Link: Kindling « Adam Greenfield’s Speedbird.
"For the moment, I have little enough to say about Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader, either as product or service, except to note the following:
"- Post iPhone, especially, the physical product looks dowdy and retrograde. I’m not surprised, given that it’s been in development so long, but the sharply-canted bevels look distinctly mid-90s. To my eye, anyway, Kindle looks something like what we might have been offered had GRiD made it through the dot-com years. Haw.
"- And those thick margins. Objectively, there may be a legibility advantage to them. But doesn’t Jeff know the visual rhetoric of ubiquity is frameless displays?
"- Unless something comes along to radically reorient my thinking, I’m willing to bet Chris Heathcote has nailed it in eighteen words: “Kindle is what happens when a non-cool company attempts to do a closed service: a car crash.” (...)
