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Kindle Library Lending is the Last Big Missing Feature of the Platform

Amazon Kindle PDF

Amazon announced yesterday a new feature for the Kindle, Kindle Library Lending. In partnership with Overdrive, a company that already provides E-Book lending services for tens of thousands of libraries, Amazon will offer customers the chance to take books out of their local library.

Lending will be enabled not only on the Kindle itself, but on the ubiquitous Kindle apps. That means the books will be lent to the account, not to the individual devices within it. The service will offer not only Whispersync between devices, but the opportunity to annotate books. If you later purchase the book, your notes will return.

We’re not sure if you’ll be able to browse a library collection and take out books easily directly from the Kindle. The shopping functionality on the Kindle already lacks in ease of use compared to shopping on the Amazon site.

Unfortunately, while the announcement is now, the actual functionality will not be available until later this year. Librarianbyday.net commented on a few lingering questions.

  • Existing E-Books that libraries have will now be available in Kindle format. But it does not say definitively whether or not there will be an additional cost for this for the library
  • Are you required to link your Kindle account to your library account to the point at which data is exchanged between the two? If so, how much data? Does Amazon get to know all of your checkout history

We’ll have more on this when it actually happens.

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Published on April 21, 2011
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Switching from Instapaper to ReadItLater

The concept of a Read It Later service is not new to our workflow. Back in October of 2010, we discussed moving our workflow to Instapaper. Then, our storage expanded to Pinboard, and we discussed integrating Pinboard and Instapaper into a writing and reading workflow.

However, the developer of Instapaper is very iOS-centric. He released an official iPad and iPhone app, and many of his updates are paired with an app update. We do like the product, but we decided to consider the competition when ReadItLater released an official Android app(Market Link), which is available currently at 99 cents. We had initially looked at ReadItLater and moved on, but things have changed.

The Android app offers an exclusive feature not available for any other platform app. Instant Push Sync, which ensures new items instantly download and are available on the phone, even if the phone is offline. Also on the Android side of things, there is a ReadItLater plugin for Dolphin Browser.

Read It Later also has a Firefox extension with a feature we were hunting for(unfortunately not also available for Chrome), which is Save All Tabs for Later. It also offers offline reading, Google Reader integration, etc.You can mark items as read directly from the browser.  Overall, it is much more tightly integrated into the browser experience.

Pinboard also supports the same import from ReadItLater it does from Instapaper, which means that end of my workflow(the archive) is unchanged.

Read It Later also has a beta paid feature called Digest. This turns your Read It Later stories into an online magazine format, and automatically sorts them into topics. The magazine format is very popular right now.

It does lack the auto-send to Kindle function that Instapaper offered, but this can still be reproduced using Calibre. It lacks folders, but supports tagging(which can accomplish the same thing)

If your priorities are clean formatting of long-form text content and integrated portability to an eReader, you may lean toward Instapaper. If you do your reading with your browser or mobile device and want to keep up with content-rich pages with lots of images or videos, Read It Later may be more suited.

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Published on April 15, 2011
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Amazon Releases New Ad-Supported Kindle – Save 25

Cover of "Kindle Wireless Reading Device,...
Cover via Amazon

Amazon announced on Monday a new Kindle option, Kindle with Special Offers. It is a $139 Kindle Wi-Fi selling for $114 if you agree to have ads on it. The ads would appear as part of the screensaver, and at the bottom of the Home Page, but not inside the reading experience. This is the sort of ad experience we can live with.

Business Insider insists that this is the future of gadgets…ads that are not annoying, but are present. Remember, a newspaper has ads and people do not find them offensive. The subsidy is $25 now, but it could be more on future projects, depending on the results. And as long as the ads aren’t annoying, and you have the choice to buy adless…why not?

As for why the Kindle isn’t free with ads…there is no proven business model for that. But maybe, after this, there will be.

From a Kindle perspective, we are very disappointed that you can get a custom screensaver that shows ads, but you can’t get one that shows something other than the random authors and art Amazon chooses. Seems a shame.

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Published on April 13, 2011
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Amazon Reveals Cloud Music – Google Next?

Amazon MP3 app on Droid
Image by scattered sunshine via Flickr

Amazon announced Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player, a digital storage and music locker service. The first 5GB are free, 20GB is $20 a year(first year is free with the purchase of an album), 50GB is $50, etc.

The service will allow storage of any sort of file, but Amazon Cloud Player, which is available in the Amazon MP3 Android App and as a web-based player, only recognizes MP3 and AAC files. So no FLAC, OGG, etc. Shame, we like OGG.

Going forward, if you buy an album from Amazon MP3, it will be transferred directly to your cloud drive and does not count toward your storage allowance. Unfortunately, it will not import your previous purchases, so you will have to upload them. The MP3 uploader doesn’t support Linux, and there is no uploader on the Android app. Hopefully, Amazon or a third-party will rectify this, but we don’t see an API for third-party developers to build on yet either.

We’re curious to see what Google’s offering is for music. But this is perfect for Amazon MP3 purchases going forward. They are already storing the files anyway, so linking them into your account doesn’t cost them any space, which is why we’re surprised they won’t do it for already purchased files, considering they’ll have to store duplicates now.

It won’t beat Amazon S3 on functionality, but it does beat them on price. If they open it up to third-party app development and support additional formats, we’d put our media there, how about you?

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Published on March 29, 2011
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Downstreaming: Amazon Prime Instant Video

Amazon Prime
Image by zcopley via Flickr

Amazon Instant Video for Prime Subscribers is a great idea. Many think this is Amazon’s move to compete withNetflix and Hulu. Amazon already has a well-reviewed pay-per-view service and a rental service can get access to movies that a subscription service cannot.

Amazon Prime is a service that offers 2-day shipping on any Amazon purchase for $79 a year. Now, for that $6.58 a month, you get 500 TV Shows and 1800 movies. These are generally library titles, as opposed to first-run movies, but the selection will improve. And classics still have entertainment value.

Prime is a way to get $79 from their customers, but more importantly $79 that encourages people to buy Amazon products over other vendors. By adding video subscriptions, they make that more appetizing. We wouldn’t suggest you get the video without the two day shipping, but together, they are a compelling deal.

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Published on March 14, 2011
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Downsteaming: Hulu Plus

An evil plot to destroy the world. Enjoy! (Log...
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It was in December that we took our Roku on the road, visiting relatives, and vowed to spend the entire weekend watching only things on Hulu Plus. Some compare Hulu Plus to Netflix, which is easy. They are both streaming services, both $7.99 a month, and both offer TV shows and movies unlimited for a single price.

Hulu Plus, for one, offers all current season episodes of 45 popular shows. It is, by itself, the closest replacement for popular TV, but it has one annoying limitation. Some of the shows are web only. If you use a HTPC, that isn’t an issue. However, if you want to use a piece of dedicated hardware, such as a blu-ray player, Roku box, etc…you are out of luck.

In trying to pick all of the programs we would watch in a week, a majority of them, despite being available for free on Hulu, were web only, and not available on Hulu Plus enabled devices. So, pay for more, get some nice back episodes, but get less than you get for free. That seems rather unfair, and until they fix that, we can’t in good conscience fully recommend this prouct.

Hulu Plus, aside from that, like Netflix, offers a good back catalog of titles. If you want to be entertained, and are not looking for current TV, you can certainly be so with Hulu Plus. What do you think? Is current content a must? Or just a good selection of decent content, regardless of year of release?

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Published on February 13, 2011
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Amazon is Selling More Kindle Books than Paperbacks

First, Amazon announced that Kindle Books were outselling Hardcovers. Now, Kindle Books have outpaced paperbacks. For every 100 paperback books the company has sold, they have sold 115 Kindle books. During the same period, they sold three times as many Kindle books as hardcover books. These numbers are for the United States, of course.

The Amazon Kindle store has more than 810,000 books, of which 670,000 are $9.99 or less, in addition to millions of out of copyright titles.

But why is this the truth?

  • The Price is Right: The Kindle 3 Wi-Fi is $139, and $50 extra gets you lifetime 3G. They will likely continue to try and bring the price to sub-$100.
  • You don’t need a Kindle to Read Kindle Books: There are Kindle apps for every mobile platform, desktop(Linux excepted), and for the Web(full content pending). You can read a book anywhere.
  • Whispersync: Not only can you read it anywhere, but it remembers where you where you left off when device-hopping.
  • Simplicity: Amazon focused on a replacement to the book experience. It didn’t try to make a device that did everything, like a tablet. It may make one of these someday, however. But their design focuses on readability, battery life, etc.

And we say all this being a latecomer to the Kindle, after we thought it was too expensive, during the early days.

Published on January 30, 2011
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Downstreaming: Is Amazon Set to add a Subscription Service?

Free 2 Day Shipping With Amazon Prime
Image by adria.richards via Flickr

Amazon Prime is a service for Amazon users offered for $79 a year that offers free shipping on Amazon purchases, no matter the order size, with a small upcharge to one-day shipping. If you are a habitual Amazon user, it is a great deal.

Engadget offered screenshots yesterday of Prime members who were noticing “Prime Instant Videos”, unlimited streaming on select movies for those who join Prime. It includes the note: “Your Amazon Prime membership now includes unlimited, commercial free instant streaming of 5,000 movies and TV shows at no additional cost. If this is confirmed and the selection is good, we could very well give their our money without hesitation, as Prime by itself as a shipping option is already tempting. Too often have we waited to buy Amazon products till we could fill a $25 super saver requirement.

On a practical level, free shipping aside, $79 a year turns out as $6.58 a month, a full $1.41 less than Netflix. Of course, Netflix is estimated to have four times the amount of movies at 20,000. But with a good quality selection, and Amazon negotiating and increasing the selection over time, launching with this number is promising for the future.

As Business Insider points out, Amazon already sells and rents digital content. It is already on a variety of boxes, and sells many of them on their site, and could engage in a variety of great bundling deals. Just like Amazon getting into the Android app store space, Amazon in the video subscription space could mean a lot of changes to come.

We look forward to an official announcement.

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Published on January 30, 2011
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Downstreaming: The State of Internet Video on Demand

Diagram of Streaming Multicast
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Last week, TNL.net did some analysis of how the top streaming video services were doing in terms of the most popular video entertainment of 2010. They compared Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Video-on-Demand, and iTunes.

Looking at the top 50 TV shows of 2010, the results were not promising. Current seasons of shows are a strength for Hulu Plus, and a weakness for Netflix. Out of these top fifty shows, Netflix offered partial content from 10 of them, Hulu 18, Amazon 31, and iTunes 41. Bear in mind that Amazon and iTunes are pay-per-episode models, which may allow them to secure more content. For current offerings, that would include the last or current season of shows, those numbers dropped to Netflix 2, Hulu 12, Amazon 28, and iTunes 39.

How did movies measure up? Checking out the top 100 box office hits of 2010, Netflix offered 10 of them, Amazon 48, iTunes 46, Vudu 46, and 74 of them are out on DVD. We haven’t discussed iTunes or Vudu yet, as we do not have devices capable of using them, but we will cover them in the future. This is not very surprising though, that a per-rental model is one that studios would prefer to an unlimited use model.

Beyond that, Amazon, iTunes, and Vudu offer an ownership model, although Amazon specifically allows you to buy something they might subsequently take away, as we mentioned when we discussed the service. Ownership means, theoretically, you can stream the title whenever you want…for the rest of your life, or the life of the service, whichever comes first. Even more titles are available on this basis.

The gap between what is available on disc, and what you can stream is closing, but it is likely the rental or the purchase models will see more adoption by the studios than the unlimited consumption models. What we are lacking are streaming models that resemble the offerings of TV stations. Would you subscribe to a service that offered a limited selection of streaming content that rotated each month, but by doing so, allowed you ultimate access to more content over the year, for example?

Specialty streaming subscriptions may be the future in this regard. It won’t happen this way, but would you subscribe to a month of instant SyFy channel, where it would give you all the movies/TV shows scheduled to air on the SyFy channel for the next month, and change on a month to month basis? Or any other cable channel?

What do you think the future of streaming is? What will companies try?

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Published on January 30, 2011
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Downstreaming: A Month of Netflix Streaming

In 1998 Reed Hastings founded Netflix, the lar...
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Netflix has been around so long that people might be surprised it took us until now to discuss it, or that we’d never tried it, and we still have yet to try their more traditional DVD by mail product.

Netflix is an obvious choice for someone looking to downsize their monthly entertainment budget. However, they are making the transition from their old business model, movies by mail, to the new one, streaming. For those who are HD purists, there are problems. Back in October, users were complaining that despite the premium for a blu-ray subscription, Netflix wasn’t acquiring catalog titles in blu-ray, and was generally neglecting that aspect of their business.

So, that said, let’s focus on the streaming. They offer an unlimited streaming plan for $7.99 a month. Netflix does offer HD streaming on some titles, but it is a limited subset of their overall catalog, and it is not yet perfect, by any means.  Overall, watching SD content, we found it of acceptable quality. The big issue is selection.

Netflix is aggressively negotiating deals with content providers to get their content on its service. However, in looking at the most current popular TV shows, Netflix tends to offer older episodes, and not as large a selection, and is significantly behind Hulu on overall popular TV content offerings. If you want classic TV and related offers, Netflix offers a great overall selection. In popular movies of 2010, Netflix is offering only about ten percent. But this is a problem for streaming overall.

To be honest, if it was a matter of content, there is enough on Netflix streaming to give us many many hours of entertainment. In that regard, it is a great service. We can sit around and catch up on older content we missed, as well as dozens of movies. To make this point, let’s look at instantwatcher, a third-party Netflix watching site. At the time of this writing, the most popular movie being watched was Get Shorty, circa 1995, which had just become available to streaming two days earlier. There were a few breakout hits from the last few years in the list, such as Shutter Island, as well, but again, this is where streaming is lacking. The selection is slowly improving as Netflix makes new deals.

So, never having a problem finding something to watch, if not always a currently popular item, means Netflix will keep you entertained. And its recommendation engine is relatively good, after it gets to know you, at making suggestions.

As a positive push, the company has ensured the ubiquity of Netflix streaming on devices. If you have a Windows or Mac machine, you can stream to your computer. Much to many people’s annoyances, it is not offered on Linux. The majority of network-enabled TVs and blu-ray players now embed Netflix streaming, as does the AppleTV, WD TV Live, and of course, the Roku Video Player, which started life as the Roku Netflix Box. A variety of game consoles, such as the Wii, PS3, and XBox also support Netflix.

We used the Roku box, as the least expensive and tiny piece of hardware, to do our testing, but clearly Netflix streaming support is now a core feature everywhere, to the point that Netflix has successfully arranged for a Netflix button to appear on many devices that have the service built in.

Should you get Netflix? We’d say yes, with a caveat. If you are putting in a Netflix plan to your overall budget and, as a result, justify a reduction in your cable service level, then it is certainly worth it. But, by itself, it is not a complete solution. More on that to come.

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Published on January 30, 2011
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