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Shopping With Kindle

Shopping for books via the Kindle's store is simple--it looks similar to what you'd see if you were shopping at Amazon online.

The Kindle store lets you browse or search for content; when you find something you like, you select the book to see further details--including a description, the sales rank in the Kindle store, customer reviews, print length, other titles that customers bought, and the list price for the paper version of the book.

Click on buy, and the book downloads to your device automatically. You can continue shopping or reading while the download is in progress. And if you purchased by accident, you can immediately cancel your order.

If you're browsing Amazon on your PC, you can buy something there and send it directly to your Kindle (unfortunately, there are no special deals as yet for buying a physical book and a Kindle digital book together). Or, you can have the title sent to your PC and from there transfer it to your Kindle via a direct USB connection.

While you can have the file reside in both places, you can't read the book on the PC. Amazon doesn't limit the number of copies, but the title is tied to your Kindle device (and you can't send a book to someone else to read--they have to buy their own copy).

Amazon archives your purchases on its servers. If you lose a book, or need to delete books off of the Kindle to make room for new titles, your purchase is still stored on the server side--and you can redownload the book at will.

Amazon's Kindle Philosophy

In introducing the Kindle, Bezos mused "Why are books the last bastion of analog?" Answering his question, he continued: "Books have stubbornly resisted digitization. The book is so highly evolved and so well suited to its task that it's hard to displace. The key feature of a book is that it disappears as you read it."

"What remains is the author's ideas and words...so you can enjoy your reading," Bezos said. Therefore, "if you're going to build a purpose-built reading device, it has to get out of your way so you can enter the author's world."

E-Books: Do They Finally Make Sense?

At $399, the up-front investment for the Kindle is high, though the device carries a one-year warranty. But this piece of hardware is the only way you can view your downloaded books, and if you lose it or break it, you'll have to buy another one.

More to the point: Are consumers ready to trade in the paper pages of their beloved books for digital? "It's always a difficult proposition to sell consumers a device that serves primarily to sell them other products," cautions Ross Rubin, an analyst with The NPD Group.

"To an extent," he explains, "that's what the Kindle and the Sony Reader both are--they are a gateway for the consumer to buy more content through those companies."

"[This] is opposed to the iPod, where consumers had a storehouse of their own music that they could move to the device. Amazon is seeking to raise the level of convenience in purchasing books with wireless access, and not saddling consumers with a subscription."

According to Rubin, e-books haven't taken off before now, in large part because of content--or the lack thereof. "Up until now, the bottleneck has been the availability of content," he says. "With over 90,000 titles, Amazon has seemed to address that, while providing the hook of periodical and blog content to make the device an everyday information access tool."

"Amazon is fighting against declining interest in book reading by making reading books more convenient," Rubin says. "E-books aren't a mass-market phenomenon as music [is]. The Sony Reader has begun to prove there's a market for such a device, though; and Amazon has helped remove some of the barriers to acquisition."