Anything that you'd want to take time to read, bookmarklet it, and each day or week Instapaper compiles a wrapup for you, reformatted to be readable on the Kindle. (Something like "Readability", but delivered wirelessly to the Kindle for reading at leisure.)
Amazon should consider acquiring Instapaper, associating themselves with making things easier to read.
2) Second, Amazon should be fixing other usability issues with the Kindle, starting with organizing books and documents in something other than a flat list. At the very least, group books by author sorted by original publication date, so it's easier to read through a series of books by a prolific author. And do this intelligently, so Patterson's co-authored books still show under Patterson. For example, Patterson's Women's Murder Club series, by various authors, actually follow a narrative arc across books, so should be read in order. The titles have numbers, so this one is easy. Other series are not as easy.
Some people, use the web for a lot of reading. I would assume this is especially true for the HN community.
Kindle, with its e-ink paper, is optimized for your eyes, for long term reading.
In a way, you may take it even further, and imagine that we might all code on an e-ink display in the future. Perhaps a dual monitor e-ink + lcd setup... I'm getting geeky now.
I would be really happy if the Kindle made it easier to read stuff on Fanfiction.net. Their current web browser is less than ideal. (My current solution is to use a Python script to download a bunch of chapters and mangle them into a single HTML file, which I convert into a Kindle-compatible ebook format. This is a hassle.)
Isn't ePub (which Kindle doesn't yet support) based on XHTML? Doesn't Apple use Webkit for the iTunes Store? Aren't there lots of Apps in the App Store that are basically rich content being run on a Webkit browser component?
Browser engineers don't necessarily have to be working on a standard roam-the-wild-internet web browser.
I love these articles using job posts as references. (There have been others from Apple and Google up here before.) THey show what managers are thinking about, and what is in the pipeline for 18 months from now, long before a company would ever publicly announce a new product or feature.
The problem here is assuming that the Kindle needs a "full" browser. It doesn't. It's a ebook reader, not a tablet. A better or faster rendering would be nice, but I think Amazon should position it in it's own niche.
I adore my Kindle and use it every day, but I have never once tried to browse the web on it. Instapaper's Kindle integration handles any longer web pages I might want to read on the Kindle.
The kindle browser isn't all that bad, but its concepts (such as using the little wheel to navigate and the page back/forward buttons to scroll vertically) are a bit crude still.
Yes you do. The more browsers, and the more evenly distributed their market share, the less any individual one gets to muck around with standards as it's in their own self-interest to converge.
can you save pdf's from the browser and then read them? if not I don't see much of the point. most of the content heavy sites I visit have everything in pdf.
Kindle version 2.3 (eg, Kindle 2 and DX) support reading PDFs. But it's only really practical on the DX, because a PDF is generally A4 - and the Kindle 2 is like a small paperback - A6 or so.
I have a Kindle DX, and in my corner of Europe, the web access is limited to Wikipedia (just the English language one, if memory of my test serves). Google maps would be nice sometimes ... but it is Amazon's nickel paying for the 3G cellular phone calls, not mine ...
Anyway, I think Amazon has decided to push for a Kindle platform - they have a call outstanding for external developers of "active content", and a beta SDK you can sign up for (not yet public, haven't seen it).
The issue will turn on who pays for the 3G data line. If it's Amazon, of course they'll use the line to pull in paying customers. The limited freebies (such as Wikipedia) are just a loss-leader.
A model where the Kindle can be used with a regular (owner-paid) data line would be needed for things such as corporate VPNs. I don't know if Amazon are prepared to go there just to make a little bit more money on hardware.
Ditto, I'm in the UK and bought a Kindle Monday. You can only browse to Wikipedia, but as this XKCD cartoon says, that's almost as good as a hitchhiker's guide because (I assume) the Web access from the Kindle is international - and because Wikipedia is huge. But unlike the XKCD, it doesn't actually let you go to Wikitravel: http://xkcd.com/548/
Let me guess ... it won't work on the Kindle 1. If not, Amazon should upgrade all us Kindle 1 owners to a Kindle 2 at a steep discount (or for free). We got the Kindle on the map, so how about showin' a little love?
Anything that you'd want to take time to read, bookmarklet it, and each day or week Instapaper compiles a wrapup for you, reformatted to be readable on the Kindle. (Something like "Readability", but delivered wirelessly to the Kindle for reading at leisure.)
Instapaper has a live reformatting engine you can use on the fly for more readable browsing as well. This WebMonkey link, for example: http://www.instapaper.com/m?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.webmonkey.com...
Amazon should consider acquiring Instapaper, associating themselves with making things easier to read.
2) Second, Amazon should be fixing other usability issues with the Kindle, starting with organizing books and documents in something other than a flat list. At the very least, group books by author sorted by original publication date, so it's easier to read through a series of books by a prolific author. And do this intelligently, so Patterson's co-authored books still show under Patterson. For example, Patterson's Women's Murder Club series, by various authors, actually follow a narrative arc across books, so should be read in order. The titles have numbers, so this one is easy. Other series are not as easy.