National Library Week is this week. We here at Gadget Wisdom love to read, be it on our mobile devices, or traditional books. But the library is not just about reading.
Libraries offer DVD and video games you can borrow. They have e-books and digital media borrowing online. They offer free wi-fi. We hope the book itself, a piece of technology(if older tech), never dies, but the libraries are moving with the times. They have to, or they will cease to be.
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?
Amazon is cutting the price of its Kindle 2 to $259, the second drop in the last few months. It is also offering an ‘international’ Kindle for $279, with shipping to begin on October 19th. Books downloaded internationally will cost an extra $1.99. This does free up a gap in the service, namely overseas, and connects Amazon to AT&T over Sprint.
Amazon has said that Kindle books now represent 48% of total book sales when both Kindle and paper versions are available, up from 35% in May and 13% in February, but no statistics have been revealed on how many units have been sold, but Kindle owners seem to buy a lot of books.
So, with the latest price drop, is it finally time to buy a Kindle? Maybe. But we’d prefer it to hit around $200 before it becomes too tempting to resist, especially with the bulk of new e-book readers coming and Google’s E-Book initiative.
Competition produces innovation. Amazon has said it would not mind selling Kindle books to people with other E-book readers, which would be a smart move for the company. But either way, in another few months, the price will likely be where we want it to be. What do you think?
Books, with the exception of our critiquing issues with the Kindle and E-Book readers, don’t usually appear on Gadget Wisdom. They aren’t gadgets, and while we are a tech blog, the book isn’t usually thought of as tech.
But think about it…aren’t they? Johannes Gutenberg, in the 15th century, invented the first viable printing press(which was first used in the moneymaking enterprise of printing indulgences for the Church, but that is another story). The history of printing, as a man demonstrating a printing press at a Historical Village showed us, is full of technology. Remember that before printing, books would have to be copied by hand.
More recently, we’ve talked about On-Demand book printing machines, which we believe is the future of bookstores.
But today, August 28th, Reading Rainbow comes to the end of its 26-year run on television. The show, started in 1983, was hosted by Levar Burton(best known to most of you as that blind guy from Star Trek, or that Roots thing). During the show, kids gave their own reviews of books, and Burton featured a real-life adventure inspired by a book. No one will put up the money to renew the show’s broadcast rights, thus dooming it.
The fallacy, according to the people at PBS, is that the show was designed to teach children a love of reading, and they want to put their money into teaching kids basic reading skills. Unlike many children’s shows…Reading Rainbow was not torture. Many children’s programs make us cringe. Anyone over the age of ten who watches them with youngsters wants to claw his or her eyes out pretty early on. We can thank Levar Burton, who spearheaded the show, for speaking simply, so that children could understand, but keeping quality high.We can count Reading Rainbow on the list of children’s programs we would still watch today.
It brings up the larger question of the future of books entirely. Without fostering a lifelong love of learning and of books, children in an increasingly technological world will let them go by the wayside. Already children are demanding multimedia education over reading, so a world in which the written word because less and less prominent is a horrible possibility.
From a technical standpoint, nothing digital replaces the feeling and ease of a real book, even the minute we spent looking at the Kindle. We continue to add bookshelves to our home, and reading on a computer screen is something we do, it doesn’t have the same relaxing appeal. It is the relative inexpensive nature and ease of use of books that has made reading and education accessible to all of us. Technology surrounding them may continue to improve, but books are here to stay for the long-term…if only we get a new generation interested in reading. But, as Levar Burton said, “you don’t have to take our word for it.”
Last week, Amazonlowered 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.
We’ve maintained, and continue to maintain the Kindle is not yet at the price point where the upfront cost is offset enough by the benefits. Endgadget, however, reports that Amazon has dropped indications it sees the Kindle readers and Kindle books as two separate businesses.
This is actually good for us…the people who want e-books to become more ubiquitous. We don’t want the paper book to go away though. We believe there is a place for it in this world. Our concern is that the lowering of the hardware will produce an increase in the price of the book itself. Currently, a Kindle book can average $9.99, more or less. A hardcover book could be over double that. On a $9.95 book, an analysis suggests Amazon only makes 61 cents.
In the fight of Kindle vs. Netbook, we opted for netbook, because it is a multifunciton device, compared to the Kindle, which is good for one thing only. But imagine if the Kindle reader became a software program available for all operating systems? What if Amazon licensed the reader software to other companies to allow the books to be read on many systems? What could that mean for the future?
The latest confusion over the Kindle is its DRM policy. Apparently, there is a limit to how many times you can download the book, even though you have bought it, and it varies from publisher to publisher…even better, no one at Amazon seems to know how to find out what the number is. The limit may actually be on the number of devices you can have the book on simultaneously, but as of now, it is still unclear. Ultimately, we remain curious what limits are put on the free distribution of content you bought amongst your own devices. Since your ownership of the book now depends on a third-party…namely Amazon, supporting your device, how does this effect your life?
So, what are the alternatives? We’ll be looking into them a bit more, as we want to take advantage of them.
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.
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 Consumeristreports 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…
National Library Week is this week. We here at Gadget Wisdom love to read, be it on our mobile devices, or traditional books. But the library is not just about reading.
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