It's not that they haven't done an amazing job with the hardware. The question is whether this entire category is viable.
You really have to remember that we have no idea how many Kindle's have been sold. Amazon refuses to answer that question. Estimates have been all over the place, from 250,000 to 750,000.
While Apple doesn't break out numbers for each model in their lines, they at least do tell us how many of a line have been sold, to a certain extent. So we know how many desktops, portables, iPhones, iPods etc.
Amazon has had ONE device. The fact that they have constantly refused to give out sales figures seems a bit suspicious.
Apple don't need to make ebook reader, they only need a touch tablet. The reader can be a software by Amazon.
ITS TIME FOR APPLE TO REISSUE THE iBOOK!!! Only this time, it will be in a book form. Having all the features of an iPod Touch, but a big screen format, like the DX. Bound in any one of the primary 1984 Apple colors- a colorful carbon fiber covering. It will have 'Kindle for iBook' software and display color newspapers, text books and magazines, as well as email and web pages.It will augment the Kindle DX, allowing Amazon to provide the content and perhaps ever sell the device from them. It will have the original Apple logo, 3D'd up a bit. (I can dream can't I?)
That is exactly his point, you break out numbers when the sales are impressive. The only numbers that Apple has broken out for the AppleTV hobby are that the sale rose 3x, but they didn't give a unit figure to compare it to, because while it maybe tops in media extender appliances, it's obviously pretty low in sales for an Apple product.
I think the electronic versions are (or will be) much less expensive. The publishing costs
are much lower with no paper, no newsstands, many fewer union employees, etc.
All we hear about it think from us posters. We've yet to hear from the companies who have to make money on this.
For newspapers, the biggest source of revenue is LOCAL advertisers. LOCAL.
How are they going to get that with this? Are they going to have to release scads of separate editions around the country? Right now, outside NY, the paper costs more because of shipping and the lack of much of that local advertising.
While shipping won't be an issue, the lack of advertising will.
There are a lot of issues that need resolving before we will know if this will be a success.
One will be the death of many thousands of jobs around the country. This isn't a good time for that either.
You're right in that I probably overstated that a tad, but I was careful to say "get their news from" newspapers, not "read newspapers" even though I definitely implied "readership." Also, these kinds of things would clearly vary from area to area, and country to country as well so your mileage may vary as they say.
I would argue that while lots of people may still read newspapers, that in most cases it's neither the main source, nor the first source for news in that group. What I see in my area is that almost everyone has switched to the "free" newspapers, which are now handed out at every bus, train, and transit station. You actually have to dodge around these idiots handing out the papers and perhaps throw a few karate chops just to make it to the bus most days.
If the readers had to pay for the paper, only something like one in a hundred would do so IMO.
It certainly makes a difference where you live in that if I lived in New York I might be tempted to buy the paper simply because it's a better paper. The two main "pay for" papers in my town are horrible rags that are almost the same format and mostly the same information as the free papers.
I would still argue that you are in a minority in spending so much money per year for newspapers and magazine subscriptions. Other than a single obscure and very unique magazine that I get from the UK (because it's the only source of that information), I haven't bought or read a magazine in at least 15 years, and I'm a huge reader with a vast book collection etc. so it's not like I fill up my time by watching TV or something.
I think the newspapers did this to themselves to a degree in that the only real reason to pay for a paper over getting the news for free on the internet, is the analysis, not the news itself. The news The NY Times and the WSJ are some of the best traditional news sources for that reason.
What I see is that the majority of TV and newspaper news outlets have been moving more and more into the entertainment realm over the last couple of decades and backing away from any kind of editorial positions or analysis of the news. Now that this same news can be had on the net for free, they are up against the wall because (WSJ and NYT excluded) they don't really offer anything that the consumer can't get for free on the internet.
Unfortunately, a lot of this is the lack of the ability of the average person to think much these days. Everything is served up as pap for them so that they don't have to think.
Too much news analysis, so that they don't have to do it themselves, mostly by people on Tv, or radio who don't know that much to begin with, from one political angle or another.
That is exactly his point, you break out numbers when the sales are impressive. The only numbers that Apple has broken out for the AppleTV hobby are that the sale rose 3x, but they didn't give a unit figure to compare it to, because while it maybe tops in media extender appliances, it's pretty low for an Apple product.
That's a bullsheet answer and you know it. 3X means nothing - that is not a number.
Who cares how many units Amazon has sold or "shipped" as Apple likes to say - as long as the product delivers? Who cares?
The very name "Kindle" to me describes Amazon's vision. This isn't the fire, it's not the fuel, it's just the little bit to get the fire started!
My biggest gripe is that the publishers see this as a way to make massively more money. eBooks have massively less manufacturing and distribution costs, cannot be resold (or, it seems, transferred from one device to another?), and have inherently less value. The price for the consumer should be far less than a paper copy.
Fix the business model, and mature the readers (bigger, faster, cheaper, color screens), and it just might catch on!
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.
all the app's from iphone store < kndle app is free >
colour
usb
firewire
dvd player
multi touch
all glass top
unibody bottom
camera
video
250 g hd
NVIDIA graphics
The GeForce 9600M GT
2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
2GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x1GB
help what else can 1 add ???
all this for 899 $
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.
Everyone knocking the display seems to ignore the 2 huge advantages of e-ink over a back-lit screen:
1. Eye-fatigue
2. Ability to read in bright sunlight.
No doubt it sucks these things are only in B&W, but who cares if it's in color if you can't see the damn thing or you don't want to look at it any longer because it hurts to do so. I don't know how any new tablet device from Apple will overcome that problem.
Would I pay that much for it? Probably not, not without a stylus to mark up the docs (assuming this would be another limitation of the e-ink technology). But as a law student, I drool at the idea of ditching my textbooks for something like this.
I have no fatigue from reading a backlit screen if it's properly set up, and neither should anyone else. The eye doesn't know where the light is coming from. That's one of the more ridiculous myths we see here.
Yes, current LCDs have problems in bright sunlight. But OLEDS, which are now coming out in some larger phone screens, are much better in that regard.
But backlit screens are much better in dimmer light where these screens are poor.
In the dark, as when lying in bed at night, the Kindle is useless without having to have a good light on as well, whereas an LCD works very well without that light.
If you have a spouse, they might object strongly to leaving a bright light on.
And yes, color is important. even Amazon states that color books will be seen in color on the iPhone with their program. Otherwise, they would just publish them in greyscale.
Why is it that people who like this screen always fail to mention the at least 50% of the time when the screen works poorly, or not at all, but don't fail to mention the one place where backlit technology works poorly?
It's not that they haven't done an amazing job with the hardware. The question is whether this entire category is viable.
You really have to remember that we have no idea how many Kindle's have been sold. Amazon refuses to answer that question. Estimates have been all over the place, from 250,000 to 750,000.
While Apple doesn't break out numbers for each model in their lines, they at least do tell us how many of a line have been sold, to a certain extent. So we know how many desktops, portables, iPhones, iPods etc.
Amazon has had ONE device. The fact that they have constantly refused to give out sales figures seems a bit suspicious.
Amazon's overarching goal is to make a sale wherever and whenever the customer is ready to buy. It's likely they are not making big margins on Kindle's right now, but they are building a new distribution chain. Nothing wrong with that.
Any eBook that is to be used in colleges a text book reader—which seems unlikely until the readers are colour capable—would have to have a robust notes taking method and be able to back itself up, perhaps even automatically like MobileMe, before it begins to be viable. And the notes taking would have to be convenient and simple to write and read quickly.
a 5MB song lasts 3 minutes or so. a 5MB book file is hundreds of pages
Maybe maybe not, it depends on the content and how it was produced. I've dealt with tech manuals that where 80 MB in size due to being scanned PDFs. Not a lot of info in those manuals either. A better document might have vector drawings and Better font tech and still take up a lot of space. I even get magazines that are more or less B & W that are more than half drawings or pics.
So sure a paperback romance novel might compress nicely but you can't assume everything will equally zip down to tiny files.
Quote:
and will take you a long time to read. no reason for enough storage to last you 20 years of reading since you will buy a better model several times by then
Well that might be what you think but consider how much storage is used on todays computers for documentation and books. I could easily go through a Giga Byte just to store all the PDFs for the various things I have to deal with at work. Some of that is in formats other than PDF such as HTML and doc. Obviously Kindle isn't much help with those alternative formats.
It's been awile since I looked but the few books I have on my iPhone take up a bit of space also. I'm not a big reader of electronic documents at this time either, so the collection is limited.
In any event I think you miss the concept of a library. Something you build up over time, add to as you see fit. You won't want to have to move that library to a new device every year because the old one ran out of space.
That's a bullsheet answer and you know it. 3X means nothing - that is not a number.
Who cares how many units Amazon has sold or "shipped" as Apple likes to say - as long as the product delivers? Who cares?
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.
Amazon's overarching goal is to make a sale wherever and whenever the customer is ready to buy. It's likely they are not making big margins on Kindle's right now, but they are building a new distribution chain. Nothing wrong with that.
Nothing wrong with it. I LOVE digital books. I have a couple hundred.
I just don't think that, long term, a reader as a device, will survive.
Comments
It's not that they haven't done an amazing job with the hardware. The question is whether this entire category is viable.
You really have to remember that we have no idea how many Kindle's have been sold. Amazon refuses to answer that question. Estimates have been all over the place, from 250,000 to 750,000.
While Apple doesn't break out numbers for each model in their lines, they at least do tell us how many of a line have been sold, to a certain extent. So we know how many desktops, portables, iPhones, iPods etc.
Amazon has had ONE device. The fact that they have constantly refused to give out sales figures seems a bit suspicious.
Really? How many APPLETVs have been sold????
This one looks much better than the previous one.
Apple don't need to make ebook reader, they only need a touch tablet. The reader can be a software by Amazon.
ITS TIME FOR APPLE TO REISSUE THE iBOOK!!! Only this time, it will be in a book form. Having all the features of an iPod Touch, but a big screen format, like the DX. Bound in any one of the primary 1984 Apple colors- a colorful carbon fiber covering. It will have 'Kindle for iBook' software and display color newspapers, text books and magazines, as well as email and web pages.It will augment the Kindle DX, allowing Amazon to provide the content and perhaps ever sell the device from them. It will have the original Apple logo, 3D'd up a bit. (I can dream can't I?)
Really? How many APPLETVs have been sold????
That is exactly his point, you break out numbers when the sales are impressive. The only numbers that Apple has broken out for the AppleTV hobby are that the sale rose 3x, but they didn't give a unit figure to compare it to, because while it maybe tops in media extender appliances, it's obviously pretty low in sales for an Apple product.
I think the electronic versions are (or will be) much less expensive. The publishing costs
are much lower with no paper, no newsstands, many fewer union employees, etc.
All we hear about it think from us posters. We've yet to hear from the companies who have to make money on this.
For newspapers, the biggest source of revenue is LOCAL advertisers. LOCAL.
How are they going to get that with this? Are they going to have to release scads of separate editions around the country? Right now, outside NY, the paper costs more because of shipping and the lack of much of that local advertising.
While shipping won't be an issue, the lack of advertising will.
There are a lot of issues that need resolving before we will know if this will be a success.
One will be the death of many thousands of jobs around the country. This isn't a good time for that either.
You're right in that I probably overstated that a tad, but I was careful to say "get their news from" newspapers, not "read newspapers" even though I definitely implied "readership." Also, these kinds of things would clearly vary from area to area, and country to country as well so your mileage may vary as they say.
I would argue that while lots of people may still read newspapers, that in most cases it's neither the main source, nor the first source for news in that group. What I see in my area is that almost everyone has switched to the "free" newspapers, which are now handed out at every bus, train, and transit station. You actually have to dodge around these idiots handing out the papers and perhaps throw a few karate chops just to make it to the bus most days.
If the readers had to pay for the paper, only something like one in a hundred would do so IMO.
It certainly makes a difference where you live in that if I lived in New York I might be tempted to buy the paper simply because it's a better paper. The two main "pay for" papers in my town are horrible rags that are almost the same format and mostly the same information as the free papers.
I would still argue that you are in a minority in spending so much money per year for newspapers and magazine subscriptions. Other than a single obscure and very unique magazine that I get from the UK (because it's the only source of that information), I haven't bought or read a magazine in at least 15 years, and I'm a huge reader with a vast book collection etc. so it's not like I fill up my time by watching TV or something.
I think the newspapers did this to themselves to a degree in that the only real reason to pay for a paper over getting the news for free on the internet, is the analysis, not the news itself. The news The NY Times and the WSJ are some of the best traditional news sources for that reason.
What I see is that the majority of TV and newspaper news outlets have been moving more and more into the entertainment realm over the last couple of decades and backing away from any kind of editorial positions or analysis of the news. Now that this same news can be had on the net for free, they are up against the wall because (WSJ and NYT excluded) they don't really offer anything that the consumer can't get for free on the internet.
Unfortunately, a lot of this is the lack of the ability of the average person to think much these days. Everything is served up as pap for them so that they don't have to think.
Too much news analysis, so that they don't have to do it themselves, mostly by people on Tv, or radio who don't know that much to begin with, from one political angle or another.
That is exactly his point, you break out numbers when the sales are impressive. The only numbers that Apple has broken out for the AppleTV hobby are that the sale rose 3x, but they didn't give a unit figure to compare it to, because while it maybe tops in media extender appliances, it's pretty low for an Apple product.
That's a bullsheet answer and you know it. 3X means nothing - that is not a number.
Who cares how many units Amazon has sold or "shipped" as Apple likes to say - as long as the product delivers? Who cares?
Pioneer, yes. Perfect world-changing solution, no.
The very name "Kindle" to me describes Amazon's vision. This isn't the fire, it's not the fuel, it's just the little bit to get the fire started!
My biggest gripe is that the publishers see this as a way to make massively more money. eBooks have massively less manufacturing and distribution costs, cannot be resold (or, it seems, transferred from one device to another?), and have inherently less value. The price for the consumer should be far less than a paper copy.
Fix the business model, and mature the readers (bigger, faster, cheaper, color screens), and it just might catch on!
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.
I agree , a nice touch tablet .
wifi
internet
osx
all the app's from iphone store < kndle app is free >
colour
usb
firewire
dvd player
multi touch
all glass top
unibody bottom
camera
video
250 g hd
NVIDIA graphics
The GeForce 9600M GT
2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
2GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x1GB
help what else can 1 add ???
all this for 899 $
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.
That's a bullsheet answer and you know it. 3X means nothing - that is not a number.
Who cares how many units Amazon has sold or "shipped" as Apple likes to say - as long as the product delivers? Who cares?
Reading comprehension would do you some good. You say my response if bullshit but then repeat what I just wrote.
Everyone knocking the display seems to ignore the 2 huge advantages of e-ink over a back-lit screen:
1. Eye-fatigue
2. Ability to read in bright sunlight.
No doubt it sucks these things are only in B&W, but who cares if it's in color if you can't see the damn thing or you don't want to look at it any longer because it hurts to do so. I don't know how any new tablet device from Apple will overcome that problem.
Would I pay that much for it? Probably not, not without a stylus to mark up the docs (assuming this would be another limitation of the e-ink technology). But as a law student, I drool at the idea of ditching my textbooks for something like this.
I have no fatigue from reading a backlit screen if it's properly set up, and neither should anyone else. The eye doesn't know where the light is coming from. That's one of the more ridiculous myths we see here.
Yes, current LCDs have problems in bright sunlight. But OLEDS, which are now coming out in some larger phone screens, are much better in that regard.
But backlit screens are much better in dimmer light where these screens are poor.
In the dark, as when lying in bed at night, the Kindle is useless without having to have a good light on as well, whereas an LCD works very well without that light.
If you have a spouse, they might object strongly to leaving a bright light on.
And yes, color is important. even Amazon states that color books will be seen in color on the iPhone with their program. Otherwise, they would just publish them in greyscale.
Why is it that people who like this screen always fail to mention the at least 50% of the time when the screen works poorly, or not at all, but don't fail to mention the one place where backlit technology works poorly?
An oversight perhaps?
It's not that they haven't done an amazing job with the hardware. The question is whether this entire category is viable.
You really have to remember that we have no idea how many Kindle's have been sold. Amazon refuses to answer that question. Estimates have been all over the place, from 250,000 to 750,000.
While Apple doesn't break out numbers for each model in their lines, they at least do tell us how many of a line have been sold, to a certain extent. So we know how many desktops, portables, iPhones, iPods etc.
Amazon has had ONE device. The fact that they have constantly refused to give out sales figures seems a bit suspicious.
Amazon's overarching goal is to make a sale wherever and whenever the customer is ready to buy. It's likely they are not making big margins on Kindle's right now, but they are building a new distribution chain. Nothing wrong with that.
The price$ are already half for a book and have been. Go to Amazon and check it out.
A book costs $10 bucks for the Kindle, or iPhone. A paperback still costs a couple of dollars less unless it's a trade edition.
Where's the bargain?
I strongly feel that prices of general readership digital books should all cost no more than $5.
The big book resellers object to that though.
Most... expensive... razor... EVER!
They are also the most expensive blades?ever!
Any eBook that is to be used in colleges a text book reader—which seems unlikely until the readers are colour capable—would have to have a robust notes taking method and be able to back itself up, perhaps even automatically like MobileMe, before it begins to be viable. And the notes taking would have to be convenient and simple to write and read quickly.
It would have to, but does this?
If it were a computer it could.
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.
Verizon loves to rape their customers, more so than any other provider. So have a good time with that.
Really? How many APPLETVs have been sold????
That's the one thing Apple hasn't told us. If Amazon called this their experimental "hobby" line, it would be different.
a 5MB song lasts 3 minutes or so. a 5MB book file is hundreds of pages
Maybe maybe not, it depends on the content and how it was produced. I've dealt with tech manuals that where 80 MB in size due to being scanned PDFs. Not a lot of info in those manuals either. A better document might have vector drawings and Better font tech and still take up a lot of space. I even get magazines that are more or less B & W that are more than half drawings or pics.
So sure a paperback romance novel might compress nicely but you can't assume everything will equally zip down to tiny files.
and will take you a long time to read. no reason for enough storage to last you 20 years of reading since you will buy a better model several times by then
Well that might be what you think but consider how much storage is used on todays computers for documentation and books. I could easily go through a Giga Byte just to store all the PDFs for the various things I have to deal with at work. Some of that is in formats other than PDF such as HTML and doc. Obviously Kindle isn't much help with those alternative formats.
It's been awile since I looked but the few books I have on my iPhone take up a bit of space also. I'm not a big reader of electronic documents at this time either, so the collection is limited.
In any event I think you miss the concept of a library. Something you build up over time, add to as you see fit. You won't want to have to move that library to a new device every year because the old one ran out of space.
Dave
That's a bullsheet answer and you know it. 3X means nothing - that is not a number.
Who cares how many units Amazon has sold or "shipped" as Apple likes to say - as long as the product delivers? Who cares?
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.
Amazon's overarching goal is to make a sale wherever and whenever the customer is ready to buy. It's likely they are not making big margins on Kindle's right now, but they are building a new distribution chain. Nothing wrong with that.
Nothing wrong with it. I LOVE digital books. I have a couple hundred.
I just don't think that, long term, a reader as a device, will survive.
There is a lot more than a screen size increase.
Good Lord. This borders on spam. Are you just pushing for 9K posts? There is no prize in the bottom of the "posts frequently" box. Zzzzzzz.....