Tag: Amazon

We Still Want a Kindle – But We Don’t Want To Want It

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Amazon Kindle
Image by davidking via Flickr

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.

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Keep Thinking About the Kindle

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NEW YORK - FEBRUARY 09: A reporter holds the ...
Image by Getty Images via Daylife

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.

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Amazon Video on Demand Support Making the Rounds

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Image representing Amazon as depicted in Crunc...
Image via CrunchBase

PlayOn has added streaming support for Amazon’s Video on Demand service as well as content from free internet network, Revision3. PlayOn, as you might remember, is a software that allows streaming from a PC to several compatible media streaming devices. PlayOn supports Hulu, CBS.com, ESPN.com, CNN.com, YouTube, and Netflix, and is working on ABC.

We are not quite sure why this is acceptable, and Hulu’s content providers shut down Boxee support. It hardly seems fair. PlayOn could be seen as just as much of a cable-killer as Boxee, or MyMediaPlayer.

Amazon Video on Demand support in HD is still in the testing phase on Tivo. Which is particularly odd. It has been so for over three months now. There may be some problems with the high-definition implementation on the Amazon end, either technical or licensing. Considering the quality, people will start trying to hack it for their own purposes. The technical implementation will thus have to be secure. And the content providers get nervous about any new rollout and want to put limits on it.

We’re impressed with the continual technological breakthroughs allow real-time streaming of high-quality video. We know they’ll continue to get better. We’ll be here to watch.

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Kindle 2 Announced

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Amazon Kindle with carrying cover, Open.
Image via Wikipedia

Engadget released a nice set of pictures of the Kindle 2, the next generation of Amazon‘s E-book reader. For alternate coverage, Crunchgear has a nice Kindle 1/2 side-by-side photo comparison.

It has several improvements over its predecessor

  • Screen refresh is 20 percent faster
  • 7 Times Greater Storage
  • 16 Shades of Grey as opposed to 4.
  • Thinner

We still can’t justify the $359 cost for the privilege of paying more for books than the printed version. The discount has to ultimately, if not subsidize the cost of the reader, at least justify with value-added service the cost of buying it. For less cost, one could use an old PDA or a cell phone, although the screen would not be as conducive to easy reading. For the same cost, one could go for a netbook.

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Roku Update

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Image representing Amazon as depicted in Crunc...
Image via CrunchBase

Yesterday, we wrote both on Roku Netflix Player, and on Amazon Video on Demand. EngadgetHD reports today that Amazon Video on Demand will be available on the box after a free software update early this year. Any of Amazon’s 40,000 other titles will be able to be purchased and played back to the TV for a 24 hour window. Unfortunately, the maximum bitrate is only h.264 compressed 1200Kbps. No HD as yet.

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