Kindle 2 released: Malaysian schoolkids rejoice!

Amazon recently released its Kindle 2 E-reader in the States for a price considered expensive even by their standards. When China releases the Chinese equivalent at one-twentieth of the price (and quality I might add) I can well imagine its viability in Malaysia and Singapore.

Even when I was finishing primary school, which is a good decade ago now, kids were hefting ever heavier backpacks – I made it my mission to bring as little books as possible (you would be surprised how much books you can not bring, if you ignore the fact that you actually need to study in school), but it wasn’t the same for the more kiasu (competitive) kids in class.

I remember some of my classmates having competitions to see who carried the heaviest bags! The winner was something in the region of 19kg. Completely nuts. A standard E-reader will solve all that problem, and same goes for all the high school kids, university kids, college kids.

The downside is that you can not use the “I left my work at home”  or “I lost my exercise book” excuses any more, which kinda makes it harder for one to be lazy so the parents will still be generally supportive of the e-reader.

Speaking of parents, they might be wary of kids carrying such expensive gadgets around, but then again the Chinese will make it affordable for everyone, and I suspect protection and gadget security will become much more advanced in the future.

This might be further in the future, but I imagine a Kindle + Tablet for the design-based students; they can then sketch on it, and never be afraid of losing their sketches ever again. Seeing that most people now scan their sketches into the computer for photoshopping anyway, sketching directly on the Kindle + Tablet will just skip the cumbersome part and you can go straight into digital coloring.

If the sheer amount of paper used by just one design student for just one project is ever known to the environmentalists, designers will have something to worry about other than tight deadlines.

While we’re on the subject of environmentalists, they will just love it to bits. Think of how many trees you save from not having to print all those books and papers. They will go nuts with delight.

Last point: traditionalists worry about the effect this will have on books, that it will further accelerate the demise of reading/books. I say they needn’t worry. Reading is almost extinct in Malaysia anyway; many Malaysians don’t give a damn about books and/or reading. In fact, since you can also read blogs, newspapers, magazines aside in it, e-readers and e-books will be the only hopes of rekindling the reading habit in Malaysia.

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