Tag: Kindle

Kindle All Over the Place

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Image representing Amazon Kindle as depicted i...
Image via CrunchBase

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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More About the Kindle 2

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Image representing Amazon Kindle as depicted i...
Image via CrunchBase

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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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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Kindle No Longer So Cost Effective

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amazon-kindle
Image by MARQUINAM via Flickr

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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