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By Chris Meadows

Wired’s “Gadget Lab” section has the story of a hobbyist who didn’t like the closed nature of Amazon’s Kindle, so he built his own e-ink e-book reader using a prototype kit from E Ink…for almost nine times the Kindle’s price.

e_ink443"The primary advantage [of the kit] is you can take it apart and look at each individual piece, like a block diagram," says Sri Peruvemba, vice-president of marketing for E Ink. "You can do your own design and put together your own device or applications based on our technology."

For e-book enthusiasts it offers what a Kindle or a Sony Reader can’t. "If you buy one of those units you won’t be won’t be able to reprogram it to your satisfaction," he says. "You can’t copy the electronics or change the chipset or use a different software."

Certainly, the closed nature of the Kindle platform is troubling. But is it troubling enough to warrant spending $3,000 to create your own personal alternative? You could buy 13 8-gig iPod Touches for that amount of money. (Granted, the iPod Touch is itself closed in some ways, but at least it can read open e-book formats such as ePub.)

 
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