since i'm overseas, i lost touch with all the great arch magazine/books for years, becos i like to go to store and flip over pages before i buy and i can't do this with amazon n i do not wanna pay extra charge for overseas shipment (most often the shipment cost about 30% of the books i buy) ...

they say u can read the first chapter for free @ kindle n i do not need to wait for 2 weeks for shipment n most importantly the extra shipment cost....

so anyone tried? do they have those non-main stream arch books/magazine like pamphlet/assemblage? if not our arch editors better act up and catch the huge market for overseas architect!

It is nice. The screen looks like book print, not a monitor.

Images, and color, are an intrinsic part of architectural publications, including periodicals. How does Kindle handle images ?

i want to know too... i heard its only black and white, will need to wait for latter version... i think it can browse internet too...

i can see this to combine iphone/ipod/mini laptop... then i dun mind to carry an a4 everywhere!

+ i can carry all the building codes, tafuri, rhino, assemblage, new york times everywhere i go in the future^^

From what I've been told, it's more likely that you would carry all those functions on your iPhone. As far as I can tell, the Kindle has only one function.

The author of an article on the Kindle, in a recent New Yorker, explored and experimented with various aspects of the device -- and concluded that he preferred to read book downloads on his iPhone, especially in bed; unlike the phone, the Kindle screen is not backlighted.

Other failings included incomplete presentation of colored material like charts and graphs, due to the monochromatic nature of the display. Sony's earlier book reader was apparently superior to the Kindle in these regards, but failed for reasons I've forgotten -- possibly something to do with the available downloads ?

Hope this page will show for you -- I'm a subscriber, possibly with access privileges. The article I mentioned was written by a Nicholson Baker. I'm sure there must be a lot of stuff online about the device. . .

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/ask/2009/07/questions-for-baker.html

Sorry -- Baker spoke of his iPod Touch, not an iPhone, as an alternative to his Kindle.

Ironically, PBS radio's "To the Best of Our Knowledge" tonight had a program on type fonts, and ran an interview with Baker. Not to beat this thing to death, but -- it turns out that both the iPod and the iPhone are able to download and display Kindle books, and Baker (at least) finds them much preferable. The Kindle experience seems to him like looking out of the window on a grey and rainy day. Even the font is a poor choice, according to him.

Anyway. . .

thks SDR for the info... i think the most ideal is to have an A4 iphone and be able to download all updated arch infos i needed and be able to drop notes/highlight/edit, to me that's the minimum size for a long reading...

for kindle grey and rainy day colour, i think is not to let ur eyes feel tired so soon... most importantly i need the bookstore experience like browsing the book before i buy^^

Apparently the designers of the Kindle felt they needed to replicate the appearance of ink on paper, which meant -- to them -- that a back-lighted screen was out. Unfortunately, they seem not to have been able to achieve the contrast that the printed page presents. On top of that, they chose a typeface unlike those most commonly seen in books, meaning that it doesn't share their readability.

It does seem too bad that that nice-sized screen wouldn't double as a big-sized iPhone or Blackberry. . .

i read articles on my i-phone when sittin gon subway. is cool but a little but tedious and i hate that i can't take notes. however, that being said, lately i also am watching the morning news from back home (i am also expat) and that is something can'T be done on kindle yet. iphone is pretty awesome. sometimes i even use it as a phone.

i've heard a rumour for awhile that apple is working on a tablet-sized computer that would supposedly obliterate the kindle (amongst other things). there's probably some info on this on the internet if you do some digging. think of it as a larger ipod touch.

then again, another recent rumour was that the ipod touch would gain photo/video capabilties this past september but that didn't happen.