1) Apple is expensive but better that's why we chose it - Amazon is going the same route - the attention to detail is amazing. The Kindle packaging is as good if not better than apple's
2) if you consider you have this for 3 years and the wireless service on any other platform would be worth at least $10/month - the normal Kindle is free and this one is a $100 - big deal. I LOVE that it doesn't have monthly service charges - it is the best wireless revenue model period!
***It's not color***
1) It's a book that's easy to read for hours and gives no more eye strain than a book
2) It just came out - I'm sure in 5 years we will have color
***It's not a laptop***
1) It's a BOOK - great so you concentrate on READING - not being interrupted every 5 secs by an email, im, game, etc
2) The battery lasts for MONTHS - try that one your iphone or laptop
I have a Kindle 2 and use it on business trips and at home - it almost perfect for what it's mission is
This is a great initiative device that is the best hope for books and subscriptions to be current in this new paperless age. Everyone should be applauding Amazon not criticizing them.
For $490 I can buy a pretty nice laptop, with a full-color screen. They really need to get the pricing down on these things.
Lots of people don't want laptops. They don't want clamshells. They don't want a computer!!!
I wouldn't expect geeks on a computer company forum to agree, but I do expect thinking people to think outside their box once in a while.
The iPhone/iPod works because they are not computers to most people. They don't act like one or usually breakdown like one.
Reading is fundamental and just like your $500 laptop hasn't put books out of business, it won't compete with the Kindles. Sure the price needs to drop to the $200 for many folks, but I think half of my family would just as soon read from a Kindle than lug around a laptop or squint from an iPhone ... and iPhones are pretty good!
And that's exactly why they took this name. Kindle is the fire starter.
But it also gets burned up at the very beginning.
I believe that will happen to these devices as well, and I think that Amazon knows it too.
Yup. Amazon isn't in business to manufacture sell e-book readers, they are in business to sell Books. They will be perfectly happy to get others to build and even sell readers*, just so long as they tie back into Amazon's store. But first, Amazon needs to show that it is a worthwhile business to be in.
* By "readers" I don't mean Kindle-clones, but a successful device will need many of those attributes. I don't believe the current laptop or phone platforms will compete.
Imagine a super-light notebook with a large color-e-ink display on the outside of the lid, and extreme low-power mode when closed, but enough for e-books, email, calendar and other basic apps, but a full-function computer when open.
Who cares? The publishers care. If they find that their textbooks aren't selling, or that newspaper subscriptions aren't selling, or magazines, they will stop doing it.
When you consider that Apple has, by now, sold about 40 million iPhones/itouch's, many of which are still in use, and Amazon, possibly half a million Kindles, well, thats a pretty big gap. If only 10% of Apple's customers are reading books on the devices, that's almost 4 million. It's about ten times the size of the Kindles audience.
Apple's selling devices much faster than Amazon ever will, so the lead just piles up.
We've read reports that book sales from the app store are much larger than all the books sold on either Amazon or Sony's platforms put together. And that's despite Apple having a small fraction of the books either of the others have. What happens as Apple's book "supply" increases significantly?
What happens when Apple's got 50 million devices out there? 80 million? 100 million?
What happens if Amazon releases its program for more devices including netbooks?
I think that the Kindle is dead meat. It may take a year or two until we see that happening.
Your grasp of markets and segmentation is rudimentary at best. It is the aim of most companies to get a firm grip of the 10-20% of their market that drive most of the revenue. Amazon doesn't want to sell Kindles, it wants to sell eBooks. No matter how many iPhones or iTouches are sold, it will still be a sucky device for reading and drive only casual book purchasing/usage. Kindle buyers are obviously hardcore readers (or they wouldn't have spent so much on it) and so their average spend on eBooks is probably many multiples greater than that of an iPhone user. Everyone I know who has one swears by it - it is a self selecting crowd.
Amazon/publishers have already learned that control of the content/delivery ecosystem is key - iTunes owns US music and was the last nail in the coffin of standalone physical music retail. Since Apple don't care about margins the only guys who can sell CDs are Target/WalMart/Best Buy etc. as "loss leaders" or Amazon at low margins/high volumes. Amazon/publishers want to get control of the written content market in the iTunes way and the Kindle is the first salvo to hook the hardcore, high revenue fish. Amazon (and publishers) needed to create a focused killer device to prove the eBook concept to the world with an ecosystem that makes them all money (not Apple). It is not a perfect device, but it is pretty damn cool for its purpose. Plus any purchases on iPhone kindle app are still high-margin revenue to Amazon/publishers.
The Kindle may not ever become a ubiquitous device but that won't matter as long as whatever devices follow - Apple netpad, tricorders, holo-glasses, etc. purchase their written content from Amazon/publishers.
Your point about device convergence is also a red herring - existing electronic devices converge when they do not conflict in purpose/function with each other and can be miniaturized enough to all fit in an acceptable form factor. Phone, MP3, internet, gaming, etc. are fine - they can utilize similar feature sets - reading a book or newspaper can't - needs a bigger screen, longer battery life etc. Laptops/Kindles will converge eventually but only after some major screen/battery/cost/software improvements which will all take a while to come.
Imagine a super-light notebook with a large color-e-ink display on the outside of the lid, and extreme low-power mode when closed, but enough for e-books, email, calendar and other basic apps, but a full-function computer when open.
I imagined a similar product like that recently, but with a swivel lid so the eBook Reader could become a tablet PC. The whole thing would require a protective cover but that could easy be a simple, thin hard cover that would latch via a small magnet, like the lid latches to the base, and could be folded over and latched so you can hold it in your hand as an eBook or tablet PC. It would be expensive and it couldn't be nearly as thin or lightweight as an dedicated eBook Reader, but with the needed battery size for a tablet/notebook it would have an amazingly long battery life as an eBook Reader. However, such a product seems so "nichey" and complex that I would very surprised to see such a thing every pop into existence.
Having just been involved in choosing a texkbook for the organic chemistry course for next semester, we looked at several options that were well over $300/student for the course (I work at a major public university), the price for the Kindle isn't too absurd, particularly given some of the advantages of an e-reader. What I would like to see is the ability to write notes in the margins of things. It would be incredibly useful for me in keeping and filing papers for research if I could.
For $500 I'd want the thing to have a digitizer and the ability to write notes on it (ie create my own PDF even if it's just strokes and no handwriting recognition). Even if it cost $100 more for the digitizer it would have made this far more useful for a student.
1) Apple is expensive but better that's why we chose it - Amazon is going the same route - the attention to detail is amazing. The Kindle packaging is as good if not better than apple's
***It's not color***
1) It's a book that's easy to read for hours and gives no more eye strain than a book
2) It just came out - I'm sure in 5 years we will have color
Sorry, for what it is and does, it's very expensive. I have 2 friends who've broken their Kindles; they are not all that sturdy.
The lack of color is a huge problem if one of the main intended uses is for textbooks. I can't think of a single text I assign (I'm a professor) that would work in B&W, even with 16 shades. It might work for my colleagues in English, but most of us in the sciences or the arts use lots and lots of color in our work.
Your grasp of markets and segmentation is rudimentary at best. It is the aim of most companies to get a firm grip of the 10-20% of their market that drive most of the revenue. Amazon doesn't want to sell Kindles, it wants to sell eBooks.
Then it bloody well should have sold Kindles cheaper and not locked out every OTHER ebook on the market with a completely new DRM that they don't seem to want to release to say...Sony or iRex.
Quote:
Your point about device convergence is also a red herring - existing electronic devices converge when they do not conflict in purpose/function with each other and can be miniaturized enough to all fit in an acceptable form factor. Phone, MP3, internet, gaming, etc. are fine - they can utilize similar feature sets - reading a book or newspaper can't - needs a bigger screen, longer battery life etc. Laptops/Kindles will converge eventually but only after some major screen/battery/cost/software improvements which will all take a while to come.
How does reading on a computer (which you're doing right now) conflict with reading on a kindle? The only difference is LCD vs eInk. Screen size is about the same for a laptop and eBook.
It doesn't. eBooks are a subset functionality of existing laptops, phones, PDAs and ipods.
NyTime is not MAYBE interested they helped launch it. It's maybe going to save the newspapers as we know it. I'm sorry for getting personal but you really have thing against this device. The iPod was a one thing device at one point - remember - music? And boy wasn't it expensive?
But people really want to carry music wherever they go in a SMALL device
If you could put the Kindle in your pocket, it would be different.
Don't you think if the Kindle had sold a million units already they would be shouting it from the rooftops?
I'm not thrilled with the device in its PRESENT incarnation.
I could say the same about you. You seem to totally ignore that computer technology is getting much better, lighter, using less battery power, and that better batteries are coming out to force a dedicated device out of the market.
That's how I see it.
Why is my strong opinion any less important than your being against what I've said?
It isn't. Many times large companies have backed a product category that later failed. The fact that some companies are backing (and we don't yet know what that means here) this doesn't mean it will succeed either.
I like it. And I don't see why it cant be used in the classroom for many topics. Other than the sciences and math (and art?), do graphics really matter that much for textbooks? I was a history major, then an English lit major. Color pictures were hardly necessary.
<Cue in postings with 500 subjects that need color graphics in 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . .>
It's too expensive. But print media is dead, and they need to have a digital device to possibly give them a distribution model to the 50% of people out there who don't care about laptops but do want to have a highly portable device to read with. I'm sure the hope is that it will become an ubiquitous technology that will eventually be subsidized for free by the media companies.
No one is mentioning the stellar battery life this thing has. With a 10" color touch screen, you'd be lucky to get 5 hours. Kindle measures their life in days - weeks if you turn EVDO off.
1) It's a book that's easy to read for hours and gives no more eye strain than a book
2) It just came out - I'm sure in 5 years we will have color
I had color and a bigger display on my Mac in 1988. Why can't I buy e-books now from Amazon for my Mac? Is it more difficult for Amazon to develop a Mac app than to develop an entirely new hardware+software platform? I don't think so. Amazon has a free iPhone app, so what's the big deal with going full Mac? I don't need/want another device in my life. Let's not get so wrapped up in our creations; Start thinking green, Amazon.
Here's one additional problem I have with Kindle (old and new)-
I seriously toyed with getting a Kindle 2, and played with one owned by a friend. I travel a great deal and enjoy reading novels while I travel. Some of these trips are weeks long, so I often carry multiple books with me. The Kindle 2 seemed a good solution. I could pack dozens of novels into the Kindle.
The problem came when I went in search of content. I started with a list of 10 novels I wanted to read. Only 2 of the 10 were available for the Kindle. I developed another list of 10 novels. Four of them were available. So, if I wanted to read books I wanted to read, as opposed to only those Kindle had available, I was going to have to carry some books along with the device, thus completely negating the value of the Kindle for me. All the current bestsellers were available, but they're not what I tend to read. So content availability will be a problem for Kindle, and I suspect it will be a problem for some time to come.
Then it bloody well should have sold Kindles cheaper and not locked out every OTHER ebook on the market with a completely new DRM that they don't seem to want to release to say...Sony or iRex.
How does reading on a computer (which you're doing right now) conflict with reading on a kindle? The only difference is LCD vs eInk. Screen size is about the same for a laptop and eBook.
It doesn't. eBooks are a subset functionality of existing laptops, phones, PDAs and ipods.
They could have opened it up, I agree, but Amazon seems to be taking a leaf out of Apple's book to create their preferred total ecosystem - (device, shop, channel, etc.) hence proprietary DRM and a proprietary device for the early adopters. The others don't have access to the whispernet and so break the Amazon "always on" model. If you are hardcore, you probably ditched your Sony for a Kindle anyway.
Laptops are heavy, have crap batteries, are awkward to use other than on a desk/table or sitting upright, don't have automated backup ootb, are disruptive to reading (email/chat etc.) and you look like a tool if you try to read one by the pool (and it's even worse if you drop it in there). Laptops are a piss-poor substitute to many major reading situations.
Here's one additional problem I have with Kindle (old and new)-
I seriously toyed with getting a Kindle 2, and played with one owned by a friend. I travel a great deal and enjoy reading novels while I travel. Some of these trips are weeks long, so I often carry multiple books with me. The Kindle 2 seemed a good solution. I could pack dozens of novels into the Kindle.
The problem came when I went in search of content. I started with a list of 10 novels I wanted to read. Only 2 of the 10 were available for the Kindle. I developed another list of 10 novels. Four of them were available. So, if I wanted to read books I wanted to read, as opposed to only those Kindle had available, I was going to have to carry some books along with the device, thus completely negating the value of the Kindle for me. All the current bestsellers were available, but they're not what I tend to read. So content availability will be a problem for Kindle, and I suspect it will be a problem for some time to come.
That's still six you don't have to carry, (net 5 including the device) and this is early days - the more people get into it, the more publishers will develop/submit e-content. I seem to remember the early days of iTunes people said the same thing - but it developed on the back of mainstream tastes and now has the majority of independent content too.
The thing about Amazon unlike the Apple store, you can't just go check it out in person. I'm interested in the text to speech part for a blind friend. I'm curious if the mobile Acrobat Reader includes all the accessibility functions and that the Kindle can tab around the page to read the tags and annotations properly.
Here is how you do it, step by step. Judge for yourself. On the right-hand margin of the device is the little joystick, snuggled into a button, making it U-shaped. The top half of the button is "Menu" and the bottom half is "Back".
Press "Menu". You get a menu along the right side of the screen, with various things like "Turn Wireless Off", "Shop in Kindle Store", "Cover", "Table of Contents", etc. When I just did this, my cursor started out at "Table of Contents". At the bottom of the menu is "Start Text-to-Speech".
With the little joystick, move the cursor to the bottom menu item. There is no audio feedback as the cursor moves from item to item. So if you're completely blind, there would be a danger of stopping before you get to the bottom. But you won't over-shoot, so that's good.
Press the joystick to start the text-to-speech. Speech takes a moment to start. I usually end up pushing the joystick a couple of times, figuring it hasn't registered the first click, but I think it just takes a moment.
Kindle starts reading. The voice is quite good, though not as good as Alex, I think. Better than the pre-Alex voices though. One drawback: the voice doesn't pause after reading a section-header or title. Since there's no period, it reads straight to the next line without a break, which will bother you. Also it doesn't seem to pause for a paragraph.
To stop Kindle reading: press the Menu button. The menu appears with the cursor already on "Stop Speaking". Press the joystick.
It's very serviceable. With a few improvements in appropriate pauses (and maybe a little noise feedback when the cursor moves down the menu so you can hear when you're at the bottom), it would be outstanding.
Highlighting, clipping, and note taking desperately needs a stylus (why type in notes when you can scribble them far faster? It's the perfect size to be a digital notepad as well). The fact that those features seem at least a year off is terribly disappointing (and if it bugs me, I can't imagine how a student might feel). There's a niche market for full-sized e-readers, and I hope Amazon finds it profitable.
That's still six you don't have to carry, (net 5 including the device) ...
I think you completely missed the point of that post.
It doesn't matter how many books they "don't have to carry" as long as it's below the critical threshold that encourages a user to buy the device.
The problem is that the publishers don't have the "digital rights" to all the titles, but they need to stop artificially separating the rights before this will change.
It's 20C thinking to pretend that there is a "real" version, and that purchasers of digital copies are buying some "extra" or "sub" version. If a book is published at publisher X, that publisher should have the rights to the text in all forms.
A related problem with digital books (or digital anything really), is that at the same time publishers diss digital copies as extras or not the real thing, they insist that money-wise, we should be paying roughly the same price. No-one but an idiot would buy a digital version of a book that's been in print for literally hundreds of years for the same twenty dollar sticker price as the latest rip off printed version.
Same goes for iTunes movies, TV shows etc. If the market prices were allowed to fluctuate in such areas by removing the media monopolies, I doubt whether the average movie would be worth more than a couple of bucks and the average book less than that. Media producers and especially publishers are used to decades of charging 50 or a 100 bucks for the latest best seller in hardback when it's really only a hundred pages in rather large type and costs pennies to produce.
Comments
***It's expensive:***
1) Apple is expensive but better that's why we chose it - Amazon is going the same route - the attention to detail is amazing. The Kindle packaging is as good if not better than apple's
2) if you consider you have this for 3 years and the wireless service on any other platform would be worth at least $10/month - the normal Kindle is free and this one is a $100 - big deal. I LOVE that it doesn't have monthly service charges - it is the best wireless revenue model period!
***It's not color***
1) It's a book that's easy to read for hours and gives no more eye strain than a book
2) It just came out - I'm sure in 5 years we will have color
***It's not a laptop***
1) It's a BOOK - great so you concentrate on READING - not being interrupted every 5 secs by an email, im, game, etc
2) The battery lasts for MONTHS - try that one your iphone or laptop
I have a Kindle 2 and use it on business trips and at home - it almost perfect for what it's mission is
This is a great initiative device that is the best hope for books and subscriptions to be current in this new paperless age. Everyone should be applauding Amazon not criticizing them.
For $490 I can buy a pretty nice laptop, with a full-color screen. They really need to get the pricing down on these things.
Lots of people don't want laptops. They don't want clamshells. They don't want a computer!!!
I wouldn't expect geeks on a computer company forum to agree, but I do expect thinking people to think outside their box once in a while.
The iPhone/iPod works because they are not computers to most people. They don't act like one or usually breakdown like one.
Reading is fundamental and just like your $500 laptop hasn't put books out of business, it won't compete with the Kindles. Sure the price needs to drop to the $200 for many folks, but I think half of my family would just as soon read from a Kindle than lug around a laptop or squint from an iPhone ... and iPhones are pretty good!
And that's exactly why they took this name. Kindle is the fire starter.
But it also gets burned up at the very beginning.
I believe that will happen to these devices as well, and I think that Amazon knows it too.
Yup. Amazon isn't in business to manufacture sell e-book readers, they are in business to sell Books. They will be perfectly happy to get others to build and even sell readers*, just so long as they tie back into Amazon's store. But first, Amazon needs to show that it is a worthwhile business to be in.
* By "readers" I don't mean Kindle-clones, but a successful device will need many of those attributes. I don't believe the current laptop or phone platforms will compete.
Imagine a super-light notebook with a large color-e-ink display on the outside of the lid, and extreme low-power mode when closed, but enough for e-books, email, calendar and other basic apps, but a full-function computer when open.
Or a two-sided tablet!
Who cares? The publishers care. If they find that their textbooks aren't selling, or that newspaper subscriptions aren't selling, or magazines, they will stop doing it.
When you consider that Apple has, by now, sold about 40 million iPhones/itouch's, many of which are still in use, and Amazon, possibly half a million Kindles, well, thats a pretty big gap. If only 10% of Apple's customers are reading books on the devices, that's almost 4 million. It's about ten times the size of the Kindles audience.
Apple's selling devices much faster than Amazon ever will, so the lead just piles up.
We've read reports that book sales from the app store are much larger than all the books sold on either Amazon or Sony's platforms put together. And that's despite Apple having a small fraction of the books either of the others have. What happens as Apple's book "supply" increases significantly?
What happens when Apple's got 50 million devices out there? 80 million? 100 million?
What happens if Amazon releases its program for more devices including netbooks?
I think that the Kindle is dead meat. It may take a year or two until we see that happening.
Your grasp of markets and segmentation is rudimentary at best. It is the aim of most companies to get a firm grip of the 10-20% of their market that drive most of the revenue. Amazon doesn't want to sell Kindles, it wants to sell eBooks. No matter how many iPhones or iTouches are sold, it will still be a sucky device for reading and drive only casual book purchasing/usage. Kindle buyers are obviously hardcore readers (or they wouldn't have spent so much on it) and so their average spend on eBooks is probably many multiples greater than that of an iPhone user. Everyone I know who has one swears by it - it is a self selecting crowd.
Amazon/publishers have already learned that control of the content/delivery ecosystem is key - iTunes owns US music and was the last nail in the coffin of standalone physical music retail. Since Apple don't care about margins the only guys who can sell CDs are Target/WalMart/Best Buy etc. as "loss leaders" or Amazon at low margins/high volumes. Amazon/publishers want to get control of the written content market in the iTunes way and the Kindle is the first salvo to hook the hardcore, high revenue fish. Amazon (and publishers) needed to create a focused killer device to prove the eBook concept to the world with an ecosystem that makes them all money (not Apple). It is not a perfect device, but it is pretty damn cool for its purpose. Plus any purchases on iPhone kindle app are still high-margin revenue to Amazon/publishers.
The Kindle may not ever become a ubiquitous device but that won't matter as long as whatever devices follow - Apple netpad, tricorders, holo-glasses, etc. purchase their written content from Amazon/publishers.
Your point about device convergence is also a red herring - existing electronic devices converge when they do not conflict in purpose/function with each other and can be miniaturized enough to all fit in an acceptable form factor. Phone, MP3, internet, gaming, etc. are fine - they can utilize similar feature sets - reading a book or newspaper can't - needs a bigger screen, longer battery life etc. Laptops/Kindles will converge eventually but only after some major screen/battery/cost/software improvements which will all take a while to come.
Imagine a super-light notebook with a large color-e-ink display on the outside of the lid, and extreme low-power mode when closed, but enough for e-books, email, calendar and other basic apps, but a full-function computer when open.
I imagined a similar product like that recently, but with a swivel lid so the eBook Reader could become a tablet PC. The whole thing would require a protective cover but that could easy be a simple, thin hard cover that would latch via a small magnet, like the lid latches to the base, and could be folded over and latched so you can hold it in your hand as an eBook or tablet PC. It would be expensive and it couldn't be nearly as thin or lightweight as an dedicated eBook Reader, but with the needed battery size for a tablet/notebook it would have an amazingly long battery life as an eBook Reader. However, such a product seems so "nichey" and complex that I would very surprised to see such a thing every pop into existence.
Its way overpriced....for what its supposed to do.
My 2 Pennies
Having just been involved in choosing a texkbook for the organic chemistry course for next semester, we looked at several options that were well over $300/student for the course (I work at a major public university), the price for the Kindle isn't too absurd, particularly given some of the advantages of an e-reader. What I would like to see is the ability to write notes in the margins of things. It would be incredibly useful for me in keeping and filing papers for research if I could.
For $500 I'd want the thing to have a digitizer and the ability to write notes on it (ie create my own PDF even if it's just strokes and no handwriting recognition). Even if it cost $100 more for the digitizer it would have made this far more useful for a student.
I can't understand all the harping!
***It's expensive:***
1) Apple is expensive but better that's why we chose it - Amazon is going the same route - the attention to detail is amazing. The Kindle packaging is as good if not better than apple's
***It's not color***
1) It's a book that's easy to read for hours and gives no more eye strain than a book
2) It just came out - I'm sure in 5 years we will have color
Sorry, for what it is and does, it's very expensive. I have 2 friends who've broken their Kindles; they are not all that sturdy.
The lack of color is a huge problem if one of the main intended uses is for textbooks. I can't think of a single text I assign (I'm a professor) that would work in B&W, even with 16 shades. It might work for my colleagues in English, but most of us in the sciences or the arts use lots and lots of color in our work.
Your grasp of markets and segmentation is rudimentary at best. It is the aim of most companies to get a firm grip of the 10-20% of their market that drive most of the revenue. Amazon doesn't want to sell Kindles, it wants to sell eBooks.
Then it bloody well should have sold Kindles cheaper and not locked out every OTHER ebook on the market with a completely new DRM that they don't seem to want to release to say...Sony or iRex.
Your point about device convergence is also a red herring - existing electronic devices converge when they do not conflict in purpose/function with each other and can be miniaturized enough to all fit in an acceptable form factor. Phone, MP3, internet, gaming, etc. are fine - they can utilize similar feature sets - reading a book or newspaper can't - needs a bigger screen, longer battery life etc. Laptops/Kindles will converge eventually but only after some major screen/battery/cost/software improvements which will all take a while to come.
How does reading on a computer (which you're doing right now) conflict with reading on a kindle? The only difference is LCD vs eInk. Screen size is about the same for a laptop and eBook.
It doesn't. eBooks are a subset functionality of existing laptops, phones, PDAs and ipods.
NyTime is not MAYBE interested they helped launch it. It's maybe going to save the newspapers as we know it. I'm sorry for getting personal but you really have thing against this device. The iPod was a one thing device at one point - remember - music? And boy wasn't it expensive?
But people really want to carry music wherever they go in a SMALL device
If you could put the Kindle in your pocket, it would be different.
Don't you think if the Kindle had sold a million units already they would be shouting it from the rooftops?
I'm not thrilled with the device in its PRESENT incarnation.
I could say the same about you. You seem to totally ignore that computer technology is getting much better, lighter, using less battery power, and that better batteries are coming out to force a dedicated device out of the market.
That's how I see it.
Why is my strong opinion any less important than your being against what I've said?
It isn't. Many times large companies have backed a product category that later failed. The fact that some companies are backing (and we don't yet know what that means here) this doesn't mean it will succeed either.
Have you bought one yet?
<Cue in postings with 500 subjects that need color graphics in 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . .>
It's too expensive. But print media is dead, and they need to have a digital device to possibly give them a distribution model to the 50% of people out there who don't care about laptops but do want to have a highly portable device to read with. I'm sure the hope is that it will become an ubiquitous technology that will eventually be subsidized for free by the media companies.
No one is mentioning the stellar battery life this thing has. With a 10" color touch screen, you'd be lucky to get 5 hours. Kindle measures their life in days - weeks if you turn EVDO off.
I'm not buying one until it's <$200 though.
I can't understand all the harping!
[...]
***It's not color***
1) It's a book that's easy to read for hours and gives no more eye strain than a book
2) It just came out - I'm sure in 5 years we will have color
I had color and a bigger display on my Mac in 1988. Why can't I buy e-books now from Amazon for my Mac? Is it more difficult for Amazon to develop a Mac app than to develop an entirely new hardware+software platform? I don't think so. Amazon has a free iPhone app, so what's the big deal with going full Mac? I don't need/want another device in my life. Let's not get so wrapped up in our creations; Start thinking green, Amazon.
I seriously toyed with getting a Kindle 2, and played with one owned by a friend. I travel a great deal and enjoy reading novels while I travel. Some of these trips are weeks long, so I often carry multiple books with me. The Kindle 2 seemed a good solution. I could pack dozens of novels into the Kindle.
The problem came when I went in search of content. I started with a list of 10 novels I wanted to read. Only 2 of the 10 were available for the Kindle. I developed another list of 10 novels. Four of them were available. So, if I wanted to read books I wanted to read, as opposed to only those Kindle had available, I was going to have to carry some books along with the device, thus completely negating the value of the Kindle for me. All the current bestsellers were available, but they're not what I tend to read. So content availability will be a problem for Kindle, and I suspect it will be a problem for some time to come.
Then it bloody well should have sold Kindles cheaper and not locked out every OTHER ebook on the market with a completely new DRM that they don't seem to want to release to say...Sony or iRex.
How does reading on a computer (which you're doing right now) conflict with reading on a kindle? The only difference is LCD vs eInk. Screen size is about the same for a laptop and eBook.
It doesn't. eBooks are a subset functionality of existing laptops, phones, PDAs and ipods.
They could have opened it up, I agree, but Amazon seems to be taking a leaf out of Apple's book to create their preferred total ecosystem - (device, shop, channel, etc.) hence proprietary DRM and a proprietary device for the early adopters. The others don't have access to the whispernet and so break the Amazon "always on" model. If you are hardcore, you probably ditched your Sony for a Kindle anyway.
Laptops are heavy, have crap batteries, are awkward to use other than on a desk/table or sitting upright, don't have automated backup ootb, are disruptive to reading (email/chat etc.) and you look like a tool if you try to read one by the pool (and it's even worse if you drop it in there). Laptops are a piss-poor substitute to many major reading situations.
Here's one additional problem I have with Kindle (old and new)-
I seriously toyed with getting a Kindle 2, and played with one owned by a friend. I travel a great deal and enjoy reading novels while I travel. Some of these trips are weeks long, so I often carry multiple books with me. The Kindle 2 seemed a good solution. I could pack dozens of novels into the Kindle.
The problem came when I went in search of content. I started with a list of 10 novels I wanted to read. Only 2 of the 10 were available for the Kindle. I developed another list of 10 novels. Four of them were available. So, if I wanted to read books I wanted to read, as opposed to only those Kindle had available, I was going to have to carry some books along with the device, thus completely negating the value of the Kindle for me. All the current bestsellers were available, but they're not what I tend to read. So content availability will be a problem for Kindle, and I suspect it will be a problem for some time to come.
That's still six you don't have to carry, (net 5 including the device) and this is early days - the more people get into it, the more publishers will develop/submit e-content. I seem to remember the early days of iTunes people said the same thing - but it developed on the back of mainstream tastes and now has the majority of independent content too.
The price$ are already half for a book and have been. Go to Amazon and check it out.
I did check it out. I compared several printed books to three kindle books. Paper won...the best price was for used books.
Your Heart Belongs to Me. Dean Koontz
Kindle: 9.99
Used in Print: 1.85
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
Kindle: 9.75
Used in Print 1.13
New in Print 9.74
Moby Dick
Kindle: 9.99
Herman Melville: Moby-Dick (Paperback): 21.50 used from 1.93
The thing about Amazon unlike the Apple store, you can't just go check it out in person. I'm interested in the text to speech part for a blind friend. I'm curious if the mobile Acrobat Reader includes all the accessibility functions and that the Kindle can tab around the page to read the tags and annotations properly.
Here is how you do it, step by step. Judge for yourself. On the right-hand margin of the device is the little joystick, snuggled into a button, making it U-shaped. The top half of the button is "Menu" and the bottom half is "Back".
Press "Menu". You get a menu along the right side of the screen, with various things like "Turn Wireless Off", "Shop in Kindle Store", "Cover", "Table of Contents", etc. When I just did this, my cursor started out at "Table of Contents". At the bottom of the menu is "Start Text-to-Speech".
With the little joystick, move the cursor to the bottom menu item. There is no audio feedback as the cursor moves from item to item. So if you're completely blind, there would be a danger of stopping before you get to the bottom. But you won't over-shoot, so that's good.
Press the joystick to start the text-to-speech. Speech takes a moment to start. I usually end up pushing the joystick a couple of times, figuring it hasn't registered the first click, but I think it just takes a moment.
Kindle starts reading. The voice is quite good, though not as good as Alex, I think. Better than the pre-Alex voices though. One drawback: the voice doesn't pause after reading a section-header or title. Since there's no period, it reads straight to the next line without a break, which will bother you. Also it doesn't seem to pause for a paragraph.
To stop Kindle reading: press the Menu button. The menu appears with the cursor already on "Stop Speaking". Press the joystick.
It's very serviceable. With a few improvements in appropriate pauses (and maybe a little noise feedback when the cursor moves down the menu so you can hear when you're at the bottom), it would be outstanding.
I did check it out. I compared several printed books to three kindle books. Paper won...the best price was for used books.
Moby Dick
Kindle: 9.99
Herman Melville: Moby-Dick (Paperback): 21.50 used from 1.93
You're either not being observant, or you're not being honest.
Moby Dick: $0.80 in kindle format.
That's still six you don't have to carry, (net 5 including the device) ...
I think you completely missed the point of that post.
It doesn't matter how many books they "don't have to carry" as long as it's below the critical threshold that encourages a user to buy the device.
The problem is that the publishers don't have the "digital rights" to all the titles, but they need to stop artificially separating the rights before this will change.
It's 20C thinking to pretend that there is a "real" version, and that purchasers of digital copies are buying some "extra" or "sub" version. If a book is published at publisher X, that publisher should have the rights to the text in all forms.
A related problem with digital books (or digital anything really), is that at the same time publishers diss digital copies as extras or not the real thing, they insist that money-wise, we should be paying roughly the same price. No-one but an idiot would buy a digital version of a book that's been in print for literally hundreds of years for the same twenty dollar sticker price as the latest rip off printed version.
Same goes for iTunes movies, TV shows etc. If the market prices were allowed to fluctuate in such areas by removing the media monopolies, I doubt whether the average movie would be worth more than a couple of bucks and the average book less than that. Media producers and especially publishers are used to decades of charging 50 or a 100 bucks for the latest best seller in hardback when it's really only a hundred pages in rather large type and costs pennies to produce.