Can Jumbo Kindle Save Students’ Backs – and the Newspaper Industry’s Neck?

Not there yet…

Seriously, the price is a "huge" problem. But, that isn’t the only one. 4GB may "theoretically" store X number of books, but not if any of them contain anything like images, especially high quality ones. Some newspapers might have a gig of images just for one issue, and with such a limited capacity, you can’t "save" old issues, especially since its not designed, from what I AM seeing, to allow someone to plug it into a printer, like you would a camera, and make a hard copy (you could possibly limit how many such copies a single device would be "allowed" to print, but more than one, in case something goes wrong, like the printer not working right.)

What is needed for this to "truly" take off is far more ubiquitous wireless internet, or common place kiosks you can go to, in order to "get" the latest magazine/paper, enough capacity to make it possible to store some of it for a while, some way to make hard copies, if needed, and there are times that "will" still be needed, at minimum. I can see at some point a student being able to easily add "references", or quote from, texts, books, papers, magazines, etc. (gods how I wish I could have done that back in Highschool), while "writing" their paper on the thing too, at some point.

But, in the short term, you need to be able to "get" the data to the thing, subscribe for sane AM ounts to your favorite publication, actually be able to "use" that content in a halfway sane fashion, and do it one something that doesn’t cost the same as a fracking low end laptop. Note that a newspaper might be able, with more "direct" ways to talk to their system, charge, or add a pending charge (to be updated when next you connect) for any prints you do make, so they still make money similar to what they do "now" for printed copies. Say.. Read certain sections, like the comics, more or less free, and see some headlines, pay a "small" subscription (or just one time purchase) for all the content, then 2-3 cents per page for any you hard copy. It would be fair, affordable, and since you could "get" a paper from any damn place on the bloody planet, like you "used to be able to" not long ago, when even small towns might have carried 4-5 of them, besides the local one, instead of "just" the local one, or maybe, if your lucky, Wall Street Journal.

But, and here is the key issue, beyond having the gadget. If/when you get the price where its sane, you need an internet service *in place*, or software that could be run as such a service, that gives the "local" people the ability to publish their "layout" and content to a system that can both provide the printed final (for those that still do that) or a downloadable copy, at the prices they set, so that "anyone" with a computer and the right software (initially), and later on, when things like the Kindle become viable, the means to get them on "that" too. And, you need something like a torrent’s tracker to register publications to, so people can "find" the content. In other words, we have here an overpriced gadget, which is sort of nice, but its like if someone had written Bittorrent before they invented TCP/IP. Fine and lovely idea, but worthless if you don’t have the "systems" in place to make it work **first**. Systems that, at the moment, make a lot more sense to build for the hundreds of millions of PC/MAC/Linux users already out there, than "after the fact", for the Kindle.

Mind, people built cars before they figured out that "roads" where a useful thing to have too, but.. you would think we would know better by now. lol