Marianne Schultz

I hate junk mail. I hate getting catalogs that I didn’t ask for. And we already know that I want a digital newspaper (see my 8/26 blog post). We heard about this service that cancels any catalog “subscriptions” you may have at no charge. I’ve signed up, but their site says it takes up to 10 weeks for your catalogs to stop coming. I’ll report back here in about 10 weeks to see if this really worked. In the meantime, you can try it for yourself – go to CatalogChoice.org (I’ve also added their logo/link to my site in the sidebar to the left if you’d rather click there 😉 ).

Speaking of digital newspapers, have you heard about the new Amazon Kindle yet? I was really excited for this release, having read rumors about it for quite some time. I *almost* ordered one on release day, but sanity prevailed and I’ve thought about it a little bit more. There are just a few things that make it not-so-attractive to me. The first is the lack of a backlight. Yes, I know that the E-Ink technology is supposed to be just like reading paper, but is there something about it that prevents a backlight from being incorporated? One of the most convenient things for me about reading ebooks is that I can read them anywhere in any lighting condition (on my Palm PDA’s, anyway). I don’t want to keep the light on and keep my husband awake when I’m reading before bed. And those little snap-on book lights don’t cut it either.

I admit that I LOVE the built-in OTA download of books and browsing the online store – that was an excellent idea (especially the part about it being free). And the price of new books is nice at $9.99 a pop. And the ability to get the New York Times or the WSJ downloaded automatically every day to the device is absolutely heaven! This is what I’ve always wanted! But you know what’s holding me back? First, there’s the backlight issue. Second, it’s the price for the device itself. This may sound odd coming from a girl who paid $599 for an iPhone on iDay, but come on! $399 for a dedicated ebook reader? I just can’t justify that. At this point, I’m just going to wait to see if an ebook reader will be a 3rd party application released for the iPhone in the next few months and work from there. Amazon: add a backlight and drop the price, then maybe we’ll talk. 😉