The Amazon Kindle 2 Electronic Reader is a great product and, in particular, they do a fantastic job on first-run.

·         The packaging is iPod-like – fun to open up

·         Since the device uses no power except to turn pages, it comes out of the box with a  page already displayed, showing the first two steps (plug in, turn on.)  Right away you’re impressed because the text quality is surprisingly good.

·         You turn on the device and a few seconds later it’s usable.

·         It’s already registered to you.  It calls you by name.  It knows your Amazon preferences.

·         If you have ordered books or newspapers or magazines or blogs on the web, they silently and swiftly load over the Sprint 3G network.  A book takes, on average, 50 seconds to download.

·         If you haven’t ordered content yet, it’s dead simple to do so either on your PC or from the Kindle.

·         The UI is simple, simple, simple.  Within minutes of hearing the UPS guy ring your doorbell, you’re reading a book without thinking about the technology.

I don’t know if this product will change the world like the iPod did or not, but there are many parallels.  It’s easy to buy stuff – so easy that you can quickly spend more money than you realize.  Newspapers and magazines act like podcasts on the iPod, providing content that keeps you going back.  You can wake up every morning with the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Seattle Times freshly delivered to a device you can easily read through on the bus on the way to work.  Also, like the early days of iTunes, much of the content you want isn’t there yet.  Of the first 10 books I looked for, only about half were available, but like iTunes, it will get better over time.  The work-almost-anywhere wireless is so fast and convenient that there will be pressure from all publishers to provide content.

Speaking of the NYT, they added to the PR in two different articles today.  David Pogue did a nice piece, and in a short-sighted Op-Ed, Roy Blount Jr. whined about how the built-in text-to-speech reader was so good it will take away from authors’ ability to gain additional revenue from recording rights.

Yes there are problems – screen size is too small, no back-light, no color, it can only hold 1,500 novels (!), but if you buy one (and why not?) marvel at the OOBE.  They did a great job.

Buy one here.