Todd Biske: Outside the Box

I’m an unabashed Kindle fan, but I’ve come to realize that there is room for improvement. The Kindle needs an iTunes equivalent. Not the store, but the desktop companion application. Clearly, Amazon’s original intent for it was as a book reader. For me, however, the usage parallels that of my first iPod. When the iPod came out, there was no iTunes store, but there was iTunes. You took your existing CDs, ripped them into iTunes, and put the content onto your iPod. While there’s no way to “rip” a physical book onto the Kindle, there’s still plenty of electronic content that I deal with each and every day that I’d love to have on the Kindle. Unfortunately, there’s not a good solution for that. Yes, you can email these documents to Amazon and pay a fee for wireless delivery (not cost effective for as many documents as I’d convert), or you can use a program like MobiPocket Creator or Stanza to convert them yourselves, which frankly, is a pain. What I want to be able to do is just drop a Word document or a PDF into a library in this application, and then the next time I connect my Kindle via USB, have those files converted and placed onto the device.

Why would I want to do this? I receive new documents probably every single day, ranging from 2-3 pages to 20 pages or more. Keeping them on the laptop usually means they don’t get read, and printing them out is a waste of paper, and also likely that they don’t get read, as I don’t have them with me when I have time to read. Putting them on the Kindle would be a great solution for me. Plus, the Kindle allows annotations, so if I need to document something to discuss with others, it can do that for me. If this were possible, I think it would open up the Kindle for the corporate market. If there were ways to tie a Kindle to an analyst firm subscription, even better. Amazon would really need to improve the content management on the device, because one big long list quickly becomes problematic, but that can be solved through software. So, Amazon, when can we see the desktop content manager for the Kindle, or are you leaving this up to a third party to provide?

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