Amazon's 2nd-generation Kindle is out, and all the geeks in the newsroom have come by to oooh and aaah.  I like this model.  It's pretty slick in a lot of ways, but falls short of the glory of it's potential of it's genre, and THIS article explains why… I'm not going to go into a lot more of that.

I'm here to explain one singular feature of the Kindle that voice actors may find helpful and another that is a chimera.

To wit, the Kindle-2 offers a text-to-speech feature that no one here has to worry will take away voiceover jobs.  I guess this is helful for people who are making cookies while trying to read the latest TIME magazine article on the warnings of Gardisil, but the Txt-2-spch not that great.

The feature that IS great is the one that lets you send copy, scripts, text ANY file in a .doc, html, .txt, .pdf, .mobi, etc. to your Kindle-specific e-mail account address, and for 10-cents Amazon will "beam" it to your Kindle for you to read.  (For no charge, they'll send it to your computer, and you can just sync it into the Kindle memory).

The same portability that makes the Kindle handy for reading books, magazines, newspapers, and blogs make it convenient for THIS feature too.

– have clients send their copy to your Amazon Kindle e-mail, and in less than a minute you can see it on your Kindle screen
– load the audition script you're going to read for your next client, read it on the way to the studio
– upload the copy you have to cut for your next job, read it on the bus
– peruse at the park the e-learning script you're going to record that night
– save paper in the process, take Kindle into your private studio, and read your work off the screen

Got an IPhone?…sure it'll do all that stuff, too, but the Kindle screen is bigger, better, and "looks" more like paper.  Kindle uses the same 3G network your phone does to recieve info, so you don't need Wi-Fi.

At $359 that may not be the only reason you'd buy a Kindle, but I plan to use it that way, ON TOP OF all the other stuff it does.

And besides, I'm a geek, and I love new technology.

CourVO