Since a few years ago, I’ve been longing for a light portable library that can hold a couple hundred books, articles, and news papers in it and I can read anywhere when convenient.  I’ve tried a bunch of devices from Franklin to Palm and read about Sony’s Reader which, although features electronic ink technology, didn’t caught much popularity at all.  Amazon’s newly launched Kindle seems to begin to light up the candles of the portable reading.

It take much to build a electronic book reading device that could compete with paper books.  First of all LCD still causes much more eye fatigue than natual ink on paper.  The electronic ink technology in the Kindle could simulate natual ink and the ability of changing the font size is a plus for eye comfort.  Content quality is the next most important thing.  For example, the Acrobat Reader for Palm has to transform normal PDF files into a special format to be displayed on Palm.  It not only take a long time to transform, but also lose a lot of formatting for graphics, tables, and math formula.  Content collection is also a challenge, where Amazon definitely wins with its unbeatable collection of books, partnership with large content providers, a aggregation of community contents (e.g., blogs).  And don’t forget these can all be access wirelessly while you are on the go and they are fully searchable!  Isn’t that cool?

Since this is only the first version, there must be a lot that could be further improved.  While I’m reading, I like to see more per screen.  So while not change the physical keyboard into a touch screen and let the screen be as big as possible?  Kindle won’t have the dilemma as iPhone’s small touch screen keyword, because Kindle has bigger screen.  Even many people got use to the iPhone keyboard after practicing, Kindle will be even much easier.

It has been reported that due to the burgeoning advancement in digital multimedia content on TV and Internet, reading and literacy capability of young generation is decreasing.  Hopefully this cool gadget could bring books back into the competition with TV and Inernet.

I just created and published a new gadget on live.com called "Zillow Home Value Estimate".  Please give it a try!  The above link points to the gadget hosted on gallery.live.com.  If you are brave enough, you can also try the one I hosted on my own site by clicking the following link "Add the gadget to your live.com" or "Add the gadget to your live space".  I would normally upgrade the 2nd one quicker

Screenshot:

If you are a home owner put this gadget on your own personalized live.com homepage, so you could closely monitor the value trend of your property.  Type in the street address and city/state (or zip code) of the real estate property that you are interested in, the zillow estimate (zestimate) and the 1 year value trend chart will appear on your live.com personalized home page.  To change the address, click on the underlined address itself and the editing functionality will show up.  The gadget uses zillow web services API to query the home value estimate.

A tip for developing live.com gadgets is beside publishing your new gadgets to the live.com gallery, you could also post a quick link on your own website/blog too so that the visitors can add your gadgets to their home page by a simple click on your site.  All you need to do is put a hyper link http://www.live.com/?add=URL_TO_YOUR_GADGET_XML_FILE for adding to live.com and http://spaces.live.com/spacesapi.aspx?wx_action=create&wx_url=URL_TO_YOUR_GADGET_XML_FILE for adding to live spaces. For example: <a href="http://www.live.com/?add=http://stanley.jojoyao.com/live_gadgets/Zillow/ZillowGadget.xml">Add to Live.com</a> and <a href="http://spaces.live.com/spacesapi.aspx?wx_action=create&wx_url=http://stanley.jojoyao.com/live_gadgets/Zillow/gadget.xml">Add to Live Spaces</a>