i recently played around with a kindle 4th gen device which is now simply known as the “kindle”. the 3rd gen kindle that i still own is now known as the “kindle keyboard”. the new kindle has scrapped the physical keyboard and in doing so has made the device much more compact. the screen is still the same size as the previous model. getting rid of the keyboard makes sense…besides when i had to type in a WPA2 key for joining a wireless network, i can’t recall the last time i used it. the other differences between the 4 and previous generation are minimal. one thing that kind of sucks is the fact that they went from 4GB of internal storage to 2GB. e-books are generally a couple 100K in size so it would seem like it wouldn’t be that big of a deal. however, i store a lot of technical pdfs with graphics on my kindle that take up a good chunk of space. for instance, i have 230 items total on my kindle and i’m using up 1.3GB of the storage. so it’d be nice if they returned to the 4GB storage again for the 5th gen.

the kindle fire and kindle touch were also released. neither i find interesting. one is a color mini-tablet the other is an e-ink reader with a touch screen. i think i will always feel like a touch screen has no business existing on a reading device. and it adds nothing but cost. but i realize the vast majority of people nowadays expect every device to have a touch screen. so i imagine amazon just caved into consumer demand, no matter how stupid that demand might be.

now, is there any reason to trade-in or throw out your kindle 3rd gen (keyboard) for a 4th gen? not really at all. even if your battery was dying you can still buy a brand new kindle keyboard (as of today 10/29/11) cheaper than you can a kindle 4 (non-ad supported model). the kindle 4 does indeed look sleeker but there’s not sufficient improvement or perks to make you want to “upgrade” to one. and speaking of which i’m not sure there’s much more improvement or features that they can actually add to the kindle. it’s already a pretty great device. i suppose the e-ink technology will keep getting better though.

in the short term, i believe the only real enhancement amazon can add would be a continuing decrease in price. i imagine by the time a 5th gen model is released that the ad-supported model will debut at $59 and the non-ad supported model at $99. $99 being that magical sub-100 dollars number.

and finally, slightly off-topic, what’s really messing up the whole e-book business is the greed of book publishers. ever since apple entered into the arena of e-books with the ipads it seems that the greed of publishers skyrocketed. e-books on average are only slightly cheaper than physical copies and sometimes inexplicably more expensive than the physical copy. i’m quite okay with new releases debuting at standard paperback prices, but it gets quite ridiculous when a 40 year old book sells for $15-16 in e-book form, that evidently is even full of typos…what the heck? hopefully, increased competition will sort the pricing out eventually…

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