Wharton MBA for Executives

Earlier this month I wrote this gem: http://www.whartonblog.com/?p=165 - it was all about the Kindle and why I was too cool to actually buy this piece of junk that doesn’t even support color.

However, I’m slightly ashamed to say…I bought one.

Last Thursday I went up to the bay area for a meeting at PixSense, one of our competitors. I can’t really say what the meeting was about but the big picture was to see if we can find ways to possible work together. In that meeting was Mike (last name witheld), from their main VC firm. At the start of the meeting, he talked to the PixSense CEO about how he recently read that CEO’s book on the Kindle. Mike just got a Kindle recently and spent about 5 minutes telling me how much he loved the device. He said that he used to read maybe 1-2 books a month but since he got the Kindle he’s been reading 6-8 books a month. He also talked about how he gets his WSJ and other newspapers delivered to it automatically every morning. He also showed me the automatic voice and how it can use speech. The voice was actually much better than I expected. I expected a mechanical voice but it was pretty natural. He highly recommended it and his enthusiasm for the product basically sold me.

At school I spoke to Larry who has the original Kindle who also raved about it. At that point, I was really only looking for confirmation so I was sold. I placed the order on Friday after class and on Monday, my Kindle 2 was here!

I played with it for awhile yesterday and similar to my list of why I didn’t like the Kindle before, here are some reasons why this device is kind of cool (so far):

1) There are plenty of free books around. http://freekindlebooks.org/ is a pretty good website that you can access from the kindle directly to download books. There are lots of great classics like Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Beowulf, Emily Dickinson, Thoreau, Canterbury Tales, Red Badge of Courage, etc…and there are books that I haven’t actually read but might read soon like Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, Kafka, Marx, Freud, etc. There are also a lot of great books that I will probably never read like Little Women, etc.

2) You can subscribe to blogs and newspapers. I subscribe to techcrunch, WSJ, and Knowledge@Wharton. These resources automatically send content to your kindle every day (like the WSJ) or periodically whenever there is content. It’s sort of like an RSS feed.

3) Most books are a little cheaper on the Kindle.

4) In addition to the free stuff, there is also a plethora of very cheap stuff as well I’ve seen books for 99 cents, $1.99, etc. Amazon also has free stuff (some no name books, the bible, etc.) that they distribute.

5) For most books you can quickly “try before you buy” by getting a free excerpt. I can browse the best sellers pretty easily so that’s cool.

Of course not everything is great in the Kindle world:

1) It didn’t come with a case. $350 and no case? Amazon sells one for $30…seems to me like they should just include it.

2) No more SD slot. I like SD slots.

3) Can’t plug it into your computer and read at the same time (at least I don’t think). I like to plug it into my computer USB for charging but I want to also read and download stuff while it’s plugged in. Can’t do it.

4) illustrations are a bit iffy. The illustrations from the WSJ come out fine but those illustrations are pretty bad in the actual newspaper (reminds me of an old 9 pin dot matrix printer). I don’t know what it would be like to get a cooking book or photography book or something like that. It would probably be really bad.

5) No color. My eyes want to see in color I’m not a dog.

Do I recommend this? Not yet. I’ll let you know in a few more weeks.

RVD.