Kindle 2 ships to fevered reviews

Amazon’s e-book reader gets raves from early customers, but a couple of barbs from critics (including The Daily Show's Jon Stewart, in the video above).

The first wave of Kindle 2 customers get their e-book readers this morning. The reader is already a guaranteed success, having sat at the top of Amazon’s sales charts since pre-orders opened two weeks ago, ahead of iPods, GPS systems and all other gadgets.

The new Kindle tablet is thinner than most magazines (even allowing for these recessionary times); adds a speech synthesizer that can read a book aloud; and makes minor tweaks to the interface.

The New York Times says the Kindles’s E-Ink display already looked “remarkably like ink on paper”. Kindle 2’s display is sharper.

Wired likes the new five-way controller, and the snappier peformance "turning" pages (Kindle has no backlighting. Rather, it's electronic "ink" imprints an image on the screen - which you can leave there for any amount of time without draining the batter. Power is only needed to redraw a page). DRM gets the thumbs down (Amazon boss Jeff Bezos says the level of copy protedction is up to individual customers).

Like its predecessor, Kindle 2 accesses Amazon.com’s library of 240,000 Kindle-optimised e-books, and electronic editions of magazines and newspapers, via a cellular internet connection provided by US carrier Sprint. Any title can be downloaded, from almost anywhere, within 60 seconds. Amazon picks up the cost of the call. The arrangement is a boon for Kindle users, but for now keeps the $US359 reader confined to the North American market.

Kindle 2’s memory is boosted to 2GB – which doesn’t sound much for a gadget, but is enough to hold 1500 books in the devices black-and-white format.

Nevertheless, some critiques have groused about the lack of an SD Card memory expansion slot, and the fact that the battery is sealed in, not-user swappable.

Others dislike the new text-to-speech function, saying it sounds too robotic.

And while some have praised Amazon for offering a user-friendly “soup to nuts” service, with Amazon.com feeding content to Amazon Kindle readers in the same manner that Apple iTunes has been paired with the Apple iPod, transforming the music industry.

But in an article for The New Zealand Author, Digital Publishing managing director Martin Taylor says “it’s questionable whether it's in the industry's, or the consumers', interests to have one company dominating so much of the industry 'value chain'. And certainly, for New Zealand, it would be good to see strong locally controlled (e)bookselling channels alongside any large global players.”

Another gripe: while more than 90% of The New York Times' top 100 sellers list is now available for Kindle (usually at a flat rate of $US9.99), some big names like the Harry Potter series and the collected works of John Grisholm are still not part of the service.

Nevertheless, Citibank is picking Amazon to do more than $US1.2 billion in Kindle-related business over the next year.

More than 250,000 units of the original Kindle were sold. Amazon says Kindle buyers also bought more eBooks - and more books full-stop - than average customers, but won't give specific numbers.

And they said it would never work: Kindle 2 at the beach.