It's GREAT that some e-book FINALLY gets some press, and that seems to have a significant launch plan. The idea of carrying around a couple of news papers, a couple of blogs, some study material and perhaps a novel and a dictionary in one piece is just fantastic. And to read a significant ammount of text, the text has to be on e-ink or paper. An LCD notebook monitor isn't good for reading massive ammount of text. I definitely see this as a great starting point. But hey Amazon.. give me a couple of minutes and I'd gladly redesign the Kindle for free. It looks really bad..
For those of you who have NOT used an ebook reader, you are speaking from ignorance.
I have an iRex illiad. The reading experience with e-ink is EXCELLENT.
I took it with me on vacation and loaded up hundreds of books on it.
I was able to read in the airport, on the plane and in my hotel room-no lugging around a suitcase full of books.
Why have a collection of books on a device? Because YOU CAN. Have the books you read for pleasure. Have the technical books for your profession. Have the daily newspaper, wikipedia and google at your fingertips.
In a form factor suited for reading with ease.
All the scifi books I could read...it was a very pleasurable and engaging reading experience, with text files.
What was missing? Apple's multitouch interface. The iRex UI is awful in terms of the resizing controls and such. Page turning is fine, it is the basic details which Apple always pays attention to that are missing.
PDF scaling UI is weak, which is why Apple with an OSX implementation of this would rule.
The market for getting your newspapers and magazines is a good one.
The market for replacing heavy school textbooks is enormous if the price is right.
From the looks of the Kindle, Apple can still enter this market and dominate. They already have all the other technology pieces including the UI done. They have the iTunes infrastructure in place. And they know both wifi and telephony (from the iPhone). They also have experience with power management and battery life. The only missing piece is an e-ink based device, running the iPod Touch UI with preview and textedit. A dictionary. Safari browser. Boom.
Apple would OWN this marketplace when they decide to enter it. All the technology for it is off the shelf for them now.
Ignorance?
"Apple would OWN this marketplace" What marketplace? There is no 'real' market for this today. This is new market speculation. (and speculators can be wrong)
"The market for getting your newspapers and magazines is a good one." No it is a bad one. That's why they are going out of business. All of them. Online news is more current, accurate, and best of all... free. They are dinosaurs.. not pheonixes waiting to be reborn.
"The market for replacing heavy school textbooks is enormous if the price is right." Also wrong. Text book marketing makes money on new editions. Electronic editions would mean evaporating the scarcity put into place on new editions. People won't pay $50 for a pdf version...because you know bits are copied for free.
So before you throw down the Ignorance card... a basic understanding of print media marketing history would be helpful.
Apple will not touch this market, because there is no market. Unlike Amazon which ran until 2002 before making a profit... Apple likes to do this everyday....and they do.
To me the screen is a real killer. (I'm guessing the 399 price tag is for the vintage greyscale screen-how many recycled gameboys does it take to make a kindle)
As others have already pointed out, despite being greyscale, the screen is completely different from an LCD and has a number of advantages such as way better battery life and better readability. To be honest, I think the screen is the only thing that is the least bit impressive on this thing.
The wireless capability is weak since it doesn't have a full web browser. I'm not crazy about them using a proprietary format, can you even read a book you've purchased on a computer as well? This thing doesn't even support PDF, probably the most common text format right now.
Quote:
Originally Posted by nondual
First off, books HAVE copy protection already - copying them is tedious, costly, and inconvenient...maybe not so for ebooks or audiobooks, but arguing that the copy protection is somehow draconian is just silly.
Maybe "rights protection" or something similar is a better name, but it IS draconian compared to a book.
If I want a friend to read a book I bought, I hand it to him and he reads it. Can't do it with the Kindle.
I can sell a book I buy or give it away. Again, can't do it with the Kindle. That makes their ebooks worth less to me than a conventional book.
Not to mention with the proprietary format, what if the Kindle never catches on and they kill the product? People will be stuck with ebooks that they can't use after their kindle breaks. No risk of that with books. The whole thing would seem much less risky with a more open format.
took it with me on vacation and loaded up hundreds of books on it.
I was able to read in the airport, on the plane and in my hotel room-no lugging around a suitcase full of books..
Just out out of curiousity, how many of those hundreds of books did you read?
I think the criticism here (other than petty aesthetic ones based one pictures of what is probably a prototype) is of the concept of needing your entire book library with you the way some want their entire music library with them.
I can see that for professional uses, and for that, this may be a good idea, although I tend to agree that there's no reason for this kind of a device to be so single-tasked. I do think that a small touch tablet would/will be much more desirable and versatile.
But for recreational reading, I have to agree that this doesn't seem to give me much more value than an actual paperback.
I think the criticism here (other than petty aesthetic ones based one pictures of what is probably a prototype) is of the concept of needing your entire book library with you the way some want their entire music library with them.
I can see that for professional uses, and for that, this may be a good idea, although I tend to agree that there's no reason for this kind of a device to be so single-tasked. I do think that a small touch tablet would/will be much more desirable and versatile.
.
What about students? They need access to lots of books at any given time, no?
That's the 'killer' application for this device, if there is one. IMO.
BTW, I think that ultimately this will be a great idea in some form or another.
One big win would be to break the back of the publishing scam that's bankrupting students with obscenely priced text books that are trivially updated simply to prompt new sales.
That whole deal is a crime.
Now there's a case where I'd defend piracy. To combat the real pirates.
I think some sort of interface like this would help the transition from those raised with books to those, ultimately, who will primarily be raised on eBooks of some sort. It will happen at some point.
To that end, an interface that made the stack of page edges visable on the left should grow as you proceed through the book to help with the loss of feeling that bigger hunk in your left hand that marks your progress.
I would be more interested in a device closer to an iTouch. Where I am listening to the audio addition of the book and the spoken text appears like closed caption. If I want to zip forward or stop I use my finger somewhat like the iTouch. Perhaps the background displays different colors to express the moods as they change. Perhaps even illustrations highlight certain parts of the book like a slide show. At the end of the book I play the game version......
I see Apple "thinking differently" than the Kindle on this one. Why simply redo a book electronically if you are not going to incorporate the sensory explosion that surrounds us?
A high-res screen would be a huge drain on the battery. The screen they chose allows for 30 hours of operation with less than a 2 hour charge. While I wish they offered something with colour that had a backlight option, I think they may have made the right choice for their target market, which is heavy readers of text-only books that are sitting in well lit areas.
Kindle's large e-ink screen (which is probably why it costs as much as it does) is 176 dpi. That is very high resolution. High-quality color magazine printing is about 300 dpi, which is unnecessary for black & white images.
I think you guys are really missing the point. The folks who talked about using the iPhone or PDA for reading books are also way off.
How many of us even HAVE ebooks? I have maybe one - and the reason is that I hate reading on my computer. I also got to play around on an iPhone at the Apple Store for an hour or so and I have to say I'm stunned to hear anyone say that they'd be thrilled to read a book on that thing either. Really?
What does $399 get you? Lifetime wireless access, a screen that's easy on the eyes, and a functional keyboard that doesn't always wrongly guess your inputs (a la iPhone/iPod Touch). How much easier would college have been for me if I wasn't always dragging around my books? The dilemma regarding which books to pack on a trip would also be practically solved for me. Need to reference something you read/saw in a newspaper or nonfiction book? Search and it's there.
I also think the people who complain about the ugliness of the device are in serious denial about the original iPod. Yeah, it looked better than most other mp3 players out there, but that wasn't a difficult contest to win. The original iPod was still a 'lump'. I loved it, but it was a lump.
One of the few noob posts I agree with. The other significant part of this introduction is the author-to-publisher-to-consumer (not to mention author-to-consumer... cutting out the publisher entirely!) system they have designed. Nice piece of work.
I've been waiting for a functional replacement for the paper book and notebook for ages, and this isn't it.
Some points:
* The keyboard is a mistake. A simple touch screen should suffice.
* e-Ink is the right way to go for display. They got that right.
* But no color display at this point is a mistake.
* It's not all that aesthetically pleasing.
Are you an engineer? Do you know anything about power consumption and battery life? And a touch screen?
I think most people would agree the design is a bit clunky, but the reactions here are way over the top... probably from nervous AAPL stock owners. I'm not at all nervous about this, I think it's a great thing.
I can dig it, maybe after a hardware revision or two. Maybe a little big but that could be for text adjustments which would be a good thing.
If I can get my Star Trek books on it, I may give it a run but I like being able to read my book taking off on the plane and landing. But I could get by.
I wish the body color was in black to reduce glare but oh well. You can't share your books either with friends like I can now. Maybe this idea sucks.
It is like someone else said, how many ebooks do we have laying around? I have one and it is a technical manual really. Not like 1998 when I had mp3's coming out of my 20 gb hdd's.
Believe it or not, I thought the coolest thing to do with this would be to add a nice semi-rigid leather-bound cover for Kindle. That would 'warm up' the product (make it not so sterile) and it would feel great, like a really nice leather-bound classic book.
That's been demonstrated with E-Ink as well. But E-Ink (I use this particular trademarked name in place of all the other generic implementations based on the same principle) has significantly better visibility than OLED over a wider range of ambient lighting.
I think the stellar application for E-Ink would be for use with high-visibility outdoor signage. Consider a speed limit sign on a bridge which can modify itself according to the weather conditions, while being equally visible at night using a car's headlights as it is under the full noonday sun.
It seems to me that I've read that this application has been implemented in some train stations in Europe. (Unfortunately, I don't have links to back this up - I saw all this a few years ago.)
What about magazines, newspapers, and for some- comic books?
Now we're thinking! Don't forget, some of the most popular 'comics' in the world are manga, Japanese comics/soap stories which just happen to be black and white!
Except that an e-ink display can run on a watch battery. E-ink can also be manufactured in flexible sheets, but the technology to make hi-res flexible backplanes is not quite here yet. The form factor that's going to make stuff happen with this technology is something equivalent to a half-sheet of newsprint, which can be rolled or folded into a briefcase, purse, etc. In ten years you'll be able to buy these for less than $100, and they'll be everywhere.
What about students? They need access to lots of books at any given time, no?
That's the 'killer' application for this device, if there is one. IMO.
Safari can read PDFs and (obviously) HTML. MobileSafari on the iPhone has a very nice way of switching between multiple open pages. If Apple made one with capacitance touch screen capabilities (is that even possible?) and with an accelorometer so turning the eReader would allow you to view two pages from different eBooks side-by-side then students could use it. Also, as I stated earlier, find-as-you-type would be a Godsend if you are using it for textbooks. Just brainstorming on how I think Apple might do it, no need to chew my head off you don't agree with me.
Comments
For those of you who have NOT used an ebook reader, you are speaking from ignorance.
I have an iRex illiad. The reading experience with e-ink is EXCELLENT.
I took it with me on vacation and loaded up hundreds of books on it.
I was able to read in the airport, on the plane and in my hotel room-no lugging around a suitcase full of books.
Why have a collection of books on a device? Because YOU CAN. Have the books you read for pleasure. Have the technical books for your profession. Have the daily newspaper, wikipedia and google at your fingertips.
In a form factor suited for reading with ease.
All the scifi books I could read...it was a very pleasurable and engaging reading experience, with text files.
What was missing? Apple's multitouch interface. The iRex UI is awful in terms of the resizing controls and such. Page turning is fine, it is the basic details which Apple always pays attention to that are missing.
PDF scaling UI is weak, which is why Apple with an OSX implementation of this would rule.
The market for getting your newspapers and magazines is a good one.
The market for replacing heavy school textbooks is enormous if the price is right.
From the looks of the Kindle, Apple can still enter this market and dominate. They already have all the other technology pieces including the UI done. They have the iTunes infrastructure in place. And they know both wifi and telephony (from the iPhone). They also have experience with power management and battery life. The only missing piece is an e-ink based device, running the iPod Touch UI with preview and textedit. A dictionary. Safari browser. Boom.
Apple would OWN this marketplace when they decide to enter it. All the technology for it is off the shelf for them now.
Ignorance?
"Apple would OWN this marketplace" What marketplace? There is no 'real' market for this today. This is new market speculation. (and speculators can be wrong)
"The market for getting your newspapers and magazines is a good one." No it is a bad one. That's why they are going out of business. All of them. Online news is more current, accurate, and best of all... free. They are dinosaurs.. not pheonixes waiting to be reborn.
"The market for replacing heavy school textbooks is enormous if the price is right." Also wrong. Text book marketing makes money on new editions. Electronic editions would mean evaporating the scarcity put into place on new editions. People won't pay $50 for a pdf version...because you know bits are copied for free.
So before you throw down the Ignorance card... a basic understanding of print media marketing history would be helpful.
Apple will not touch this market, because there is no market. Unlike Amazon which ran until 2002 before making a profit... Apple likes to do this everyday....and they do.
To me the screen is a real killer. (I'm guessing the 399 price tag is for the vintage greyscale screen-how many recycled gameboys does it take to make a kindle)
As others have already pointed out, despite being greyscale, the screen is completely different from an LCD and has a number of advantages such as way better battery life and better readability. To be honest, I think the screen is the only thing that is the least bit impressive on this thing.
The wireless capability is weak since it doesn't have a full web browser. I'm not crazy about them using a proprietary format, can you even read a book you've purchased on a computer as well? This thing doesn't even support PDF, probably the most common text format right now.
First off, books HAVE copy protection already - copying them is tedious, costly, and inconvenient...maybe not so for ebooks or audiobooks, but arguing that the copy protection is somehow draconian is just silly.
Maybe "rights protection" or something similar is a better name, but it IS draconian compared to a book.
If I want a friend to read a book I bought, I hand it to him and he reads it. Can't do it with the Kindle.
I can sell a book I buy or give it away. Again, can't do it with the Kindle. That makes their ebooks worth less to me than a conventional book.
Not to mention with the proprietary format, what if the Kindle never catches on and they kill the product? People will be stuck with ebooks that they can't use after their kindle breaks. No risk of that with books. The whole thing would seem much less risky with a more open format.
took it with me on vacation and loaded up hundreds of books on it.
I was able to read in the airport, on the plane and in my hotel room-no lugging around a suitcase full of books..
Just out out of curiousity, how many of those hundreds of books did you read?
I think the criticism here (other than petty aesthetic ones based one pictures of what is probably a prototype) is of the concept of needing your entire book library with you the way some want their entire music library with them.
I can see that for professional uses, and for that, this may be a good idea, although I tend to agree that there's no reason for this kind of a device to be so single-tasked. I do think that a small touch tablet would/will be much more desirable and versatile.
But for recreational reading, I have to agree that this doesn't seem to give me much more value than an actual paperback.
But as always, we'll see.
J
I think the criticism here (other than petty aesthetic ones based one pictures of what is probably a prototype) is of the concept of needing your entire book library with you the way some want their entire music library with them.
I can see that for professional uses, and for that, this may be a good idea, although I tend to agree that there's no reason for this kind of a device to be so single-tasked. I do think that a small touch tablet would/will be much more desirable and versatile.
.
What about students? They need access to lots of books at any given time, no?
That's the 'killer' application for this device, if there is one. IMO.
One big win would be to break the back of the publishing scam that's bankrupting students with obscenely priced text books that are trivially updated simply to prompt new sales.
That whole deal is a crime.
Now there's a case where I'd defend piracy. To combat the real pirates.
It's books. Of course it's bigger than an iPod. What it isn't is bigger than it should be. You need a screen big enough to read.
Still, there's sooooo much wasted space on the thing. It looks like a good third of it is keyboard or bezel.
If it were the size of just that screen, with the keyboard, oh say, software based and visible only when needed, it might be the right size.
Wonder where that kind of format could be found, mmmmm?
I think some sort of interface like this would help the transition from those raised with books to those, ultimately, who will primarily be raised on eBooks of some sort. It will happen at some point.
To that end, an interface that made the stack of page edges visable on the left should grow as you proceed through the book to help with the loss of feeling that bigger hunk in your left hand that marks your progress.
I see Apple "thinking differently" than the Kindle on this one. Why simply redo a book electronically if you are not going to incorporate the sensory explosion that surrounds us?
A high-res screen would be a huge drain on the battery. The screen they chose allows for 30 hours of operation with less than a 2 hour charge. While I wish they offered something with colour that had a backlight option, I think they may have made the right choice for their target market, which is heavy readers of text-only books that are sitting in well lit areas.
Kindle's large e-ink screen (which is probably why it costs as much as it does) is 176 dpi. That is very high resolution. High-quality color magazine printing is about 300 dpi, which is unnecessary for black & white images.
Charlie Rose is interviewing Bezos tonight regarding Kindle.
http://www.charlierose.com/home
Cool. I'll try to catch that interview.
I think you guys are really missing the point. The folks who talked about using the iPhone or PDA for reading books are also way off.
How many of us even HAVE ebooks? I have maybe one - and the reason is that I hate reading on my computer. I also got to play around on an iPhone at the Apple Store for an hour or so and I have to say I'm stunned to hear anyone say that they'd be thrilled to read a book on that thing either. Really?
What does $399 get you? Lifetime wireless access, a screen that's easy on the eyes, and a functional keyboard that doesn't always wrongly guess your inputs (a la iPhone/iPod Touch). How much easier would college have been for me if I wasn't always dragging around my books? The dilemma regarding which books to pack on a trip would also be practically solved for me. Need to reference something you read/saw in a newspaper or nonfiction book? Search and it's there.
I also think the people who complain about the ugliness of the device are in serious denial about the original iPod. Yeah, it looked better than most other mp3 players out there, but that wasn't a difficult contest to win. The original iPod was still a 'lump'. I loved it, but it was a lump.
One of the few noob posts I agree with.
this thing is HUGE
Baloney. It's no bigger than a typical hard-bound book.
I've been waiting for a functional replacement for the paper book and notebook for ages, and this isn't it.
Some points:
* The keyboard is a mistake. A simple touch screen should suffice.
* e-Ink is the right way to go for display. They got that right.
* But no color display at this point is a mistake.
* It's not all that aesthetically pleasing.
Are you an engineer? Do you know anything about power consumption and battery life? And a touch screen?
I think most people would agree the design is a bit clunky, but the reactions here are way over the top... probably from nervous AAPL stock owners. I'm not at all nervous about this, I think it's a great thing.
I can dig it, maybe after a hardware revision or two. Maybe a little big but that could be for text adjustments which would be a good thing.
If I can get my Star Trek books on it, I may give it a run but I like being able to read my book taking off on the plane and landing. But I could get by.
I wish the body color was in black to reduce glare but oh well. You can't share your books either with friends like I can now. Maybe this idea sucks.
It is like someone else said, how many ebooks do we have laying around? I have one and it is a technical manual really. Not like 1998 when I had mp3's coming out of my 20 gb hdd's.
Believe it or not, I thought the coolest thing to do with this would be to add a nice semi-rigid leather-bound cover for Kindle. That would 'warm up' the product (make it not so sterile) and it would feel great, like a really nice leather-bound classic book.
That's been demonstrated with E-Ink as well. But E-Ink (I use this particular trademarked name in place of all the other generic implementations based on the same principle) has significantly better visibility than OLED over a wider range of ambient lighting.
I think the stellar application for E-Ink would be for use with high-visibility outdoor signage. Consider a speed limit sign on a bridge which can modify itself according to the weather conditions, while being equally visible at night using a car's headlights as it is under the full noonday sun.
It seems to me that I've read that this application has been implemented in some train stations in Europe. (Unfortunately, I don't have links to back this up - I saw all this a few years ago.)
E-ink has been used in signage for years.
What about magazines, newspapers, and for some- comic books?
Now we're thinking! Don't forget, some of the most popular 'comics' in the world are manga, Japanese comics/soap stories which just happen to be black and white!
What about students? They need access to lots of books at any given time, no?
That's the 'killer' application for this device, if there is one. IMO.
Another excellent point!
given the choice of hi res oled/lcd OR eink
I would go for the LCD every time.
Except that an e-ink display can run on a watch battery. E-ink can also be manufactured in flexible sheets, but the technology to make hi-res flexible backplanes is not quite here yet. The form factor that's going to make stuff happen with this technology is something equivalent to a half-sheet of newsprint, which can be rolled or folded into a briefcase, purse, etc. In ten years you'll be able to buy these for less than $100, and they'll be everywhere.
I've been following e-ink since 1999.
What about students? They need access to lots of books at any given time, no?
That's the 'killer' application for this device, if there is one. IMO.
Safari can read PDFs and (obviously) HTML. MobileSafari on the iPhone has a very nice way of switching between multiple open pages. If Apple made one with capacitance touch screen capabilities (is that even possible?) and with an accelorometer so turning the eReader would allow you to view two pages from different eBooks side-by-side then students could use it. Also, as I stated earlier, find-as-you-type would be a Godsend if you are using it for textbooks. Just brainstorming on how I think Apple might do it, no need to chew my head off you don't agree with me.