As our original review of the first-generation Kindle pointed out, Amazon’s entry into the e-reader market wasn’t entirely trailblazing. Sony’s Reader and a variety of competing devices had already failed to make much of an impact on the market, despite a decade of trying. A marketing partnership between Sony and Borders to promote the Reader in the year prior to Kindle’s debut made little headway.

With the Kindle however, Amazon applied its global mail order experience and leveraged its enormous catalog of titles (and subsequent pull among publishers) to put additional momentum behind the push to drive print publications into ebook territory. However, the first generation Kindle also demonstrated the company’s lack of experience in building hardware.

The original Kindle was ugly and looked flimsy and cheap, ensuring that only the most avid of ebook users would pay for the privilege of test driving Amazon’s e-reader experiment. The company only shipped about a half million Kindle devices last year. That’s perhaps a significant achievement among e-readers but hardly the launch of a new mainstream way to access information.

Continue reading the review here.