I broke down and bought myself a Kindle this past week. I will say that I am definitely in like with the device, but not really in love with it yet. The major reason for that is because in the kindle I can see so much more potential, which Amazon clearly has no interest in. Sadly, their main competitor, the Nook, has fully abandoned e-ink for the glossy shiney promiss of interactive CD-ROM… oh, sorry, wrong decade. I think they are now calling it interactive magazines.
E-ink is beautiful. Just beautiful. It is a pleasure to read, creates no eye strain, it’s paper, but better.
The missing potential is around how completely locked down development is, and looks like forever will be, on the Kindle. I recently tried to get access to the KDK to play around with astronomy code on the Kindle. E-ink represents a unique value in astronomy, because it is a dynamic screen that generates no light. I’ve got 15 lbs of books that I take to every star part (and another 15lbs I leave at home) to look up targets, facts and figures, when in the field. Replacing that with a Kindle would be amazing. Having Where Is Io run on the kindle would just kick some serious butt.
But that’s not in the cards. While this time I actually did get a response from the KDK folks, the tone was clear. They don’t want a homebrew market on the kindle, they only are going to let folks in with a product plan in place. Kindle active content is going to be extremely limited because of this, which I think is Amazon’s intent. Given that they are the ones paying for the wispernet cellular connection in every device, they’ve got some incentive to keep very tight control on what people can do. I get that, but as an open source developer, I still don’t like it.
It does sadden me, because I can see so much more potential for this device. Maybe Amazon will have a change of heart in the future. For now I’ll just have to live with this being a really great reader, and possibly play with some custom authoring myself.
It's always more complicated 
if the noteslate (http://noteslate.com/) ever becomes a reality (currently the emphasis is on the “late” part, it seems), it might be an alternative?
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Possibly, though the kindle is pretty spectacular performance wise. It also supports all the canvas api in it’s web browser, which is giving me some ideas there as well.
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Though I can’t comment on tablet use at night, is there anything like this Red Screen utility for Linux that you could use with a laptop? ( http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/33578/redscreen ) I use the program when I’m running an event requiring a dark room so I can monitor things and be as little of a distraction as possible. Works really well for my purposes.
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I’ve got various ways to make my screen only emit red light, but at the end of the day it’s still an LCD, and it’s emitting light. When I’m doing astronomy I’ve actually got 2 different red lights, one for setting up, and one for observing, which is a single LED that’s really really dim. Even red light in too high of a quantity is problematic.
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