Amazon Shows Off The Amazon Silk Browser At Their Live Show

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One thing is clear–the steady advance of ebooks means an equally steady advance in the technology that drives them. More and more, you see ebooks that aren’t just text but also pictures, animations, even full-on video clips. And as that happens, the power required to run an ebook will steadily increase as well. But the folks at Amazon think they’ve got that particular trouble well in hand with their new browser, Amazon Silk.

Amazon Silk–the name coming from the fabric that is incredibly strong in even a single strand–is geared to work heavily with cloud computing, which is going to be especially popular on devices like this, as you store your ebooks and videos and the like in the cloud for later access (as well as, hopefully, locally so you can still reach them even if the net goes down). But the Amazon Silk encompasses both the starry-eyed cloud dreamers as well as us hard-headed local operation realists by giving you what’s called “dynamic split browsing”.

Basically, the browser lets you cache some materials using the device’s hardware so that you get faster loading times between the cloud and the local device, based on the remarks at the show. It can also perform automatic downsampling, so that if you get a nice hefty three meg image on a WVGA screen, your image will be adjusted accordingly on the fly so you’re not waiting for a big image to load. Bezos et al promise that it will work much the same way as any normal browser, yet provide significantly better performance.

What this all boils down to is that Amazon is clearly not just looking at today’s ebooks, but also at what ebooks might be doing in the next two or three years, giving your new Kindle–Fire, Touch, or otherwise–a bit more shelf life, which gives you a whole lot better value for your purchase, and peace of mind in the process. Nothing is quite so unpleasant as dropping money on a new chunk of hardware only to discover that, six months or a year later, it’s almost useless because the environment changed. Amazon Silk reduces the chances that that will happen and really kill your day. There’s a video of the whole thing below for an even deeper explanation.

Extra value, better experience–the Kindle is looking like a pretty good choice to me. But what do you guys think here? Think you’ll be picking one of these up soon? Whatever you think, the comments section is waiting below, so head on down and tell us what you think!

What new Kindle device are you buying? Kindle Keyboard, Kindle, Kindle Touch, Kindle Touch 3G or Kindle Fire (vote in our poll)?