• Paper type and quality
• The smell of dead trees aged by their siblings in a book store
• The binding of the pages
• The physical qualities of the cover (hardback, padding, art, texture)

While it may never be truly possible to dynamically simulate these things (that is, until they are able to create custom bound full ePaper books filled with blank pages that you can “connect” into a service), there are some things that I hope Amazon considers as they move forward:

• Clean up the “Home” page. We need categories! Paging through lots of samples, purchased books, subscriptions, and our own content is painstaking difficult to navigate through.
• Cover images! We should have the ability to browse by book cover (the same one you already have in the Kindle Store would work fine) so that we can get a feel for the book as we would if we saw it on a shelf.
• Emit a stinky musty smell of dead trees. OK, I’m kidding about this one.

What do you think about having cover images on the Home screen?

There were 1329 replies to his posting. Compared to the average count of replies on Amazon’s Kindle forum, this was a killing!

If you spend a few minutes reading people’s responses, you will very see that the ages vary amongst Kindle owners. There is a surprisingly large group of older people (65-80) who are very happy with the device. There is a lot of chatter about arthritis, but I do not believe there is any correlation between it and the device right now. Some have noted that the Kindle feels lighter than a book in their hands, allowing them to read through longer periods of time than they could with their dead tree counterparts.