Already With a Fan Blog for the Kindle

Kindleville is exactly what you’d expect from the title: a site filled with “news, opinions and speculation about [Amazon.com's] Kindle e-book device.” One of my favorite features so far is the regular interviewers with actual Kindle users, like law librarian Mary Minow, who’s in Amazon’s focus group for the machine, management advice author Lisa Hanberg, and interface design expert Michael Puhala. Those three users are fairly enthusiastic overall, but the blog also offers a less glowing perspective from a customer named Kit Redmond:

“Two days after we got it, the Kindle [stopped] working all together. After calling Customer Service a couple of times we were finally informed that it would be approximately two weeks until we could receive a replacement. We were disappointed that Amazon did not have a contingency to replace faulty Kindles immediately. The Customer service representative told me that they only had a small support staff. Those answers were not acceptable to me for a device that was so new and so expensive.”

What I found even more interesting, though, was an item linking to a Forrester Research report that suggests “Amazon… will be lucky to sell more than 50,000 units in its first year,” because “the Kindle solves problems that publishers and retailers have, not problems that readers have.”

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