Amazon Is Building a Better Browser for Kindle

Anything that you'd want to take time to read, bookmarklet it, and each day or week Instapaper compiles a wrapup for you, reformatted to be readable on the Kindle. (Something like "Readability", but delivered wirelessly to the Kindle for reading at leisure.)

Instapaper has a live reformatting engine you can use on the fly for more readable browsing as well. This WebMonkey link, for example: http://www.instapaper.com/m?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.webmonkey.com...

Amazon should consider acquiring Instapaper, associating themselves with making things easier to read.

2) Second, Amazon should be fixing other usability issues with the Kindle, starting with organizing books and documents in something other than a flat list. At the very least, group books by author sorted by original publication date, so it's easier to read through a series of books by a prolific author. And do this intelligently, so Patterson's co-authored books still show under Patterson. For example, Patterson's Women's Murder Club series, by various authors, actually follow a narrative arc across books, so should be read in order. The titles have numbers, so this one is easy. Other series are not as easy.

Browser engineers don't necessarily have to be working on a standard roam-the-wild-internet web browser.

Anyway, I think Amazon has decided to push for a Kindle platform - they have a call outstanding for external developers of "active content", and a beta SDK you can sign up for (not yet public, haven't seen it).

The issue will turn on who pays for the 3G data line. If it's Amazon, of course they'll use the line to pull in paying customers. The limited freebies (such as Wikipedia) are just a loss-leader.

A model where the Kindle can be used with a regular (owner-paid) data line would be needed for things such as corporate VPNs. I don't know if Amazon are prepared to go there just to make a little bit more money on hardware.