarification of the $2 charge
  "When traveling abroad, you can download books wirelessly from the Kindle Store or your Archived Items. U.S. customers will be charged a fee of $1.99 for international downloads."
  This can be avoided by having the book be downloadable to your computer instead, for transfer to your Kindle via the USB cable.

NOTE that for the UK and other countries:
  "You can transfer personal documents to your Kindle via USB for free at anytime. Service fees for transferring personal documents via Whispernet are currently $.99 per megabyte." (vs the $.15 per megabyte for U.S. customers nearer the servers).

UPDATE 9 - Wireless coverage maps for all Kindles
These are now under "Whispernet Coverage" in the reference section (right-hand column).

---

Main blog entry Oct. 6
I will be updating this blog article as it goes! Our conjecture about the reasons for the weekend glitches was on the money.  It had to do with international sales and the horrors of publisher prohibitions in some areas while making agreements in others.

  Hardcover sales don't know international boundaries that e-books are subjected to by the publishers.  That makes a nightmare for the programmers since people are temporarily in some places where rules are different.

BUT the INTERNATIONAL KINDLE is a reality now.  Pardon the caps.
  And this means "no monthly charges" in those areas too, per the product page ad.

These will be ready October 19 for wireless use in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Cambodia, Japan, Taiwan, Cayman Islands, and other countries that I've not checked yet.  Countries not involved yet include Canada, China and Singapore, alas. Australia gets a special page of its own.  Beyond that, I've not checked for now.  Check the pull-down menu on the product page though.

Here are the following Kindles and pricing as of now, for ordering and, in the case of the new Kindle with International capabilities (3G), pre-ordering.

Kindle 2 - $259,   Kindle US/Int'l - $279, Kindle DX - $489

Also, Australia needs to sell one without a power adapter and relies on the USB cable for power.   Go to AUSTRALIAN Kindle page.

WIRED MAGAZINE info
WIRED magazine's Steven Levy has more salient details and quotes from Jeff Bezos

' As Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos explains it in a phone interview with Wired, “The two Kindles are identical, except for the radio.” The new device does not sync with Sprint, which was previously the exclusive supplier for Amazon’s Whispernet technology.  Instead, it works with AT&T’s wireless network, which has the global reach that Amazon needs for its international plans.

...Won’t everybody want to spend 20 bucks more on the AT&T version that that works all around the world, even if a cross-border trip isn’t on the immediate horizon? “I would!” says Bezos. Indeed, having a Kindle that downloads from overseas means you can get your favorite newspapers and magazines delivered instantly, at the same cost you pay at home. '

The Lonely Planet series will be sold on Kindle along with currently available Frommer, Rick Steves and Michelin.

In Europe, the current Kindles that people have will not work with the European AT&T wireless.   This is kind of funny:

' ... Those who bought a Kindle in the last 30 days can exchange them for the international version.  Maybe the biggest gripes will come from those who bought the most expensive Kindle, the supersized DX.  Imagine sitting in a Paris bistro with your US-download-only $490 DX and watching some tourist with a puny $280 Kindle filling up with newspapers, Michelin guides and the latest Michael Connelly thriller.

  The story explains the complexities of copyright and royalties dependent on where an e-book book is sold and mentions that of the 350,000 books in the Kindlestore, only 200,000 will be available in some countries.

  Also, publishers who will not release a Kindle edition along with the release of a hardcover edition are being somewhat shortsighted.  Bezos says, ""When you’re on NPR and someone goes on their Kindle to look for the book, it’s your chance to make that sale... They won’t remember in a month or two.”

KINDLE SALES - STATS - PER WIRED MAG INTERVIEW
While Bezos startled the publishing world by announcing that Kindle sales were 35% of Amazon book sales in cases where Kindle editions were also made available, Wired reports: "Now, he says, the number is up to 48 percent."

  Here's a point Jeff Bezos made, which is important re pricing:

' The international Kindle is not just for Americans traveling abroad.  Bezos says that Amazon’s sales patterns show a sizable demand for English language books in countries that speak other languages.  Until now, readers in those countries have found such books to be expensive and hard to find, not to mention slow to arrive after being ordered.  The global Kindle will make the process cheap and instant.

  In connection with digital tablet rumors, Wired reports:

' He says that Amazon is hard at work making software apps (like the one already available for the iPhone) that will extend the Kindle system to other devices. He’s also still open “in principle” to rival e-reader manufacturers who wish to use the Kindle store to provide content.  But he feels that while people may read on phones and web-surfing tablets, the dedicated e-reading device will keep improving.
  “We want Kindle to be the best way to read,” Bezos says. And now, people can read books that they download outside the US.

See more details at WIRED magazine.

I will be doing more updates with the detail I find for countries that I can summarize.

You can try the pulldown screen for countries of interest to you at the Kindle Int'l page though.

A geographic-restriction glitch for non-USA Kindle book purchases - Update3

See UPDATES at bottom of this blog article.  Glitch is now fixed for most reporting in.

Customers on the MobileRead forums and Amazon Kindle forums reported that although they have, for a long time, been able to buy Kindle books while out of the country for Kindles Amazon had shipped to their given U.S. addresses, they received geographic-restriction rejections of the Kindle book orders, starting this weekend.

This occurred even with People using U.S. credit cards (rather than gift certificates which can be used internationally).  Kindle owner and author Bufo Calvin started an Amazon forum poll to try to find out the circumstances of those affected before making assumptions and gathered already some good information.

A reassuring response came from customer Eliza Bennet, from Canada, who responded to Bufo with this information:

' I just (an hour ago) spoke with a kindle CS rep and he informed me that "something went wrong" with the amazon server and many techies had been called in over the weekend to fix the problem vis à vis the "geographic restriction" message.  I live in (Ottawa) Canada and gave him the name/billing address of the credit card attached to my account (which belongs to a friend living near Boston), and he made no comment about it not being my own card.  He also had no adverse reaction to my saying I paid for books with a gift card.  Certainly hope that he knew whereof he spoke! '

BlogKindle had an earlier article today in which he suggested a workaround if needed, using US proxy servers.

This weekend's problems are likely due to changes made in connection with an anticipated launch of the Kindle in the UK, which has had digital book restrictions also, and programming changes, too often, have untoward effects on other areas of similar code.

When you have questions that other customers can help with, a visit to the Amazon Kindle Community forums can be helpful.  There are also some amusing threads there too that I've pointed to before.  The forums are for sharing of information between customers and can also be playful (sometimes a tad rough) and is a good community with lots of new people everyday needing help.  Now they finally have a forum-search mechanism so that helps quite a bit.

UPDATE2 10/5/09   - Original Posting was 10/4 at 3:52 PM
  (Update1 was incorporated above.)
Julia of the forum-poll thread above added a written response from Customer Service tonight, which was another example of customers with U.S. credit cards and address being affected by the problem as well:

' I'm sorry for the trouble you had when trying to purchase Kindle books outside U.S using a payment method issued by a U.S. Bank with a U.S.billing address. I've reported this to our technical team, and they're working on taking care of it.

Please try again over the next few days. Errors like this are usually
corrected shortly after they're reported... '

They've been corrected for some customers, so far, as reported in the forum thread.

UPDATE3 10/6/09, 3:15 PM -  Original Posting was 10/4 at 3:52 PM
Caroline Wong has made a second, updated poll at the Amazon Kindle forums, to monitor how the fixes by Amazon are going.  Many are reporting they can once again order as they did before.  And in the original poll by Bufo Calvin, some who had problems have been reporting they are once again able to order/buy from Amazon as before and have received non-boilerplate email from Amazon Customer Service representatives who have been following up on the problem.

 At MobileRead forums, 'mgmueller' describes how he has been buying books from Germany as an Amazon-US customer and that it is working for him.  Earlier than his post is one from 'Dharmabum' who was unable to buy e-books this weekend unless using an IP# workaround but can buy again today using his regular method, which is like mgmueller's and those of others reporting on the Amazon forum threads.

  The glitch is obviously being fixed for many, including some who were/are skeptical about it being a technical glitch.  Various workarounds over the weekend had been Hotspot Shield, VPN to US, and UltraSurf 9.5 - the latter has been reported to be not entirely safe due to processes noticed in it, reports which I can link to later; it could also be due to processes meant to confuse authorities in China who are banning Net access to many to various sites, but I opted not to test it due to some reports.

UPDATE4 10/12/09
On October 7, one day after the International Kindle 2 announcement, Customer Service wrote to Bufo Calvin's poll thread at Amazon forums to say that they felt they had resolved the problem and that all affected were able to receive books again, with the gift certificates they had been using.

DX and PDF Author-Title Corrections. K1 & K2 also.

Mark Alexander recommended, in the Sheet Music comments section, the free pdftk command-line utility to modify the metadata (title, author) in PDF files before transferring them to the Kindle.  He mentions that the Kindle appears to recognize only Author and Title fields.  See Mark's instructions for modifying that data.

He wrote an extra file for use with this - "pdfmeta" - which allows one simple command to be given (shown in his guide) instead of having to make the small file with author and title info.

HOWEVER, Windows users would run any of this in a DOS window and I realize most are not comfortable with that.  In that case, you can instead try Calibre to change that type of info in a PDF.  This must be a not-easy thing to do, as Calibre's method does not work with some PDF files.  At any rate, you can choose to get Windows, Mac, or Linux versions of Calibre and there are pages for features, with screenshots.

Calibre is what I used for converting any of Google's million free ePub files to Kindle-compatible files.  Calibre can do many things.

I'll add a blog entry later for good free utilities that convert PDFs to Word files to keep some complicated formatting and then sending these to Amazon for a free conversion to Kindle format which would be emailed back to your everyday email for free so that the attached converted file can be put, via USB cable, into to your Kindle DX or Kindle 1 or 2.  Of course, we can send instead to our [us]@kindle.com address to have converted files sent to our Kindles via Whispernet but that costs 15 cents per each megabyte of a file.

  At any rate, For DX's, this conversion provides an added non-PDF file copy that can be highlighted and for which notes can be made and the Kindle inline-directory used (and the text-to-speech would work for those also, while that function doesn't work with PDFs).
  For Kindles 1 and 2, it can provide a conversion with better layout, though simple-layout PDFs with one column and almost no illustrations can be sent to your Kindle address for the usual Amazon conversion.

I'll be going on vacation, during which time I will concentrate more on Kindle tips.  If you have questions about how anything might be done, contact me and I can add it to a list of topics. Thanks!

Kindle DX' - Refurbished, $350, now available - Oct 2009

THIS IS THE EARLIER ANNOUNCEMENT IN OCT 2009. PLEASE SEE INSTEAD JULY 2010 PRICES (CONSIDERABLY LOWER) AT July 2010 Refurbished DX pricing.

The rest, below, are just archives and history at this point. 

Amazon is now offering (June 2010 update) refurbished Kindle Dx's for $399.99 $349.99, with a year's warranty when they become available.  This is a large savings over a new Kindle DX.

  There is currently one offer under the Refurbished category, when I looked at the Used area (there are no used ones currently). These are factory refurbished and factory sealed packages which carry the usual Amazon customer service and the Kindle 30-day return policy if you don't want to keep the DX (return shipping is paid by Amazon).

  I called the Amazon Kindle customer service dept about the warranty, and 'Gustavo' checked on it, to see that the warranty on refurbished DX's is the same as for refurbished Kindle 2's.  It's the basic one-year Amazon warranty and covers any defects (the Kindle is replaced in that case) but doesn't cover accidents in which the Kindle is damaged.

Here's a summary of warranty information:
    WARRANTY: 1 full year for defects. Doesn't include accidents.
      No extended-warranty from Amazon is available on these.
      Drops w/damage resulting can qualify for discounted new refurbs.
      Year 1, any unit defects are covered.
      Amazon offers the usual 30-day return policy on these.
      Above information from Customer Svc Reps Nitesh and Gustvao.

    SquareTrade offers an extended warranty for refurbished units
    but they don't cover drops/accidents on refurbished units.
      (Drop coverage is the reason many of us get an extra warranty.)
      If wanting a SquareTrade extra-years warranty,
        google for a SquareTrade coupon to use with it.


I am partial to the DX myself (more info on the basic unit at Amazon's product page).

  Here are photos I took of my own DX showing how it looks with web-pages, PDFs, and with normal book text.
  I added a photo of plain text on the screen, taken at an ice cream shop last week (here's a smaller shot that includes the keyboard also).

  Remember that the Kindles have 24/7 free, though slow, web access via cellular wireless network, with no monthly or annual subscription charges currently or for the last two years.

  No other e-reader comes with that feature, which has been useful for me when away from my computers and needing to look up info.  Google and Wikipedia are built-in options for searches on words or phrases.

Media exaggeration on the Daily Princetonian story

Media exaggeration and some misrepresentation was of interest to me this week as online columns described The Daily Princetonian report on, essentially, one student's remarks and turned it into a "consensus of students" and headlined "failure" of the Kindle at Princeton, from those bare bones after the beginning two weeks of an entire Fall Session study.

Longterm, who knows, that could be, but not based on the college newspaper's story.

  (I've had my own doubts about our inability to make notes on PDF's, a critical flaw for academic use, even if there are workarounds, and have written about it.)

But, after reading yet another misstatement of the Daily Princetonian story from a writer at a large online tecnnical site who actually gave the most balanced interpretation I've read (from about 20 online articles), I wrote a comment to the columnist.  I'll just insert that here and call it a day.  (There is a lot of other, more interesting news and I'll get those up tomorrow night.)

Written to the column mentioned above:

' October 1, 2009 7:34 PM PDT
' _____, you wrote one of the most balanced pieces on The Daily Princetonian report but even you said:

' Feedback from some students complained about the
Kindle's annotation system being "too slow" to keep up with the thinking of a reader who wants to effortlessly mark up text.  Others called the entire Kindle device "a poor excuse for an academic tool." '

  As with the other online reports that used mostly one student's feedback [but referred to] "some" and "others" (as above), they were/are all quoting primarily Aaron Horvath, who said all of the above.

  The ONE other student quoted talked about the 'huge benefits' and the downsides as well, one of the downsides being that you have to charge the Kindle to use it.

  The other two people quoted were
  (1) an obviously resistant professor who was "permitting"! his students (in a selected KINDLE STUDY classroom) to use Kindle location numbers, since not one of the students has dropped out of the study though they are allowed to, and
  (2) another professor who enjoys using the Kindle and had nothing negative to quote.

The Amazon Kindle study with several universities is taking place this year, so it's no surprise the relative effectiveness of the learning process using an e-reader and the paper-saving goals which are also a focus) wouldn't be studied next year.

  From that we've been getting tons of articles generalizing from that one student's words after two weeks of use, calling [the negative feelings] a "consensus" in one article and the study "a failure" in others.  As I say, yours was the most balanced I've read of about a dozen so far. '

  I don't know.  Am I the only one who wishes columnists would not overgeneralize and, essentially, mischaracterize one student's statements this way?
  The reluctant professor is obviously not loving the idea in the first place.  But the headlines have been about how "students" are responding to the Kindle :-).

  Students are allowed to opt out of the program, but so far none have, and we've now heard, primarily, from one student out of the 50 in the study.