Yesterday Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos officially released Kindle ($399), a new eBook reader that also allows for wireless access to blogs. In development for more than 3 years, the device claims to use a new high-resolution display technology called electronic paper. This new display is supposed to provide a crisp black-and-white screen that resembles the appearance and readability of printed paper. It reflects light like ordinary paper and uses no backlighting, eliminating the glare associated electronic displays. The screen uses real ink, but displays the ink particles electronically. As a result, Kindle can be read as easily in bright sunlight as in your living room. Also, the screen never gets hot, so it won’t burn your fingers during a long read. Even with a high introductory price, the Kindle sold out in just over 5 hours.

The most interesting thing to me is the Wireless Access that comes with the device. There is no monthly service/access plan and you don’t need a wifi-hotspot either. You don’t even need to do any kind of wireless setup! They call this new wireless access Whispernet and it’s built on Sprint’s national high-speed (EVDO) data network to enable you to wirelessly search, download, and read content on the go… all at Amazon’s expense. If you’ve got a couple of bars of access on your cell phone, odds are you can download a book, newspaper or magazine in a quick minute.

Kindle also has wireless access to Wikipedia and a built-in New Oxford American Dictionary with over 250,000 entries and definitions, so you can seamlessly look up the meanings of words without interrupting your reading. You can also add annotations to text, just like you might write in the margins of a book and bookmark pages for future use. (Although you’ll never need to bookmark your last place in the book, because Kindle remembers for you and always opens to the last page you read.) The device is also reported to have a 5 day battery life with average use and allow for adjustable text sizes, which should be helpful if you sign up for newspaper delivery direct to your Kindle.

A few of the apparent problems I see are that there is no support for PDF documents (at least I find no mention of this), a proprietary DRM format to download and read content, no color support, and no touchscreen. It will be interesting to see if Apple comes out with a larger version of the iPod touch to compete in this market. I doubt it, but interesting to think about. Also, one of the things that made the iPod so successful was that people could rip their own CDs and put them onto their iPod, not just buy new tracks from an e-store. I think eBooks and eBook Readers will follow the same trend. It will be user-generated PDFs that will help a device reach a successful mass market adoption. Without that, I think any eReader is doomed to fail. But that’s just my 2 cents…

You can get full information about the Kindle at the Amazon page located here. However, a funnier read is to look at the almost 400 (mostly negative) reviews that have already been posted even though the product was just announced and none of these people have actually used one yet! I also found a very interesting video clip endorsing the Kindle from our old friend Guy Kawasaki (of Apple Evangelism fame).