I can't wait for the Apple device that will probably run on Verizon.
Color, OS programs, email, just hope we are not raped by a contract.
Should work well with iPhone, Mobile Me. It's happening.
The color option will be too expensive right now. Fujitsu just produced the first color E-ink device and it is slow and around $1000.00. In one or two years....I am excited. I don't want a color LED, I want the color E-ink.
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.
Yeah, I completely agree. If you don't think the Kindle is for you, its not.
I don't get it. Who buys these? What's the demographic? The technology isn't bad; I get it, but really... $489/$359? to read on a e-ink, or whatever it is in black & white. If it were a $100, I'd consider getting one for my dad.
I have 6 more years of undergrad and grad school left. I would LOVE to have all of my textbooks, PDFs, and other notes on this device. There are millions of students who would love to carry around something that light versus 20+ pounds of books each day.
There is NO way that a "little child" will be carrying these expensive devices to school and back every day. If they don't break them, they will get lost or stolen. As a parent, I would have had to think very carefully about letting my child take the chance that someone wouldn't try to take it away, and that during that incident, my child wouldn't get hurt.
Isn't that what people said about kids carrying laptops to school and yet Jr. High students use apple laptops every day.
Paraphrasing what SJ said for BR, it's a damn bag of hurt. The Kindle, in any of its variants, is an unremarkable piece of expensive CRAP, despite Amazon's "good" intentions.
Almost 500 dollars for a monochromatic, bulky and extremely limited device? ABSOLUTELY NOT.
And no, comparisons with similar comments for the iPod when it was first launched are not appropriate. The versatility of Apple's media players has been, from day one, WAY higher than that of the Kindle. A nice effort by Amazon, but that's all...no relevant markets are gonna replace their paper matter en masse, and few students will adopt it as the de facto substitute for textbooks.
The Kindle is just a nice device, whose potential will surely be better explored in much better iterations by companies like Apple. The KINDLE IS DEAD.
What is with the hate? ALL tech starts expensive and drops in price. SOMEONE has to bring it to market. Remember DVD players running 1000+ dollars. Now they are 35 bucks. Give it a couple of years and we will have cheaper devices with color and the ability to write on them and highlight as well (Sony's can do some highlighting right now).
I seem to remember SJ bringing that cute and colorful iMac to the table and people saying it was going to fail. Hmmmm.
You guys do realize that the Apple mystery tablet is going totally annihilate the kindle dx out of existence to the point where the destruction might cause a tear to form in the space time continuum.......right?
Unless this mystery tablet is using E-ink...and color E-ink technology, then the purported Apple tablet and the DX are totally different machines.
Example. The kindle doesn't use power to display an e-ink page, only to turn the page. If you are not using the whisper-net or a backlight (does it have a backlight?) then your battery will not discharge in 4 - 6 hours.
If the average paperback is $7, you can buy almost 70 paperbacks for the cost of the kindle. Most major newspapers are now free online. In two years, as an electronic device in the beginning stages of it's evolution, the current Kindle will surely be outdated and ready for replacement in two years.
Even veracious readers probably could get 2 years worth of reading out of 70 books. I like to read but I'm lucky if I have the time to read a book a month. As readers go I realize that's probably a low number but I'm guessing it's closer to the average than 17.5 books per month.
The internet connection is a nice plus, but I have a computer because I need one, and so I'll use what I already have for internet browsing. The bookmarking, dictionary, and convenience of not breaking the spine of a thick book to keep from struggling to hold it open while reading is really attractive, but at $489, I can't say it's a feature that makes me feel I need one. Part of the fun of picking a book is browsing the physical shelves in book store. I can order a paperback from Amazon and have it shipped to my door (and give it away to someone when I'm done with it).
The point is, the Kindle is a very attractive device, but it is just way too expensive considering it has such a concentrated application with virtually no multipurpose use. I just bought a beautiful 26" LCD TV for a small 2nd bedroom for a bit more than what the kindle costs. For hundred bucks more you can get a mac mini which offers a huge number of ways and purposes to use it. Yes, those are completely different devices. However, comparing the amount of use you get out of each device, the Kindle's cost puts it in the range of an extremely costly luxury for average readers with the very deepest of pockets or people for whom reading far ousts TV, home computing, and gaming combined as the way they spend their free time.
If the latest Kindle were half the cost, I would be tempted. As it is, not so much. You can get an iTouch iPod for much less and download an ebook ap that gives you comparable ebook functions, music, a ton of other aps, internet browsing, video and more availability from different suppliers of ebooks than just Amazon. I'd love to have a Kindle right now, but not at that price.
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.
It's nice that you criticized my knowledge, but what do you know?
Among other things you don't know that it's more than likely that a large segment of the Kindle buyers aren't much at reading, but rather are much at getting what they think is the hottest, and coolest device around. A device that almost no one has. A device that not too many will be getting.
If you were paying attention, you would also know that I've been saying that Amazon isn't interested in selling Kindles, but selling books, magazine and newspaper subscriptions etc.
Amazing that you know so many people who own one that you can refer to them as "everyone". You must have the biggest concentration of kindle owners outside of Amazon R&D. I notice that with all the rhetoric, you haven't said that YOU own one. Don't bother to do so now, because it won't be believable.
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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.
Ah yeah. Nothing new in what you just said, other than some confusion in that you contradict youself in the same paragraph.
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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.
Again, what's the point to all this? I already have been saying that, without the scifi references.
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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.
You really are confused, and confusing. I can't easily figure out what you're trying to say. first you say that they will converge, by evolving, as I've been saying. Then you say they WON'T converge. Then you say they will.
Which is it?
You've said nothing new. In fact, though you don't seem to know it, where you can be understood at least, you haven't said anything I haven't.
People keep making this comparison, and I wish they wouldn't. It's accurate in only a very limited fashion. First, with the iPod, I never had to buy from the iTMS to feed my iPod. If I already had a bunch of CDs, I can put the music on the iPod with almost no effort. And if I had something from iTMS and wanted to listen to it on my car CD player (before I had a car with a connector), I could easy burn a CD. So the music data was incredibly mobile. In the early days of the iTMS, selection was woefully incomplete, but no one really cared too much, because if you couldn't get your songs there, it was easy to fall back on the CD store. Anything you wanted on your iPod, you could put on your iPod.
The Kindle is different in this regard, and the lock-in is much more real. I can't grab a book and rip it to my Kindle without a scanner and a ridiculous amount of time proofing. I can't buy a book from the Kindle store and move the book to another data format, so that I can read it on my Mac (or if I had a different e-ink reader I liked better, to that). There are some books in certain non-Kindle filetypes which I can put on my Kindle, and that's easy, but it's not the same a ripping.
And if there's a book I want on my Kindle, and it's not available, UNLIKE the days of the old iTMS, my only real option is to click a button on Amazon saying "Please tell the publisher I'd like this on Kindle".
Problem: The Beatles don't have their music on iTMS.
Question: How many people have the Beatles on their iPod?
Answer: Everyone who actually wants to.
Problem: Richard Feynman's "QED" isn't available for Kindle.
Question: How can I read QED on my Kindle?
Answer: I can choose something else to read, hoping QED will someday become available, or I could learn Spanish (because that version IS available), or I could put my Kindle aside and read the actual paperback. It's not old enough to be at Project Gutenberg.
I like my Kindle. But I feel much more lock-in with it than I ever did with my iPod.
As nice as that would be, you're dreaming on the price! You just described a "Tablet Macbook Pro" (See inclusion of FW). How you think that would make it cheaper than a plastic Macbook, I have no clue? The price would be more like $1299, at the cheapest.
aahhhaaa!!! yes but with a large verzion and nytimes discounts for signing something we can bring down the price to much less /
I completely understand why Kindle 1 & 2 are successes, but I don't get why anyone would buy this DX. $500 is a lot for a big gray-scale monitor. How is this going to compete with or help publishers? Newspapers are offering subsidies with long-term subscriptions, but for newspapers on a Kindle - how do you get coupons, what about the Sunday edition in full color? Magazines - who wants to read a gray-scale version of a magazine??
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.
Not really. They rapidly came out with a program for the iTouch/iPhone that can get all the content the Kindle can.
They don't care about the Kindle. It's just there to give some publicity to their digital sales.
They'll be just as happy with selling these services to anyone.
If they come out with a program for other devices, we'll see that happen, as it should.
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.
The problem is that publishers have learned the wrong lesson from iTunes. The lesson they've learned is that prices that are low and controlled by someone else, may stay low.
What they haven't learned is that those low prices sell far more content than does high prices.
The problem is also that they're locked into royalty costs that make it difficult to sell many books at really low prices. They're also threatened by booksellers such as Barnes & Nobel who don't want to see book prices lower than they sell them at.
As bookstores likely sell over 99% of books at this point, the publishers are still at their mercy.
I think digital books should sell for a much lower price than physical media. If that happened, more people would buy one as an impulse buy instead of having to think about it, the way they buy magazines at the checkout counter.
The color option will be too expensive right now. Fujitsu just produced the first color E-ink device and it is slow and around $1000.00. In one or two years....I am excited. I don't want a color LED, I want the color E-ink.
This is a MUCH more sophisticated device. I already gave the link.
Isn't that what people said about kids carrying laptops to school and yet Jr. High students use apple laptops every day.
Yes. And they're having problems with these programs too.
But at least a laptop is a device that does much more than a book reader. It might be worth the shot. I don't think that parents will want their kids to be carrying a $500 device that just has their books. My daughter didn't mind carrying all that around.
and i may add i wonder when we start to bootlegg the books for free . ?
This is already being done in the .alt newsgroups area.
It's part of the digital revolution I'm sad to say.
People are actually going to the effort of taking a book apart page by page, scanning them, and cleaning them up with OCR. They then put them in the newsgroups.
Among other things you don't know that it's more than likely that a large segment of the Kindle buyers aren't much at reading, but rather are much at getting what they think is the hottest, and coolest device around. A device that almost no one has. A device that not too many will be getting.
All I can say is that you're wrong as far as my sample of one and a half, so far as the motivation.
I have one. I got it to read by the pool. It's bright light, so an LED screen is out. Whenever I try and read a book outdoors, the wind is always fiddling with my pages, and it gets annoying. The Kindle is a very nice solution to that. Put it in a Ziploc and you can even read in the tub
Some people (my mom, for instance) would be attracted to a Kindle because they accumulate such big piles of books over time, and a Kindle is seen as reducing clutter. (My mom is most definitely not a technophile and is currently on the fence about me buying her one, because the screen isn't quite white enough.)
So there you have it: convenience of reading in a specific setting, and the avoidance of accumulating piles of books. The motivations of one person who has one, and one person considering one.
I'm curious if you have one or if you know people with one. Did they buy it for the reasons you state? The Kindle frankly doesn't seem to be a gadget-lust kind of purchase to me, mainly because it's so specific to its one function. I definitely think you're off base with "it's more than likely that a large segment of the Kindle buyers aren't much at reading". Since you state it's a device that almost no-one has, it doesn't sound like you actually know too many people with one either. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and say maybe you do know a couple of especially shallow people who dropped $350 for a device they weren't planning to use. Feel free to cast whatever judgement you wish on them, but I'd ask you not to be too hasty in extending that judgement to the other Kindle buyers, without some data. My own suspicion, entirely unsubstantiated, is that most of the people who actually BUY a Kindle USE it (or if they don't, they still spend a lot of time reading).
Isn't that what people said about kids carrying laptops to school and yet Jr. High students use apple laptops every day.
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Originally Posted by melgross
Yes. And they're having problems with these programs too.
But at least a laptop is a device that does much more than a book reader. It might be worth the shot. I don't think that parents will want their kids to be carrying a $500 device that just has their books. My daughter didn't mind carrying all that around.
Agreed. And I suspect they're selecting some pretty sturdy laptops. My Kindle 2 is amazingly thin. I don't know how well it would stand up to rough handling. The Kindle DX looks just as thin and bigger. I KNOW how well THAT will stand up to rough handling.
All I can say is that you're wrong as far as my sample of one and a half, so far as the motivation.
I have one. I got it to read by the pool. It's bright light, so an LED screen is out. Whenever I try and read a book outdoors, the wind is always fiddling with my pages, and it gets annoying. The Kindle is a very nice solution to that. Put it in a Ziploc and you can even read in the tub
Some people (my mom, for instance) would be attracted to a Kindle because they accumulate such big piles of books over time, and a Kindle is seen as reducing clutter. (My mom is most definitely not a technophile and is currently on the fence about me buying her one, because the screen isn't quite white enough.)
So there you have it: convenience of reading in a specific setting, and the avoidance of accumulating piles of books. The motivations of one person who has one, and one person considering one.
I'm curious if you have one or if you know people with one. Did they buy it for the reasons you state? The Kindle frankly doesn't seem to be a gadget-lust kind of purchase to me, mainly because it's so specific to its one function. I definitely think you're off base with "it's more than likely that a large segment of the Kindle buyers aren't much at reading". Since you state it's a device that almost no-one has, it doesn't sound like you actually know too many people with one either. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and say maybe you do know a couple of especially shallow people who dropped $350 for a device they weren't planning to use. Feel free to cast whatever judgement you wish on them, but I'd ask you not to be too hasty in extending that judgement to the other Kindle buyers, without some data. My own suspicion, entirely unsubstantiated, is that most of the people who actually BUY a Kindle USE it (or if they don't, they still spend a lot of time reading).
I know one person who has one. He bought it because he wanted to see what it was like. Ho hum.
It's ok, but the opposite problem about reading is also true. If the light isn't good, then it doesn't make it. I have a problem using it in the living room, because the light level is fine for what it's used for, and reading books and magazines works well enough. But the Kindle is just too poor to easily read there.
My friend sort of likes it, but I think it's the novelty. He doesn't seem to carry it around when he goes somewhere, and he does read.
It's too easy to stuff a paperbook in a pocket somewhere, and you have to come up with some other less convenient way to carry this, and worry about not damaging it.
I've been reading books on my iPhone, and have no problem with it. I like the fact that with this and my earlier phones, I only need one hand to operate it. Very good when I'm holding a pole in the subway. You can't do that with the Kindle. You really do need two hands.
In NYC I see all kinds of devices. I see many iPods daily. Many. I also see many iPhone/iTouch's.
I see them on the subway every time I'm on it. Sometimes two or three!
I've only see one person with a Kindle. A late middle aged lady sat down next to me and took one out. I was reading from my iPhone at the time, and maybe she saw that and chose to sit there.
Most people are shallow. If they weren't, they wouldn't be buying game machines instead of books to begin with.
Comments
I can't wait for the Apple device that will probably run on Verizon.
Color, OS programs, email, just hope we are not raped by a contract.
Should work well with iPhone, Mobile Me. It's happening.
The color option will be too expensive right now. Fujitsu just produced the first color E-ink device and it is slow and around $1000.00. In one or two years....I am excited. I don't want a color LED, I want the color E-ink.
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.
Yeah, I completely agree. If you don't think the Kindle is for you, its not.
I don't get it. Who buys these? What's the demographic? The technology isn't bad; I get it, but really... $489/$359? to read on a e-ink, or whatever it is in black & white. If it were a $100, I'd consider getting one for my dad.
I have 6 more years of undergrad and grad school left. I would LOVE to have all of my textbooks, PDFs, and other notes on this device. There are millions of students who would love to carry around something that light versus 20+ pounds of books each day.
There is NO way that a "little child" will be carrying these expensive devices to school and back every day. If they don't break them, they will get lost or stolen. As a parent, I would have had to think very carefully about letting my child take the chance that someone wouldn't try to take it away, and that during that incident, my child wouldn't get hurt.
Isn't that what people said about kids carrying laptops to school and yet Jr. High students use apple laptops every day.
Paraphrasing what SJ said for BR, it's a damn bag of hurt. The Kindle, in any of its variants, is an unremarkable piece of expensive CRAP, despite Amazon's "good" intentions.
Almost 500 dollars for a monochromatic, bulky and extremely limited device? ABSOLUTELY NOT.
And no, comparisons with similar comments for the iPod when it was first launched are not appropriate. The versatility of Apple's media players has been, from day one, WAY higher than that of the Kindle. A nice effort by Amazon, but that's all...no relevant markets are gonna replace their paper matter en masse, and few students will adopt it as the de facto substitute for textbooks.
The Kindle is just a nice device, whose potential will surely be better explored in much better iterations by companies like Apple. The KINDLE IS DEAD.
What is with the hate? ALL tech starts expensive and drops in price. SOMEONE has to bring it to market. Remember DVD players running 1000+ dollars. Now they are 35 bucks. Give it a couple of years and we will have cheaper devices with color and the ability to write on them and highlight as well (Sony's can do some highlighting right now).
I seem to remember SJ bringing that cute and colorful iMac to the table and people saying it was going to fail. Hmmmm.
Just so I know we are all on the same planet.....
You guys do realize that the Apple mystery tablet is going totally annihilate the kindle dx out of existence to the point where the destruction might cause a tear to form in the space time continuum.......right?
Unless this mystery tablet is using E-ink...and color E-ink technology, then the purported Apple tablet and the DX are totally different machines.
Example. The kindle doesn't use power to display an e-ink page, only to turn the page. If you are not using the whisper-net or a backlight (does it have a backlight?) then your battery will not discharge in 4 - 6 hours.
BIG DIFFERENCE!
Even veracious readers probably could get 2 years worth of reading out of 70 books. I like to read but I'm lucky if I have the time to read a book a month. As readers go I realize that's probably a low number but I'm guessing it's closer to the average than 17.5 books per month.
The internet connection is a nice plus, but I have a computer because I need one, and so I'll use what I already have for internet browsing. The bookmarking, dictionary, and convenience of not breaking the spine of a thick book to keep from struggling to hold it open while reading is really attractive, but at $489, I can't say it's a feature that makes me feel I need one. Part of the fun of picking a book is browsing the physical shelves in book store. I can order a paperback from Amazon and have it shipped to my door (and give it away to someone when I'm done with it).
The point is, the Kindle is a very attractive device, but it is just way too expensive considering it has such a concentrated application with virtually no multipurpose use. I just bought a beautiful 26" LCD TV for a small 2nd bedroom for a bit more than what the kindle costs. For hundred bucks more you can get a mac mini which offers a huge number of ways and purposes to use it. Yes, those are completely different devices. However, comparing the amount of use you get out of each device, the Kindle's cost puts it in the range of an extremely costly luxury for average readers with the very deepest of pockets or people for whom reading far ousts TV, home computing, and gaming combined as the way they spend their free time.
If the latest Kindle were half the cost, I would be tempted. As it is, not so much. You can get an iTouch iPod for much less and download an ebook ap that gives you comparable ebook functions, music, a ton of other aps, internet browsing, video and more availability from different suppliers of ebooks than just Amazon. I'd love to have a Kindle right now, but not at that price.
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.
It's nice that you criticized my knowledge, but what do you know?
Among other things you don't know that it's more than likely that a large segment of the Kindle buyers aren't much at reading, but rather are much at getting what they think is the hottest, and coolest device around. A device that almost no one has. A device that not too many will be getting.
If you were paying attention, you would also know that I've been saying that Amazon isn't interested in selling Kindles, but selling books, magazine and newspaper subscriptions etc.
Amazing that you know so many people who own one that you can refer to them as "everyone". You must have the biggest concentration of kindle owners outside of Amazon R&D. I notice that with all the rhetoric, you haven't said that YOU own one. Don't bother to do so now, because it won't be believable.
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.
Ah yeah. Nothing new in what you just said, other than some confusion in that you contradict youself in the same paragraph.
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.
Again, what's the point to all this? I already have been saying that, without the scifi references.
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.
You really are confused, and confusing. I can't easily figure out what you're trying to say. first you say that they will converge, by evolving, as I've been saying. Then you say they WON'T converge. Then you say they will.
Which is it?
You've said nothing new. In fact, though you don't seem to know it, where you can be understood at least, you haven't said anything I haven't.
The Kindle is different in this regard, and the lock-in is much more real. I can't grab a book and rip it to my Kindle without a scanner and a ridiculous amount of time proofing. I can't buy a book from the Kindle store and move the book to another data format, so that I can read it on my Mac (or if I had a different e-ink reader I liked better, to that). There are some books in certain non-Kindle filetypes which I can put on my Kindle, and that's easy, but it's not the same a ripping.
And if there's a book I want on my Kindle, and it's not available, UNLIKE the days of the old iTMS, my only real option is to click a button on Amazon saying "Please tell the publisher I'd like this on Kindle".
Problem: The Beatles don't have their music on iTMS.
Question: How many people have the Beatles on their iPod?
Answer: Everyone who actually wants to.
Problem: Richard Feynman's "QED" isn't available for Kindle.
Question: How can I read QED on my Kindle?
Answer: I can choose something else to read, hoping QED will someday become available, or I could learn Spanish (because that version IS available), or I could put my Kindle aside and read the actual paperback. It's not old enough to be at Project Gutenberg.
I like my Kindle. But I feel much more lock-in with it than I ever did with my iPod.
As nice as that would be, you're dreaming on the price! You just described a "Tablet Macbook Pro" (See inclusion of FW). How you think that would make it cheaper than a plastic Macbook, I have no clue? The price would be more like $1299, at the cheapest.
aahhhaaa!!! yes but with a large verzion and nytimes discounts for signing something we can bring down the price to much less /
aahhhaaa!!! yes but with a large verzion and nytimes discounts for signing something we can bring down the price to much less /
and i may add i wonder when we start to bootlegg the books for free . ?
Books - yes; newspapers - maybe; Sunday editions newspapers & magazines - no!
But even for books, whats if they have color photos - now you have to look at b/w versions of them?
If this was a full-color monitor (and $500 is a bit much to me) it would be great, but it's not.
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.
Not really. They rapidly came out with a program for the iTouch/iPhone that can get all the content the Kindle can.
They don't care about the Kindle. It's just there to give some publicity to their digital sales.
They'll be just as happy with selling these services to anyone.
If they come out with a program for other devices, we'll see that happen, as it should.
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.
The problem is that publishers have learned the wrong lesson from iTunes. The lesson they've learned is that prices that are low and controlled by someone else, may stay low.
What they haven't learned is that those low prices sell far more content than does high prices.
The problem is also that they're locked into royalty costs that make it difficult to sell many books at really low prices. They're also threatened by booksellers such as Barnes & Nobel who don't want to see book prices lower than they sell them at.
As bookstores likely sell over 99% of books at this point, the publishers are still at their mercy.
I think digital books should sell for a much lower price than physical media. If that happened, more people would buy one as an impulse buy instead of having to think about it, the way they buy magazines at the checkout counter.
The color option will be too expensive right now. Fujitsu just produced the first color E-ink device and it is slow and around $1000.00. In one or two years....I am excited. I don't want a color LED, I want the color E-ink.
This is a MUCH more sophisticated device. I already gave the link.
http://www.dailytech.com/Japan+Gets+...ticle14610.htm
Isn't that what people said about kids carrying laptops to school and yet Jr. High students use apple laptops every day.
Yes. And they're having problems with these programs too.
But at least a laptop is a device that does much more than a book reader. It might be worth the shot. I don't think that parents will want their kids to be carrying a $500 device that just has their books. My daughter didn't mind carrying all that around.
and i may add i wonder when we start to bootlegg the books for free . ?
This is already being done in the .alt newsgroups area.
It's part of the digital revolution I'm sad to say.
People are actually going to the effort of taking a book apart page by page, scanning them, and cleaning them up with OCR. They then put them in the newsgroups.
Among other things you don't know that it's more than likely that a large segment of the Kindle buyers aren't much at reading, but rather are much at getting what they think is the hottest, and coolest device around. A device that almost no one has. A device that not too many will be getting.
All I can say is that you're wrong as far as my sample of one and a half, so far as the motivation.
I have one. I got it to read by the pool. It's bright light, so an LED screen is out. Whenever I try and read a book outdoors, the wind is always fiddling with my pages, and it gets annoying. The Kindle is a very nice solution to that. Put it in a Ziploc and you can even read in the tub
Some people (my mom, for instance) would be attracted to a Kindle because they accumulate such big piles of books over time, and a Kindle is seen as reducing clutter. (My mom is most definitely not a technophile and is currently on the fence about me buying her one, because the screen isn't quite white enough.)
So there you have it: convenience of reading in a specific setting, and the avoidance of accumulating piles of books. The motivations of one person who has one, and one person considering one.
I'm curious if you have one or if you know people with one. Did they buy it for the reasons you state? The Kindle frankly doesn't seem to be a gadget-lust kind of purchase to me, mainly because it's so specific to its one function. I definitely think you're off base with "it's more than likely that a large segment of the Kindle buyers aren't much at reading". Since you state it's a device that almost no-one has, it doesn't sound like you actually know too many people with one either. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and say maybe you do know a couple of especially shallow people who dropped $350 for a device they weren't planning to use. Feel free to cast whatever judgement you wish on them, but I'd ask you not to be too hasty in extending that judgement to the other Kindle buyers, without some data. My own suspicion, entirely unsubstantiated, is that most of the people who actually BUY a Kindle USE it (or if they don't, they still spend a lot of time reading).
Isn't that what people said about kids carrying laptops to school and yet Jr. High students use apple laptops every day.
Yes. And they're having problems with these programs too.
But at least a laptop is a device that does much more than a book reader. It might be worth the shot. I don't think that parents will want their kids to be carrying a $500 device that just has their books. My daughter didn't mind carrying all that around.
Agreed. And I suspect they're selecting some pretty sturdy laptops. My Kindle 2 is amazingly thin. I don't know how well it would stand up to rough handling. The Kindle DX looks just as thin and bigger. I KNOW how well THAT will stand up to rough handling.
All I can say is that you're wrong as far as my sample of one and a half, so far as the motivation.
I have one. I got it to read by the pool. It's bright light, so an LED screen is out. Whenever I try and read a book outdoors, the wind is always fiddling with my pages, and it gets annoying. The Kindle is a very nice solution to that. Put it in a Ziploc and you can even read in the tub
Some people (my mom, for instance) would be attracted to a Kindle because they accumulate such big piles of books over time, and a Kindle is seen as reducing clutter. (My mom is most definitely not a technophile and is currently on the fence about me buying her one, because the screen isn't quite white enough.)
So there you have it: convenience of reading in a specific setting, and the avoidance of accumulating piles of books. The motivations of one person who has one, and one person considering one.
I'm curious if you have one or if you know people with one. Did they buy it for the reasons you state? The Kindle frankly doesn't seem to be a gadget-lust kind of purchase to me, mainly because it's so specific to its one function. I definitely think you're off base with "it's more than likely that a large segment of the Kindle buyers aren't much at reading". Since you state it's a device that almost no-one has, it doesn't sound like you actually know too many people with one either. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and say maybe you do know a couple of especially shallow people who dropped $350 for a device they weren't planning to use. Feel free to cast whatever judgement you wish on them, but I'd ask you not to be too hasty in extending that judgement to the other Kindle buyers, without some data. My own suspicion, entirely unsubstantiated, is that most of the people who actually BUY a Kindle USE it (or if they don't, they still spend a lot of time reading).
I know one person who has one. He bought it because he wanted to see what it was like. Ho hum.
It's ok, but the opposite problem about reading is also true. If the light isn't good, then it doesn't make it. I have a problem using it in the living room, because the light level is fine for what it's used for, and reading books and magazines works well enough. But the Kindle is just too poor to easily read there.
My friend sort of likes it, but I think it's the novelty. He doesn't seem to carry it around when he goes somewhere, and he does read.
It's too easy to stuff a paperbook in a pocket somewhere, and you have to come up with some other less convenient way to carry this, and worry about not damaging it.
I've been reading books on my iPhone, and have no problem with it. I like the fact that with this and my earlier phones, I only need one hand to operate it. Very good when I'm holding a pole in the subway. You can't do that with the Kindle. You really do need two hands.
In NYC I see all kinds of devices. I see many iPods daily. Many. I also see many iPhone/iTouch's.
I see them on the subway every time I'm on it. Sometimes two or three!
I've only see one person with a Kindle. A late middle aged lady sat down next to me and took one out. I was reading from my iPhone at the time, and maybe she saw that and chose to sit there.
Most people are shallow. If they weren't, they wouldn't be buying game machines instead of books to begin with.