Leisure kindling

I remember some beautiful summer afternoons when I lounged myself in the front patio, holding anyone of my favorite story books, enjoying every little bit of the rustle in the crisp illustrated page as I gliding my entire palm across the paper. Those were innocent years and my conditioning time to the conventional reading habits. Little I knew that technology would one day force me to accept a reading medium without paper but just a thin rectangular box with blue digital texts. It’s called kindle, a not so new gizmo on the block. The Irony of this new gadget, which was perceived by most reading enthusiasts as a phase for the Amazon.com, it now has a sequel; much to our dismay.

Amazon.com plans to unveil the Kindle 2 on 24th Feb. As far as the first version was concerned, sales figures showed a very dismal effort against its much created hype. However the new improved Kindle will not have a much sharper image, will be lighter and slimmer that its predecessor and will have a new text to speech option for people who have always been fond of bed time stories.

However being still priced at $359, kindle with its incremental upgrades isn’t a bad purchase. Especially if one takes Jeffery Bezos (CEO Amazon.com) a little too ambitious goal seriously – “Our vision is every book ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds.”

One element which may pose hindrance to the Kindle owners is the Google world of e-books. Google has already successfully scanned some seven million texts from various authors across multiple disciplines and genres, some of them are even out of print. To make matters more tight, Google plans to hatch a deal with cell pone companies like Apple’s iphone to view it on there own hand helds.

However the company is still determined to launch kindle 2 besides the search engine turned multi million dollar company’s mounting threats. In the mean while all us reading enthusiasts need to collect as many conventional books as possible, before they turn into a collectors item.