Amazon Announces the Kindle Fire for $199

Wow! Amazon announced today that they will be shipping on November 15th the Kindle Fire with a 7 inch color multi-touch screen for $199 dollars. With all the speculation it looks like they delivered on their promise of a highly functional reader complete with access to the web, ebooks, apps, music, and streaming video. At $199 dollars  they will carve out a niche for those consumers who were waiting on the sideline to jump into purchasing a tablet of their own. The Kindle Fire will be powered by a dual core processor and host a multi-touch screen (7" multi-touch display with IPS (in-plane switching) technology and anti-reflective treatment, 1024 x 600 pixel resolution at 169 ppi, 16 million colors) and come standard with Wi-Fi and a USB 2.0 Micro-B connector along with a the built-in Amazon Silk browser for fast web surfacing. The Kindle Fire is reported to be able to run for 8 hours on a full charge and can be charged with the wall AC Adapter or via a USB connection to a computer. The Kindle Fire will ship with has a native email client that can support Gmail, Yahoo!, Hotmail, AOL etc. Of course you will have access to the entire Amazon collection of music, videos, apps, and music which you can purchase for their store. This looks like the Amazon Kindle Fire will hit that sweet spot for a powerful but easy to use device that can serve as portable  tool when we are away from our desks. For now the Kindle Fire only support Wi-Fi,  but I would imagine if it is a success in the marketplace that we will see a 3G version as well. From the likes of it, it doesn't look like the Kindle Fire supports Bluetooth- but I will have to delve into that a little more. Amazon has put on their boxing gloves and looks to be in for the long haul as they position the Kindle Fire as an  alternative to Apple's iPad. At a price point of $199 dollars the Kindle Fire is sure to be a winner for consumers. The Kindle Fire can be pre-ordered now from Amazon for a mid November delivery.

Amazon To Make Big Kindle Announcement this Wednesday

Jeff Bezos will take the stage this coming Wednesday at 10:00 am in NYC and will unveil the latest Kindle offering. From following the bloggers, it looks like we will see a 7 inch back-lit touch screen color Kindle that will be running a customized version of the Android operating system. The color Kindle will be positioned as a ebook reader very much like the Nook Color has for the past couple of years. However, the color Kindle will offer you rich media through the Amazon Store where you can download and play songs, movies and of course download your books. The color Kindle will support WiFi at this time and will come with a Browser giving you access to the web and the full range of Amazon Store services. What is really exciting is the price point that everyone n the web has been has been speculating about. Some have shared that they believe the new Kindle Color Reader will be priced below $250 dollars which will certainly get everyone excited about the potential for this tablet/ereading device. Having access to a color eReader like the Kindle Color with good performance and access to the web could certainly shake up the tablet market. So I know I will stay tuned to the announcement this Wednesday to find out all of the details. We certainly live in exciting times! So check back here next week for the Kindle Color update.

Kindle eBooks from Public Library are Now Available

One of the shortcomings of the Kindle platform is that it does not support the ever popular ePub format which made it next to impossible to borrow ebooks from the public library. But all that has changed and as of today, patrons of the public library can now take out Kindle eBooks which can be delivered over a WiFi connection or via a USB download.

I decided to give it a try and so I  logged into Overdrive and searched for my Public Library which was quickly found. I then logged into the digital library with my Patron Number and clicked in the Kindle books library which allowed me to search for a book. Once I found a book I wanted, I clicked on Add to Cart and when I checked out- I was redirected to the Amazon Kindle page where I could send it to my Kindle. Once I turned on my Kindle the book was automatically delivered over my WiFi connection and I was up and reading in no time. The process was fast and efficient. Having access to the eBooks from my Public Library  library will open up all kinds of possibilities now for reading adventures using my Kindle.

Amazon Announces Amazon Cloud Drive Service

Amazon was quick to the punch and yesterday unveiled their new Amazon Cloud Service- letting you store up to 5 GB of documents, music, photographs and videos in the cloud. I had a chance to start my account which took me literally seconds to open using my existing Amazon sign in credentials. Once I was on the site it was a breeze to store my photographs and documents from within the browser. There is a lot competition in this arena and there has been talk and rumors that Apple will soon release their MobileMe service for free giving us cloud based services to synch our iOS devices. In the meantime, we can enjoy 5 GB of storage space courtesy of Amazon to do what we want with. Enjoy and let me know how you like the service.

Amazon Upgrades Kindle to System 3.1

For educators who are using the Kindle's in the classroom you will be glad to learn that Amazon has just upgraded the System Software to Version 3.1. With this upgrade you will get the most asked for feature, true page numbering that matches the printed version. This is a god send and one that I know academicians will enjoy as well when they need to create a citation. There is a lot more in this upgrade but having true page numbering that matches the printed text is really great. To get started with the the Upgrade click on this link which will take you to the Amazon page. Please note that if you prefer you can also upgrade your Kindle over the air via a wireless network.


Some of the features included in this update are:

• Public Notes -- This feature lets Kindle users choose to make their book notes and highlights available for others to see. Any Kindle user -- including authors, their fans, book reviewers, professors and passionate readers everywhere -- can opt-in to share their thoughts on book passages and ideas with friends, family members, colleagues, and the greater Kindle community of people who love to read. This is a new way for readers to share their excitement and knowledge about books and get more from the books they read. To review and turn on Public Notes in your own books, view the Public Notes of people you follow, track your reading activities, see Popular Highlights and your annotations, and view your full library of books, go to https://kindle.amazon.com. Learn more.
  
• Real Page Numbers -- Our customers have told us they want real page numbers that match the page numbers in print books so they can easily reference and cite passages, and read alongside others in a book club or class. We've already added real page numbers to tens of thousands of Kindle books, including the top 100 bestselling books in the Kindle Store that have matching print editions and thousands more of the most popular books. Page numbers will also be available on our free "Buy Once, Read Everywhere" Kindle apps in the coming months. As with all of Kindle's features, we want you to lose yourself in the author's words, so page numbers are only displayed when you press the Menu button. Learn more.
  
• Before You Go ... -- When you reach the end of the book, you can immediately rate the book, share a message about the book with your social network, get personalized recommendations for what to read next, and see more books by the same author. Learn more.
  
• New Newspaper and Magazine Layout -- We're introducing a new and improved layout for newspapers and magazines. This new layout gives you a quick snapshot of the news and helps you decide what you want to read first. Learn more.

What Would Happen if Reading Was More Social?

It is hard to imagine my world without books yet for many students this is their reality. From a young age I could always remember my love for reading. For many, reading is a very personal and solitary activity. But things are about to change. You see it is now possible using eReaders like the Kindle to share ideas and engage others in the books that you are reading. With so many students engaged in the use of electronic and digital devices we have seen that the amount of time students are reading books has plummeted. Yet we know from a recent study ( 2010 Kids & Family Reading Report-published by the Harrison Group) that many students reported that they would be very interested in reading an e-book on an electronic device. Devices like the Kindle are very appealing reading devices because of all the built in features. Many students will enjoy the ability to change the size of the font or use the text to speech feature to have the book read to them. But from my perspective the Kindle opens up all kinds of possibilities for making reading a more social activity.

Now for a moment imagine that all of your students in your reading class had Kindles and were reading the same novel on their eReader. You with me so far? On the Kindle it is possible for the students to set up their social networks like Facebook and Twitter which would allow then to automatically post text they highlight in the book as well as notes they have taken on a particular passage. If all of the students have Facebook and Twitter accounts they can simply log into their accounts and view what their friends have posted about the book. If students use a simple # hashtag when posting their notes then it would be possible to search their Twitter accounts to see what everyone has posted. Likewise students could use a service like Tweetchat and with the hashtag have real time discussions about the book. Students would need to have access to WiFi to accomplish this, but as we move forward being able to utilize social networking to engage students in the reflection and discussion of the books they are reading can be a tipping point to more fully engage students in the reading process.Bring social networking into the reading process may just be the factor that keeps students engaged and coming back for more. I would be interested in your perspective so please leave comment.

Informix in virtualized environments

I recall that when I was around my 16 to 19 years old I was completely amazed by the possibility of running a different operating system inside a window on my system. At the time I was using a Commodore Amiga, and I had software to emulate Atari, Apple and MS-Dos systems. The first two used the same CPU as my native system, and the later was a complete emulation off an Intel x86 CPU. Because of this, performance was really awful, but nevertheless it was very interesting to use.

At that time we called that emulation. And the purpose was a bit different than what we currently call virtualization. The similarity lies in the fact that in both situations we create a virtual hardware environment in which we run a operating system and applications. Today, virtualization is a widespread technology, used in high-end systems as well as in plain simple laptops. Some examples of virtualization technologies and uses include:

• IBM's system Z (mainframes)
  These systems have virtualization technology for ages. We can run different operating systems on "partitions" which are groups of resources (CPU, memory, storage) allocated from the base machine. These OS include Linux for example
  
• IBM's system P (Power processors)
  It incorporates some of the System Z concepts. The partitions can be "physical" and "logical". Can have a fixed or dynamic resources capacity. Can run AIX and Linux on same base equipment in different "partitions"
• SUN's Solaris Domains and containers
  On SUN's boxes you can create different partitions running different copies of your operating system, or create "containers" which are logic groups of resources which share the same copy of the operating system. IBM provides the Workload Manager for AIX for this.
  
• HP-UX npars, vpars, Integrity VM and Secure Resource Partitions
  HP provides physical partitions, virtual partitions, virtual machines and also virtual resources environments sharing the same copy of the operating system
• VMware
  Probably the most well known virtualization technology. It can run on our desktop systems (Windows and Linux) or be directly installed on the base hardware.
  
• XEN
  An open source virtualization technology. It is used by several other environments like Amazon EC2 (more on this later)
• SUN's VirtualBox
  It's another x86 virtualization product which runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OSX and OpenSolaris
  

For performance reasons, usually, the virtualization technologies just create virtual machines of the same architecture as the base system. This means the CPU type is generally the same. Emulating other kinds of CPUs, although technically possible, imposes a serious performance overhead. Also, current CPU technologies include support for virtualization directly on the chips. It's perfectly possible to do it without hardware support, but it's slower. The main issue is that any machine code instruction that tries to access the hardware directly has to be intercepted. If the virtualization system (hypervisor) didn't do it, you'd have conflicts between the different virtual machines running on the same host.

So... Why would we want to virtualize? Well, several reasons for several uses:

• Many hardware resources are used below it's capacities. Virtualization allows the sharing of the same resources (CPU, memory, network and storage) for usage in different (and isolated) machines. This leads to cost optimization
• It's much easier to create a virtual machine on top of an existing hardware box, than to physically purchase, connect, install and manage a real machine
• Due to the two reasons above, a virtual machine can be a great environment to support several activities like testing, learning and training, developing, demoing etc.
• It's relatively easy to "shutdown" a virtual machine on one host, and "turn it on" on another hardware box. Latest versions of virtualization products sometimes even support "live" migration of virtual machines between different hardware boxes. This can become a real advantage in terms of system availability (without extra cost, like clustering, redundancy etc.)
• It's possible to dynamically balance the physical resources (CPU capacity, disk and even memory) of the physical host between the virtual environments it supports. This means that different virtual machines with distinct usage cycles can co-exist on the same hardware box, and you can configure the resources to move between the virtualized hosts whenever their needs change

Ok. The above can give you an overview of the virtualization technologies and why you would want to use them. Now let's dig into the Informix related stuff. The first questions would be: Should you use Informix in virtualized environments? Does it work well? Does IBM support it? Does IBM provide flexible pricing to match the flexibility in these environments?

Well, the answer to all these questions could be a simple "yes". Let's see:

• Informix architecture, usually referred to as Dynamic Scalable Architecture (DSA) is a perfet fit for virtualized environments. Informix implements the concept of virtual CPU in a operating system process. These CPUs then run user and system threads. This explains why it's so light. These virtual CPUs (CPU VP in informix jargon), can be added and removed dynamically. So, from the begining of IDS (when DSA was introduced) you can effectively dynamically adjust the CPU resources of your intance. Memory can also grow, and shrink. But I have to grant that it would be nice to see some improvments here. In practice it's very difficult to be able to shrink the memory once it grew.
  But the small footprint (both of installation and running resources) and dynamic resource adjustment are nice features for virtualized systems.
• Regarding support, you can be confident that IDS is supported in these environments. There are obvious questions regarding performance issues, but you will not get the dreadful answer of "your setup is not supported" in case you need help from tech support.
• Finally, IBM pricing is well aware of the virtualization needs (assuming a CPU based license policy). You will only pay for the resources you attribute to your virtual host. Accordingly to a recent announcement your license fees will depend on your virtual hosts environment and not the underlying hardware (which is usually much bigger, as as such would be more expensive).
  IBM calls this license scheme for virtualized environments "sub-capacity", alluding to the fact that you're running a virtual host with less capacity than the base hardware.
  If you want to license for concurrent session, than this is just like in any other (non virtualized) environment

Virtual appliance with IDS developer edition

IBM announced some time ago the availability of an IDS Developer Edition based virtual appliance. This is pre-installed and pre-configured VMWare image, running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server V11 and IDS 11.50. Everything is configured so you can easily deploy it and use it for testing, learning or developing purposes. Scripts are provided to create a full MACH-11 cluster and intructions are included to lead you through some demos. You just need a free product from VMWare to run it on your laptop. The appliance is available in 32 and 64 bit versions. You can access this virtual image in two ways:

• From the IBM web site at: https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/iwm/web/reg/download.do?source=swg-informixfpd&S_PKG=dl
  You'll need an IBM id to access it.
• From the VMWare Appliance Marketplace
  If I recall correctly you'll have to register within VMWare to download the appliances

When you first run the appliance, you'll go through some screens that allow you to make some configurations and also will prompt you for license acceptance. This process is fairly simple and will only take a couple of minutes. After that you'll see a normal Linux desktop with some shortcuts that will allow you to explore the power and simplicity of IDS.
This appliance is being constantly improved and updated by IBM. Current IDS version is 11.50.xC3, but you should expect 11.50.xC4 when available. I strongly recommend this appliance to anyone who wants to get familiar with Informix.


Amazon EC2 cloud

Cloud computing has become another buzz word of the IT industry. Large companies have large computing infra-structures. You can imagine that companies like IBM, SUN, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Amazon and so, on have large datacenters spread around the world. Like any other computer in the world, these datacenters are not always using it's full capacity. So, more, and more companies are trying to take advantage of some of their computing power, by making it available to customers as services. This resources are "somewhere" on the Internet. That's why the term "cloud" is used. Customers only have to know how to use these resources. They don't need to know how they're implemented or where they are located. You as a customer, pay a certain fee to use a determined amount of computing resources.
Amazon was one of the first companies to sell cloud computing type of services.. It started around 2006 selling an infra-structure where customers could implement web services. Later it introduced the EC2 (Elastic Computing) concept. The idea here is to rent virtual machines (Linux or Windows) to anybody who needs them. And you pay only what you use at the rate of $0.1 / hour for what Amazon calls a "small instance". This is "equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor" and has 1.7GB of RAM. Not a big server, but perfectly enough for some tests or studying. You can also rent bigger instances, and you can rent several of them.
So, the term "elastic" means you can rent the resources you need and grow them as your needs grow. And you won't have to pay for physical allocation and equipment.

Now, why am I talking about this? Simply because IBM made the same virtual appliance I wrote about above, available as an AMI (Amazon Machine Image). This means you can rent an Amazon instance running IDS 11.50.UC3 (32 bit only for now) on top of SUSE Enterprise Linux.
To be honest, I was a bit lost with all these concepts, so I decided to test this myself. I've followed the following steps:

1. I went to Guy Bowerman's blog to search for info
2. I got hold of the IBM Informix Server Amazon Machine Image (AMI) Get Starting Guide
   
3. I went to http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ and sign up. After login you'll have the access keys and an X.509 certificate (private and public key). These are used to identify you when calling Amazon web services (which implement the Amazon managing API). So you should download them into your local system (as explained in the Getting Started Guide)
   
4. The next step is to "buy" the AMI of the IDS Developer Edition. I put "buy" between quotes, because although you have to put on a purchase order, in reality you will not have to pay any licensing fees. You'll just pay the use of it, at the standard Amazon small instance rate of $0.1/hour. This step and the URLs are perfectly documented in the guide
5. The next step involves downloading and setting up an installation of the Amazon EC2 API (command line) tools. These are implemented in Java, which means two things: You'll need a Java (JRE) environment on you system, and you can run them on Windows, Unix and Linux. During the setup process it is suggested that you create another key pair that will be used to authenticate your logons to the instance.
6. Then, instructions are provided in order to launch an Amazon instance based on the IDS Developer AMI that you "purchased" earlier. Detailed instructions are included so that you can access the running instance using an SSH connection. Remember that the authentication will be done through a pair of keys you generated a few steps ago.
7. After you login to the instance you'll get through a similar process that the IDS virtual appliance also provides. Besides the common licencing acceptance, in this environment you'll also be prompted for:
   
1. The keypair you generated (it's suggested that you copy the files and just point to them)
2. The user's passwords (root, informix and developer)
3. The configuration of a persistent storage.
   I should have wrote about this earlier... The AMI instances are volatile. This means that once they're stoped all their "local" storage is gone. So, you should allocate a permanent storage from Amazon EBS service (extra charge of around $0.1/GB/Month). This storage volume can be mounted in /data by the IDS Developer instance. I'll get back to this topic below.

So, after this steps I got a SUSE Enteprise Linux, running IDS Developer Edition, with a MACH 11 cluster already configured, running somewhere, in the Amazon Cloud, available for me (and anyone I want) to connect to. How much did it cost? Around $0.35, including an EBS storage volume.
Please note that IBM didn't just made an IDS Developer AMI available. IBM also established a policy for licensing Informix (and other IBM software) on the Amazon Cloud Computing platform. The relevant announcements are here; http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26673.wss and here; http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/passportadvantage/pvu_for_Amazon_Elastic_compute_cloud.html (Processor Value Units - PVUs - for Amazon EC2 )

So, isn't this a perfect way to test software, or to create temporary machines for propotype developing, or for the purpose of distance teaching etc. ? Yes... But I feel there's a small issue:
As stated above, you pay what you use. This means that you pay for as long as your instances are running. Obviously, for saving money, you'll want to stop them when they're not used. But the instances are volatile. Meaning that it's not exactly like a VMWare image. When you restart them you'll get the AMI initial image, and not the machine's state when you shut it down. That's why Amazon provides the EBS volumes. These are permanent, non-volatile storage volumes. As mentioned in the getting started guide, you should keep you database files in these volumes. But even so, if you restart the instance, you'll have to go through the setup screens again. This is not convenient. But there is a simple solution for this: Private AMIs.

When you're running an instance, you can decide to make an AMI from it. The process is called "bundle" it. You can get the details on how to do it here: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/DeveloperGuide/bundling-an-ami.html After you create a bundle from a running instance, you can upload it. This will make a new AMI available for you. It's called a private AMI. You can also make it available to the public.
After this you can launch an instance from your own AMI. So theoritically you could customize the IDS Developer AMI, bundle it, upload it as a private AMI and use it to launch your customized instances. You'd have to check the licenses though...

So, in short, in which scenarios could we use Amazon EC2, and more specifically the IDS Developer AMI?

• You need some machine for a team of developers to work on a new project during a short period of time
  It's easy to setup and use. And you'll know how much it will cost you. And you don't have to depend on your own resources
• You need to make a customer demo for an application you developed. You just install it, and use it at your customer site. Better yet, your customer can make it's own testing even after you leave
• You want to provide some application training remotely (or long distance). Again, just install it, give the access details to your students, and there you go...
• You want to learn about IDS and you don't want to install the virtual appliance locally (you don't have the necessary resources for running it)
• And of course, you have a startup company, and you don't want to own your own datacenter. So you just rent it... In this scenario you would need payed IDS licensees of course....

Summary
In this long post I've gone through the following points:

• Why IDS is a perfect match for virtualized environments
• IBM Informix virtual appliance. A pre-configured VMWare image with IDS Developer Edition already installed. Everything ready for your experiments
• IBM Developer Edition AMI (Amazon Machine Image). The machine image in Amazon EC2 format that IBM made available for use in Amazon EC2 environment

I haven't gone into details of the virtual appliance contents. But I recommend that if you're interested in IBM Informix Dynamic Server, you should really test it. It probably has everything you'll need to learn and test IDS.

Glossary

• Amazon EC2
  A cloud computing environment run by Amazon
• AMI
  Amazon Machine Image - A pre-built virtual machine that you can use to start an Amazon EC2 instance
• Amazon EC2 instance
  A running virtual machine in the Amazon EC2 environment
• Amazon S3
  Amazon's Simple Storage Service
  This is a non-volatile storage service provided by Amazon. It costs around $0.1/GB/Month
  
• IDS Developer Edition
  A version of IBM Informix Dynamic Server, that you can use for application developing.
  It's freely available at and you can use it for learning, test and application developing. Please check the license for details
• VMWare Appliances
  Pre-configured virtual images ready to run in one of the VWWare products (IDS Developer image is available)

References

• Guy Bowerman's Blog entry about IDS Developer Virtual Appliance:
  http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/gbowerman?entry=the_informix_virtual_appliance
• Guy Bowerman's Blog entry about IDS Developer AMI:
  http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/gbowerman?entry=informix_cloud_computing_with_amazon
• Amazon's page about IBM partnership:
  http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/featured-partners/ibm/
• Amazon's EC2 IDS catalog entry page:
  http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=2044
• IBM Informix Dynamic Server Amazon AMI Getting Started Guide - This is a must have to get started :
  http://download.boulder.ibm.com/ibmdl/pub/software/dw/cloud/ids/Get_Started_IDS_AMI.pdf
• IBM announcement about the availability of IBM software on Amazon Cloud environment:
  http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26673.wss
• IBM developerworks page on cloud computing:
  http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/spaces/cloud
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about the IBM Development AMI on AWS (for IDS 11.50):
  http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/downloads/im/ids/faq-ec2-ids.html
  

Kindle 2 to be Released February 24th

I'm sure many of you have been following the Kindle, since its release by Amazon.com. Well on February 24th Amazon is about to release the Kindle 2.0 which will include a number of enhancements and features that I though you might be interested in hearing about. I am excited to see that the Kindle 2.0 will include text to speech which will allow anyone to have the Kindle read the text to them. What a great feature for students with reading disabilities. With a library of over 23o, 000 books this will be a welcome addition to the world of assistive technology. The Kindle 2.0 looks incredible thin and with its new capabilities it may even be something that I will decide to purchase. With built in 3G wireless you can download books from just about anywhere. The Kindle 2.0 can hold over 1500 titles which is quite awesome. The Kindle 2 will cost $359 dollars. Here is a link for more information.
Here are some of the new features:

Slim: Just over 1/3 of an inch, as thin as most magazines

Lightweight: At 10.2 ounces, lighter than a typical paperback

Wireless: 3G wireless lets you download books right from your Kindle, anytime, anywhere; no monthly fees, service plans, or hunting for Wi-Fi hotspots

Books in Under 60 Seconds: Get books delivered in less than 60 seconds; no PC required

Improved Display: Reads like real paper; now boasts 16 shades of gray for clear text and even crisper images

Longer Battery Life: 25% longer battery life; read for days without recharging

More Storage: Take your library with you; holds over 1,500 books

Faster Page Turns: 20% faster page turns

Read-to-Me: With the new Text-to-Speech feature, Kindle can read every book, blog, magazine, and newspaper out loud to you

Large Selection: Over 230,000 books plus U.S. and international newspapers, magazines, and blogs available

Low Book Prices: New York Times Best Sellers and New Releases $9.99, unless marked otherwise

Is There a Kindle in Your Future?

Amazon today released Kindle, a new book eReader gadget that allows you to download books, magazines and blogs. It uses the EVDO network to keep you connected to the Amazon website which means you do not need to be in the range of a Wifi connection to download books or to access the Amazon Store. There is no fee for being connected to the EVDO network for users. The Amazon Kindle will retail for $399 dollars and New York Times best sellers will cost you $9.95 to download. The question I have is, do we need another gadget to read books? While the demonstration looked pretty cool do we really need another electronic device to handle our books? Lets see I carry a cell phone, iPod, Palm and now a Kindle! While there are certainly advantages to digital books and magazines, I for one still enjoy holding a magazine or book when reading. I know that when I have to read long passages or documents on the web I still prefer to print them and read them at my leisure. For those with reading disabilities it would be great to have text to speech built into the Amazon Kindle-but this is not feature that is built in at this time. I would be interested in your comments and views on the Kindle.