You can't implement a flick-scroll type interface without immediate feedback. A delay of 1 second or even an large fraction of a second makes this untenable.
My point is not a Kindle replacement being a netbook. It's about being interactive. 1 second screen refreshes cripple interactivity.
When I use text search to find things in electronic references, I find myself doing one find, quickly perusing the results, then often doing another refined search and perusing those results. Adding 1 second to each input is going to add something like a half-minute to each search session. That's death.
I think that your confusion here stems from your misunderstanding of the people who are in the market for the kindle.
They're not using it for anything other than reading books, and most of them don't want to. You know what demographic represents a large portion of kindle users?
The elderly.
While we geeks might enjoy envisioning kindle users as the sort of technical elite that salivate over the kindle's wireless distribution model, or its e-ink screen, the people actually using the device don't care.
It is a book reader, not a mobile computing platform, I'm not sure how hard I can drive this point home.
The people who really are geeks (people that use websites like HN), carry things like netbooks around because they have real keyboards on them. Putting a real keyboard on the kindle would ruin it.
The refresh time on the kindle's screen (kindle 2) is almost perfect. It is almost exactly the ammount of time that it takes my eyes to transition to the top of the page and continue reading.
For me, the experience with the kindle is better than experiences I've had with dead-tree books.
I (and I suspect the overwhelming majority of kindle users) hope that amazon never changes it.
No, this is your misunderstanding. (It comes across as quite insistent, actually. You're opposing views I don't hold, rather you are projecting them onto me.)
I'm advocating a reader-type device for other uses like reference. I'm not talking about a Kindle replacement. I'm not advocating putting a real keyboard on such a device. A very flat pad with no hinges would be the best, actually.
You're only talking about the narrow use-case of the Kindle. There are other use-cases for print media, and these represent additional markets.
Kindle refresh time is good for linear reading of entire books. But this is not the only use case that print media satisfies!
That's about a half-dozen things you misunderstood.
(However, a device with the enhanced interactivity I am talking about would also be just as usable as a plain old eBook reader.)
The Kindle isn't for research. It's for reading. Just plain reading. And for most people, it's a great replacement for a stack of books they carry around. I don't think anyone's really trying to make it more than an eBook reader with some very basic search for purchasing content.
This is exactly my point. A different device with a similar form factor, but with different display capabilities can capture an entirely different market!
A device with greater interactivity than the Kindle could service markets that the Kindle cannot.
The market could well be a hardware market. (As opposed to the Kindle which is a driver of demand for content.) I'm interested in being able to display full-page daylight-readable content that I collate and generate, and manipulate it quickly and interactively. I'm certain that many others have similar needs, or will discover such uses once these are available.
My point is not a Kindle replacement being a netbook. It's about being interactive. 1 second screen refreshes cripple interactivity.
When I use text search to find things in electronic references, I find myself doing one find, quickly perusing the results, then often doing another refined search and perusing those results. Adding 1 second to each input is going to add something like a half-minute to each search session. That's death.