Rand McNally Serves up Maps for Kindle

First off, the Kindle is Amazon’s e-book reader. Some love it (Oprah does!), others hate it. I’ve yet to see one in the wild myself, but hear about it quite on tech podcasts. Among the texts that can be downloaded wirelessly are books, magazines, newspapers, etc. You can even put audio on it.

Yesterday Rand McNally announced its first set of maps for the device (press release). The prices are good - $1.99 each for Northern and Southern California and Washington State. More are planned for 2009. The challenge, as Gizmodo points out, why put non-updatable maps, even digital ones on such a device? If Rand McNally comes up with an update mechanism, perhaps this will be more interesting, but PNDs and cell phones are way out ahead of the Kindle. In particular, people know what they are!