Five Things Amazon Should Put in Kindle 2.0

The rumblings in the ground are pointing to an imminent Kindle 2.0, a successor to Amazon's loved but flawed e-book reader. The Kindle has effectively dropped in price to just $260 (although you'll to sign up for an Amazon Visa card to get the discount), and the current version is getting pretty old in gadget years.

But what should Amazon do to make it better? Cheaper? Check. Smaller? Hell yes. But we have a few other suggestions that Jeff Bezos might like to take a look at if he wants the Kindle 2.0 to be the best e-book reader on the planet.

Sexier
The current Kindle is ugly. Almost nobody will argue with that. In fact, the only way to make it uglier would be to make it in false-limb-pink. This one is easy: just copy somebody else. A sleek, black slab made from aluminum and glass would do the trick just nicely. Add a couple of buttons to turn the pages and you're done. And the keyboard? That's next:

Touch Screen
Those keys need to go. The Kindle is an e-book reader, not an email writer, and the only things you'll ever need a keyboard for are searching your books and tapping in URLs. A touch-screen keyboard is the way to go -- even a crappy one would be fine for such light usage and leave space for the most important part: The screen.

Color
This won't happen for years given the state of e-ink technology, but this is a wish list, not a spec sheet. Recent talk about comics has got me thinking that a color Kindle would be perfect for the job. The trouble is that standard laptop screens have too low a resolution, meaning that you have to zoom in to get a comfortable level of detail. The Kindle's screen is a lot higher-res, and not too far off the size of a comic.

It could be the way into the 21st century for publishers, too. I haven't bought comics regularly for years, since the tough budgeting of studenthood cut out all but the essentials -- beer and cigarettes. If Marvel and DC put their entire catalogs onto Amazon, they'd make a fortune. Better yet, the print sales wouldn't drop -- the nerds will still buy copies to slide into acid-free card-backed bags.

Sell it Everywhere
The Kindle is still US only, a rather embarrassing fact given how perfect e-books are for international delivery. We know why: the killer feature of the Kindle is its free, alway-on internet connection and that means negotiating with our evil telco overlords. We're sure Amazon is on to this already -- without connectivity, the Kindle is no better than any other e-book reader.

And if you live in the US, this is still important. The Kindle is arguably at its most useful when you go on vacation -- all the titles you want, and none of the excess baggage fees. But as soon as you leave the country, your access is cut off. You'd better make sure you buy everything you need before you fly.

Subscriptions
The Kindle can subscribe to newspapers, so why not books? A monthly fee for all-you-can read would be perfect. But even an Audible-style queue would be good enough: You pay a subscription and get a fixed number of books each month. And those comic books? What about subscribing to those and having the new issue just show up every Wednesday?

Over to you. Suggestions. as ever, go in the comments.

by Charlie Sorrel for Wired.com

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