Gadget Wisdom

For a long time, we wavered on the issue of whether to buy an e-book reader. However, after we got a lot of money this holiday season in Amazon gift cards, we wavered and considered reversing ourselves, even though we have major issues with the Kindle.

This holiday season, for the first time, Kindle books outsold traditional books on Amazon, the Kindle itself was the site’s bestselling product.

But even after this, we don’t think the technology is open enough. We didn’t get into music downloading until Amazon released a DRM-free store. It is all about the freedom.

Our latest contemplation, with the delay of purchasing an e-book reader, is to replace our physical classics with free books from the Google Books project, as they are now available in EPUB format, which can be read using the free and open FBReader. What do you think?

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Last week, Amazon lowered the price of the Kindle to $299, a reduction of $60. We want a Kindle, but we don’t want to want a Kindle. It is still a bit pricey for its limitations.

What does that mean? Well, the Kindle is the greatest e-book reader out there…not because of its hardware, but because of the sheer amount of titles Amazon offers and the ease of getting them through the Kindle. The smartest thing Amazon could do is license the Kindle source to anyone, and we still await that.

Reports indicate that Amazon is exploring ad-supported Kindle books for additional revenue. Publishers are afraid Amazon will force them to lower their profit margins on e-books. Publishers hope new players like PlasticLogic, FirstPaper, ScrollMotion, and Google’s e-publishing service could help turn the tables in their favor. But so far, Amazon has an early lead.

We are hoping competition does come along. Google plans to sell readers online access to digital versions of various books, and the books would be cached in their browser when offline. This seems like an improved system. A simple browser plugin could handle this. They appear, for their early copyright-free public domain books, to be working with the ePub format, which is an official open standard.

Our fondest dream is to use the Kindle to free up space. We have so many shelves of books. Some of them could be digitized. We’ve done this when we rid ourselves of most of our VHS cassettes and started to replace audio cassettes with CDs.

A while back, we commented on why a Kindle might not be so cost-effective.

Today, things change. On Wednesday, the Kindle DX was introduced. It will be an alternative, not a replacement for the Kindle 2. It boasts a 9.7-inch display with auto-rotation, high-speed wireless access to 275,000 books, 3.3 gigabytes of storage(roughly 3,500 books), native support for PDF documents, with no panning, zooming or scrolling necessary.

The product will begin shipping this summer and will cost $489. Three newspapers will offer a reduced price on the Kindle DX in exchange for a long-term subscription: The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. This is where one might reconsider the Kindle, if the reduction is enough to justify the purchase. However, this apparently will only be offered where Home Delivery of the papers are not. That may be offered through the Kindle 2 as well. Details are not yet available.

The Kindle DX eliminates some of the problems with the Kindle…namely that documents are printed on 8 1/2 by 11 sheets of paper most commonly, and the Kindle 2 is half that size at 6 inches. The DX has 2.5 times the surface area. Amazon has reached agreements with three leading textbook publishers that represent 60 percent of the market: Pearson, Cengage Learning and Wiley(But not McGraw-Hill Education.). Thus, the Kindle DX will be a perfect tool for college campuses, where textbook savings(hopefully) can be applied toward the device. Students will try out the Kindle DX this fall at Arizona State, Case Western Reserve, Princeton, the University of Virginia, Reed College and Pace.

As Techcrunch pointed out, for the 275,000 books that are available on the Kindle, sales are already 35 percent of the same books in print. That is a shocking statistic.  But while we continue to be impressed by the Kindle and its variants, the price tag is still a matter of concern. BusinessInsider pointed out devices you can buy for less than $489, including a netbook, iPhone, AppleTV, Wii, Xbox 360, 22″ LCD HDTV, etc.

Which is our point. When given the choice between a netbook and a Kindle, we opted for the netbook, where we can read the New York Times and most news sources free with a net connection. It isn’t a dedicated device, which has its pros and cons, and it lacks the always-on connection included with the price of purchase(which is certainly an advantage) Web anywhere for life is certainly a pro as well.

On the software side of things, we feel certain a Kindle Reader will come for the PC(although Linux will no doubt take more time), as they already have an iPhone reader and they want to corner the e-book market. Barring that, you can always turn a netbook into an e-book reader with something like FBReader, which supports most non-DRMed formats, and buy your books from non-Amazon sources(More on this in a future post).

What it comes down to is that we love what the Kindle represents, and we are impressed by its continual evolution, but we are staying away for now.

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PC Magazine has a great article this week about the success of the Kindle, entitled Amazon’s Kindle Secret is in the Software. In it, Dan Costa argues that the announcement of a free Kindle Reader for the iPhone cements Amazon’s leadership role in the e-book market.

If you didn’t hear, Amazon released a Kindle reader for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Not only will it allow you access to the content you’ve purchased on the Kindle(if you have such content), but it will take you to where you left off, and allow you to view, but not edit, annotations and bookmarks you made on the Kindle. Thus, it seems to be for people who have already bought a Kindle, and wish to use their iPhone as a secondary reading device. And you need a computer to buy the books, it is apparently not easy to do from the iPhone itself(Disclosure: None here owns an iPhone)

What Amazon offers through Kindle is a DRM system for e-books. While the DRM is up to the content providers, most publishers have opted to lock up their books. Now, they are allowing content providers to enable or disable the text-to-speech options for their books. It is this closed format that allows Amazon to have collected over 230,000 titles in Kindle format. The Kindle doesn’t support ePub, the open digital book standard sponsored by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF).

As Costa puts it:

Open-minded publishers like Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, have already balked at joining Amazon’s single-source, single-file-format delivery system. As the market grows, so will the demand for alternatives. Even Apple supports multiple file formats on the iPod.

We object to any locked device. We understand DRM, but any good device should support alternative choices. As O’Reilly Radar points out, Amazon wants to own not only the hardware market, and the e-book format market. By releasing applications for other devices, they can do that. Techfragments predicts that a desktop and/or web-based version is probably in the works. The sync that allows you to pick up where you left off on the iPhone from your Kindle could work well on the desktop. And with hardcover book sized netbooks becoming popular, this will be another platform they can offer.

Amazon pushing the books over the devices will allow them greater long-term profit and control of the market. They can continue to offer free applications, offer a hardware device, and reap the benefits on all fronts.

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We continue to admire the Kindle, as we emphatically state it is too expensive a toy for us to consider seriously. For those of you wishing to see shots of the Kindle and drool, Engadget has some great closeups.

More interesting is Crunchgear’s 10 Reasons To and Not to Buy a Kindle. Here’s our version of it:

Reasons to Buy a Kindle

1. It’s great for travel.
2. You can email DOC, TXT, and PDF files to your Kindle email address for conversion…but it costs 10 cents.
3. It looks and feels great. It is only grayscale…with 16 shades on the new Kindle 2, but it offers a clear reading surface. We’ve heard color is in the future. Amazon designed a solid piece of hardware overall.
4. Almost any book is available at any time. As more and more publishers offer their content in Ebook form, the amount of books you can’t get is limited to the rare. Even an out-of-print book can be resurrected and offered.
5. It can work in a variety of situations that paperbook books would be cumbersome in.
6. The bookmarking and highlighting systems have been improved for the Kindle 2, but overall they add the ability to mark up your E-book and return to sections the way you might in a real book.
7. The dictionary is now integrated. Also…having a dictionary at all built in to look up terms you don’t know.
8. It is the future. Reading is going in this direction. We doubt paper books will die. But E-books are going to be a major part of the market.

Why NOT to buy a Kindle

1. The Kindle is not conducive to research or reference. Page changing and book style searching are not at the speed/rate you could browse through a book. You can’t flip through and find what you are looking for.
2. It isn’t ready for students…a market that could really use a Kindle. Not only are there price issues, and textbook availability issues and the one mentioned above.
3. The Kindle is thin, and not exactly rugged. Of course, that is what a good case is for.
4. The net connection isn’t available internationally.
5. No expansion slot. The Kindle 2 has no SD slot, or any provision for add-on memory.
6. It is battery operated and most be charged periodically. Books never run out of batteries. The battery also makes it bottom heavy.
7. There is still a value to the printed book.

What are your thoughts? Coming up…more of where to get and use e-books less a Kindle.

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Not long ago, we were on a plane and someone across the aisle had Amazon’s Kindle. The Kindle, if you’ve missed it, is an E-Book reader. And if anyone had the power to make electronic book reading take off, it is Amazon.

But the Consumerist reports that nearly 30% of books sold for the Kindle are now above $9.99, making them cost more, not less than the equivalent paperback. As one person put it…

300 dollars was supposed to be a sort of covenant between us and amazon. we backed their device and they would usher in an era of low cost/reasonably priced literature. Sure it wasn’t written in stone but the way they advertised it many of us believed it, otherwise this forum wouldn’t be as popular as it is. Instead what is happening is that we put ourselves out there for a company and they returned the favor by charging us even more for books then if we just went out and bought the printed version.

The idea of electronic reading is eventually the reader pays for itself in savings offered by buying electronic over print media, making print a luxury. The size of the Kindle makes it, from what we saw, much easier to read on than a cell phone, which certainly could do the same job of displaying text. It offers an always-on wireless connection to provide content.

But ultimately, it is a $300 toy, for which there are rumors a new version is set to be released on the 9th of February. Three hundred dollars can buy a lot of books…or even a netbook computer to read books on.

On a related note, for free e-books, the following site was suggested as options….feedbooks.com – Provides a variety of contributed as well as public domain e-books in a variety of formats as well as subscription based service. Looks good to us. We’re off to read Sherlock Holmes and not pay a cent…

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