新鲜科技：阅读电子书的新式武器
最大的网上书店亚马逊公司去年推出了一款售价400美元的"Kindle"电子书阅读器，该公司希望通过大大改善用户的购书体验来占领市场。
Kindle是第一款能让用户无需通过电脑、而直接通过无线宽带下载电子书的阅读器。亚马逊公司提供了大量的电子书籍供用户选择，大约有9万本之多，而索尼公司的可选书目仅有2.5万本。Kindle还可以直接下载电子报纸、杂志和博客，并进行自动更新。这可能是因为Kindle内置了手机数据传输网络，可以免费免费实现无线上网功能。
近期Kindle 2也即将面世。
I've got plenty of books already, but more keep turning up, including a few that have to be plugged in and recharged.
Project Gutenberg, the first effort to computerize classic books, began when Richard Nixon was still wiretapping his enemies. What we've lacked are attractive, simple devices for reading these digital volumes. And suddenly they're popping up everywhere.
Amazon.com's Kindle, released in 2007, was the first e-book reader to make a mark. The company refuses to say how many it has sold, but outside analysts reckon they have moved half a million or more. Now comes the second edition.
The $359 Kindle 2 is an incremental upgrade. It's a thinner, more elegant device, with enough memory to store 1,500 volumes, according to Amazon. The old Kindle had a slot for inserting extra memory; not this one. Also gone is that odd little scroll wheel for navigating menus. Instead, there's a little square button that tilts up, down, left, and right, just like a joystick.
On Kindle, the reading is easy, thanks to a 6-inch black and white screen developed by E Ink Corp. of Cambridge. There's a slightly uncomfortable "flashing" effect when you press the Next Page button, but you get used to it. Besides, the new Kindle flips pages faster than the old one.
And if your eyes get tired, Kindle 2 will read to you. Text-to-speech software converts the book into a surprisingly lifelike male or female voice, then pumps it through a headphone jack or the Kindle's two small but tolerable speakers. The system works so well that the Authors' Guild, an association of writers, warned that writers could lose the royalties they now earn from audiobook editions of their work. Fewer people will buy the new James Patterson thriller on CD if their Kindles can read it to them. As a writer, I sympathize. As a reader, I shrug.
Of course, the new Kindle retains the original's most addictive feature - seamless integration with Amazon's online bookstore. You can buy more than 230,000 electronic books, or subscribe to dozens of magazines and newspapers, without rising from your chair, or tracking down a Wi-Fi Internet hotspot. Instead, the Kindle attaches to Sprint Nextel Corp's cellular data network, which serves every major US population center. Order a book, and it's installed in a couple of minutes. There's no charge for using the Sprint network; Amazon eats the cost. Yet the company still charges only $10 for most electronic books, even bestsellers.
