Kindle looks like as if it has just been designed to replace books. But, that not a customer pain point from business perspective. If i can read on my laptop and the same time i can do other thinks like emails, videos etc , why do i need a different device.

People who read hard books, love to read because they love hard books. If i love roses, i wont like an electronic gadget manufactured in japan, which glitters with different colors and looks like a rose which i can carry anywhere and which never stales.

So, in a nutshell , problem statement before design kindle was

“Design a device which can replace books”

and, kindle has successfully done it.

So, whatever judgment you have about kindle will depend on, in what perspective you are looking at it. If amazon launched kindle to capture huge business then, i would say that would be really difficult because people have stopped reading books and those who do reads because they want to get the feel of reading hard copy books.

The first thing they tell you to do is to explore the Kindle Store – I encourage you all to do that even if you don’t buy the product.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/133141011/ref=topnav_storetab_kinh/104-4453002-1964769
In addition to Kindle Books, there are Kindle Newspapers and Kindle Magazines. The offerings in both of these categories is quite slim in my view, but especially with the magazines, where is The New Yorker, Harpers, etc.? There do seem to be a number of blogs, but subscribing to them is not free? Again why?

Jobs comment makes more sense to me after doing that little exercise. The iPod has become the norm for portable digital music. My experience with the iTunes Store is that they aren’t near comprehensive (amazon.com has more based on my cetainly biased search for old albums) but surely they have every title that might generate volume for them. Kindle doesn’t have that and Jobs, I believe, was remarking about the low likelihood that they’ll get there.

If it makes you feel any better, the reading scores for 9 year olds are at an all time high, according to NCES. The fact that high school scores are down, however, is the only thing you’ll see in the news. If you look at those scores over time, though, even they aren’t so alarming; the scores are the same as in 1971, as Nancy Kaplan has pointed out. In other words, Johnny reads about as well as Johnny read back in the 1950s when Life magazine wrote an article titled “why Johnny can’t read.” For whatever reason, the only way we seem to be able to promote reading is to say it’s in crisis.

For the record, I would be perfectly delighted if Mexico had a 100% literacy rate. I’m not sure why that should be worrying to us.

And for the record I love Art Spiegelman’s comics.

On another note, my kids are all literate but many of their classmates are not. If we stop teaching kids to read because they don’t want to take the effort and their parents really don’t care then we are soon going to be way down on the literacy list. How will you feel when Mexico has a higher literacy rate than the US? They are close to that now. And of those who are literate functionally many of them do not read books in a form but comics. Al in Benson, AZ

Jobs is full of …. ahem, hot air. There has always been a substantial part of the population that doesn’t read books. That doesn’t mean nobody reads, or that Kids Today don’t want books. Teen book sales are doing quite well, actually. 300,000 people share their libraries at LibraryThing. And there’s a book published in the US every 2.2 minutes, according to The Culture and Commerce of Publishing in the 21st Centurey. A few of those are read.

I don’t think much of the Kindle – it’s too expensive, thanks to their DRM you don’t really own what you buy, and you can’t even read it in the dark. It’s a fashion accessory for a limited population that can afford to buy a gadget that lets you make impulse purchases more easily.

But I agree, we have a role to play not just in encouraging reading, but in encouraging the habits of curiosity that make reading worthwhile. The role we play should go beyond helping students be good students, but help them have the habits and skills to be free and fulfilled human beings.

They need to develop critical habits of mind so that when they hear pundits and government agencies say dumb things like “Americans have stopped reading,” they can put it in perspective and move on.