The Mandelbear's Musings - Kindle? or fizzle?

Nov. 20th, 2007

09:53 pm - Kindle? or fizzle?

If you want everyone else's opinion, see the links after the cut. Here's mine: interesting play, but it's in the wrong game.

You see, Kindle is Amazon's attempt at an iPod for books. They're using what they hope is an elegant, convenient, and reasonably-priced piece of hardware (which I'd guess that they're selling at pretty close to cost when you factor in the pre-paid data plan) to sell digital copies of books (which are fairly expensive considering all the atoms they don't have to handle compared with their dead-tree counterparts).

Apple, on the other hand, is using convenient access to an extensive collection of audio tracks (which they sell at pretty close to cost) to sell a particularly elegant and convenient, but overpriced, piece of hardware. Apple isn't even in the hardware business, really: they understand that they're in the fashion business, and have made it really easy for other companies to sell accessories for iPods.

Hands up, who's going to build fashion accessories for the Kindle? Don't all speak at once... How many people are going to buy a Kindle for each of their kids? Is anybody going to let their kids loose on a piece of hardware that lets them buy books at $10/pop at the click of a button? That's what I thought.

The iPod succeeds, even in a market where there are plenty of far cheaper players, because its fashionable and because it's part of a large ecosystem of fashionable accessories. The iTunes lockin is negligible because hardly anyone bothers with it -- I seem to remember reading that the average iPod user downloads about three tracks from iTunes. The rest are all mp3's from ripped CDs.

There are cheaper alternatives to the Kindle, too: PDAs, smartphones, and of course paper books. You need a player of some sort to listen to a CD, and if you have a computer it's easy to rip any CD in your collection and put it on your iPod. You don't need a reader to read a book, and you can't put it on your Kindle!

See the difference?

Eventually, electronic readers are going to largely supplant paper; in order for that to happen they need to be cheap, and they need to be able to read books originally printed on paper. The first will happen pretty quickly: five or ten years. The second will require a display the size of a full page, and the ability of people to freely pass actual scanned page images from all those legacy books that were published before the age of computerized typesetting. That is going to require a massive shift in the copyright laws, and Amazon isn't going to help with that, any more than the RIAA is, and for the same reason: they need to protect their failing business model.

Meanwhile, if you're going to spend $400 on something that read electronic books, buy something that can also browse the web for free, display PDFs, and play videos. A low-end laptop, a PDA phone, a media-player, or an internet tablet. All but the laptop will also be small enough to fit in your pocket.

I ordered my XO a week ago, thanks.

Just to have everything all in one place, here are some links to what I've been reading in the last couple of days:

Amazon Kindle eBook Review (Verdict: Confusing, Expensive...but Promising) and 15 Things I Just Learned About the Amazon Kindle in BoingBoing
Kindling Openness and Impact on O'Reilly
Amazon Kindle vs. Sony Reader and What You Missed: Kindle Coverage in Wired
Amazon's $399 ~~folly~~ book reader in El Reg
Amazon Kindle Hands-On and Questions Answered (Gallery), Amazon Kindle Delivers Free EV-DO 'Whispernet' Service, and Comparing Amazon Kindle to E-Book Readers of Yesterday and Tomorrow in Gizmodo.
Many details about the Kindle in Engadget
Kindle's Overpriced Content in Techdirt
Amazon pushes Kindle book reader, but will anyone buy it? in BetaNews
Amazon Kindle: Kool or Krap? at Infoworld.

A couple of LJ posts with good discussions: Tech Drool in catsittingstill and Has Amazon finally got the printed-book killer? in thatcrazycajun

...and a couple of alternatives: The Nokia 810, the XO, and the Asus Eee; the latter from this post by marypcb.

Tags: ebooks, eink, paper, readers

Current Mood: thoughtful

(10 comments | Leave a comment)

Comments:

From:	kayshapero
Date:	November 21st, 2007 08:04 pm (UTC)

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Apparently there is at least a theoretical market for an eBook reader that is larger than the Palm TX, since every time I point out that I have no trouble whatsoever reading eBooks off of mine I get cries of "but the screen/letters are too small" and the like. The big problem is that with a few notable exceptions (ex Baen Books) most publishers seem to think that people will pay the same price for the eBook that they would for the trade paperback. This is not the case - it's a cheap edition, and it should be recognized as a cheap edition. Charge too much and the audience stays away in droves. And of course acid-free hard copy is something you can pick up and read wherever there's light from now until the language has vanished from human ken.

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From:	mdlbear
Date:	November 22nd, 2007 01:27 am (UTC)

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There's a market -- I can't see a Palm replacing my filkbook, but a lightweight reader with a letter-sized screen could. Similarly, although I could see reading text on a Palm in the shade, PDF's would be impossible, and so would reading outdoors in the sunlight. But the Kindle isn't the answer.

I agree about eBooks being the "cheap edition".

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From:	kayshapero
Date:	November 22nd, 2007 03:01 am (UTC)

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I'm using MY Palm to hold my fake book - then again I just need lyrics, and singing a'capella I don't need to hang onto a guitar or anything, and can hold it reasonably close. I don't see it being too useful for sheet music.

I've got two ways to read PDFs on the TX. I can use Documents to Go (which has a nasty habit of moving paragraphs, but it IS possible), or run them through Mobipocket and read them as .prcs. The latter comes out like hard copy run through a good, but not perfect, OCR scan, but since it gets converted into HTML in the middle of the process, if I want to KEEP the thing I can get into the guts of it and edit. Less software dependant, too.

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From:	mdlbear
Date:	November 22nd, 2007 03:53 am (UTC)

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"I don't see it being too useful for sheet music." ... or lyric sheets with chords. If I can't sit it on a music stand and see the whole song at once, I can't use it. And sometimes I really need two pages side-by-side.

Imperfect conversion for PDF is usually the right thing: PDF's are tied to one paper size, and they're useless on the screen.

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From:	webmaven
Date:	November 29th, 2007 04:58 pm (UTC)

Kindle book pricing, etc.

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Amazon's Kindle store has a large number of sub-$10 books. In fact, there are rather a lot of sub-$1 books.

For example, there are over 7k books originally from Project Gutenberg (via mobipocket's free ebooks section) selling for 99 cents. These (like all other 'Kindle editions') have been wrapped in DRM to lock them to a single device. Grr.

You can see some more details in the comments on this boing-boing post (toward the bottom):
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/11/20/amazon-kindle-the-we.html

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From:	mdlbear
Date:	November 30th, 2007 03:35 am (UTC)

Re: Kindle book pricing, etc.

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Somehow the idea of charging me money to add DRM to public-domain books that I can download and convert for free just doesn't sit right. Deal-killer as far as I'm concerned.

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From:	webmaven
Date:	December 1st, 2007 08:27 pm (UTC)

Re: Kindle book pricing, etc.

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Yeah. Note though, that there are plenty of other sub-$1 ebooks for sale (mostly from Fictionwise it seems) in the Kindle store that are in-copyright, rather than public-domain.

BTW, the free .prc versions originating from the PG texts are still available sans-DRM from the mobipocket site, and can be downloaded from there directly to the Kindle via the built-in web browser, which makes the DRM-encrusted versions available for sale rather pointless and annoying. You can similarly directly download the original .txt files from Project Gutenberg.

Other DRM-free ebooks in the mobipocket format are available for download from various places on the net, like http://manybooks.net/, And the Kindle can download from them as well.

If you want to do your own conversions to .mobi or .prc, the only way I've found to do this is using the free-as-in-beer utilities from mobipocket, which are windows-only. Apparently they can also be run under Wine, but I don't really consider that a good enough solution.

If there was any free-as-in-speech solution for producing a Kindle-supported ebook format (either by opening the mobipocket utilities or by adding support for another Free format), then the device would be attractive to me (especially if the price came down some), as I could ignore the Kindle store and it's stupid DRM entirely. Accordingly, I'm keeping an eye out for any developments along those lines (such as someone reverse-engineering the .prc format).

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From:	mdlbear
Date:	December 2nd, 2007 01:08 am (UTC)

Re: Kindle book pricing, etc.

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It's the combination of the closed formats and the walled-garden attitudes of all concerned that really turn me off. And there are some ergonomic considerations that make it less attractive, too: it's noticably right-handed, and practically impossible to pick up with either hand without hitting one of the page-turn buttons. (One arrived in the lab yesterday.)

Pretty soon, somebody is going to do it right. By that time either the price will be closer to $200, or the size will be A5 or even A4.

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From:	(Anonymous)
Date:	April 4th, 2008 03:25 am (UTC)

You forgot about eInk

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None of the alternatives you listed use eInk. Which is ideally suited for displaying books, periodicals, etc. But which completely sucks at web browsing, video, games, etc.

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From:	mdlbear
Date:	April 8th, 2008 06:15 am (UTC)

Re: You forgot about eInk

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For what it does, eInk works fine. Actually, if you stick to "page down" when browsing, eInk works fine for that, too.

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