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Kindle Versus The iPhone
Bernie Campbell writes "Forbes takes a look at the recently announced Kindle ebook from Amazon, and considers the possibility that Apple may have beaten them to the punch. 'Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs has a not-so-secret weapon when it comes time to load up the iPhone with content: Google ... Google's Book Search project has already pumped much of the world's printed matter into Google's servers. Downloads of classic titles, such as Bleak House, can already be had for free. Mix Apple's iTunes content distribution smarts with Google's vast storehouse of content, and you'll have an instant competitor to Kindle -- one with a touch interface and the ability to play movies and music, too.'
My GMail tagline right now.
Fool.com: The Motley Fool - Amazon's New $400 Paperweight
Beat to the punch, indeed.
There is a war going on for your mind.
I'll take real books please. No batteries required.
I'll wait a long time to get the kindle. I've always found a paper book to be more convenient than anything online. The kindle is, apparently, quite light and very easy to read, which fixes a couple of the problems. But can you lend a book to a friend or just give it away? What about take it to the toilet and not have to worry? What about a low replacement cost? It looks like they have the price per book to a reasonable level, but everything about paper books is perfect for me. The kindle would have to be amazing to supplant my current library, and the same goes for the iPhone.
If you forget the price difference, the monthly fee the iPhone requires, the shorter battery life of the iPhone (how long can it last if the display is lit nonstop?)...
Not to mention that the iPhone display is smaller and lower resolution.
And that Amazon already has a lot of pull with book publishers.
I'd buy a Kindle if I knew I could get all my college books on it.
Because that's the point of Kindle, isn't it? It is an electronic device that feels similar to a real book and let's you concentrate on the reading. It doesn't have a shiny screen and it won't distract you with calls.
... when it's possible for me to sell, swap, borrow, and/or loan them.
It seems like none of the people who design ebook systems have ever been in a used book store or a library, or have ever lent a favorite book to a friend.
Why is this even a comparison? Book fans are going to appreciate Kindle's interface and feel much more then they ever could on their iPhones.
The iPhone is great for what it is designed for; reading books was not one of its design criteria. Besides, the idea of Apple relying on someone else to provide the content goes against Apple's business plan of the iPhone regardless of how many board members Apple and Google share.
For me, at least, the iPhone already makes a decent ebook reader when coupled with Baen Books' archive of books in HTML format. Just type in the URL, and it's all there. No special software needed. I just wish more publishers would make their books available in HTML. Sure, it's the lowest common denominator in terms of quality, but text is text.
While the iPhone has similar resolution to the Kindle in terms of DPI, it does not have the screen real estate required to display enough text for it to be considered an effective eBook reader.
Clearly the author of that Forbes article hasn't tried reading too many of the books on Google books. While there are some really nicely formatted ebooks on there, most of the collection consists of horrendous scans of esoterica only useful to researchers with a tolerance for photographs that may be blurry, noisy, or shot at funny angles.
I'm trying to imagine less enjoyable way to read a book than on an electronic screen the size of a post-it, but I'm not having much luck. Maybe the audio version by Fran Drescher?
A-Bomb
... consumer.
On Amazon's side I get it. Locked in customers, paying a premium for a device they are already eating the entire hardware cost on. The Kindle is a pure Nintendo play (which is great for a business). Profit on hardware, profit on software, even profit on content the user already owns.
On the consumer side though, what is the compelling sell through? E-Ink? Perhaps except the Libre has grown up and is now in generation three on US/Japanese shores and Sony actually finally learned from their mistakes and made putting user generated/owned content on the device an easy process. The Kindle doesn't even compare well with the more expensive offerings as they are all colour and offer full PDF viewing.
How did this thing get to market? The hardware is silly it is so outdated with regards to style. The software is crippled from the go. Believe it or not heavy users of books *are* price conscious. They will not appreciate being taken for a ride. This whole package reads like some silly dot.com plan and given that Amazon says they have spent three years on it, shows how much they just don't get it. This thing has sat insulated inside Amazon as some hidden away project without regards to the changing market. The Kindle would have been *great* three years okay... questionable at this time last year, but now? Hubris.
I do look forward to picking one up next year though for $80 with some reverse engineered software though.
--- I do not moderate.
They're incredibly out of touch with reality if they think people are going to pay $399 for a book reader, in addition to paid content/subscription. They might have small chance of success if they offered the device for $99. At the current price, it's nothing more than a curiosity a la AIBO/Segway.
Apple actually had Kindle's market sector covered way back in 1993. The Newton had pretty much the same form factor, and with applications like Paperback it was an excellent book viewer in it's time.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
The theory of e-ink is that you want something that lasts for endless hours so that you don't have to recharge it. In return, you'll be willing to accept page turning delays, type lagging, strange user interfaces, no backlighting, and a monochrome display.
I think that's a fallacy, because we are already used to carrying one or two devices around with us that we have to recharge: a small mobile device and a larger laptop-sized device. In both cases, the trends are clear: people want longer battery life and screens that work under sunlight. The market will satisfy these trends. And these devices won't be limited by DRM or strange wireless plans. The iPhone or N800 form factor does indeed support eBook like reading. And, as noted, since we use these devices constantly, we're used to making sure that they are charged.
That is not to say that there won't be a niche for e-ink devices, but I am very doubtful that the Kindle can kindle much anything. It's an interesting gadget, and at $150 or so it might have a sizable market -- but not at $400.
one with a touch interface and the ability to play movies and music, too. Guess what other, cheaper product has that same ability: yes, the iPod Touch, for (by the time Kindle comes out) probably hundreds less. For me, and from what I've read others agree, the two-finger touch on Safari is the most compelling feature of the iPhone. I don't need its phone capabilities, I just want a web browser with wifi that navigates easily, and that's the iPod Touch, isn't it?
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
If you can use your balckberry playing BrickBreaker and emailing the misses, you can surely use the Kindle on the hopper! :)
No wifi, no pdf support, no support for encrypted (purchased) mobipocket ebooks (only unencrypted), no paper backup options for ebook purchases, nickle and dime charges for wireless transfers, selling access to web sites that are basically free including blogs, $400 and an exterior look inspired by 1980's Coleco products all lead to one conclusion: EPIC FAIL.
The one area I see this as a benefit is for technical books. I have a pretty good library of reference books and carrying them around is not feasible. These are not the books that are freely available via Google's book search. The ability to scan through a library of tech books would be very nice, as well as being able to buy them directly. I also see this as much easier for textbooks - no longer would you need to carry a giant bag of books. The iPhone/iPod is also MUCH harder to read than e-paper. The screen size is a big difference, as well as the surface. I really don't see these as competing with a proper e-reader. Given all the above, it is still hard for e-books to prosper, given how incredibly well adapted the book is for it's purpose. So while at work or school I may look to a Kindle or other e-book reader to look through various tomes, at home at the end of the day when I read for pleasure it will always be a real book.
Kindle won't burn my retinas from staring at it for long periods of time as is done when I, ya know, read. The iphone does. ...but it still costs too much.
It seems like the Kindle could be really useful for college students if amazon could get a good deal going with the textbook companies. I'd be more willing to buy a device that cost 400 bucks if I could get each of my textbooks for around 40 or 50 bucks. In a couples of semesters, it would pay for its self. There is also the added bonus that I could carry around a 10 oz device instead of 6 or 7 pounds of books.
That being said, the textbook companies would most likely not agree and the iPod touch or the iPhone would become be my device of choice.
Live Long and Prosper
Remember when Sony was pushing this thing everyone wondered what the purpose was. Now Nick Bezos puts a carefully worded letter on amazon.com and it's the must have product. Remarkable that after Apple finally showed the PDA wannabes what customers wanted all along, and that they should have sold what they knew customers wanted all along, someone still came out with this plastic monstrosity.
Now look at Kindle. Aside from being ugly as sin, the device is almost entirely proprietary. Where the hell is the support for the common document formats? At $400 this device should have full and complete support for text, html, prc, lit, rtf and pdf. At least. Some crappy converter service or software simply doesn't cut it. Sony's Walkman devices also had converters for MP3 to ATRAC3. Look how disastrous that proved.
I really don't understand what the hell is going through Amazon's head. The device is ugly, proprietary and expensive. I don't even see e-paper as a compelling reason since Sony's Reader is significantly cheaper. And Sony seem to have gained a clue in the intervening years and are now far more standards compliant then they used to be. The Reader device supports more standards and even plays MP3s and AAC.
Amazon seem to have created the worst of all worlds. Either they should keep the device proprietary but slash the price. Or they need to open the thing up to common book formats and make it useful. It definitely needs a redesign in either event.
It's not like it's the only phone with web access.
Without E-Ink it doesn't matter if you have the content or not, your display will not be practical enough, it may have bells and whistles, colors, speed and touchscreen but your battery will run out faster and for reading comfort the resolution won't be enough. Battery life (e-ink does not consume current to maintain a drawn screen, nor does it needs any backlight) and the number of pixels in a page counts so much more than the rest for reading.
I thought the same thing when I read about this new device from Amazon. My iPhone already functions like an eBook reader when I'm reading long documents on the web and PDFs or Word Documents from the mail application. You'd think it would be rather trivial to add support for ebook's to iTunes.
This may sound kind of dumb, but here goes.
ebook readers are literally hardware. they are made with a tough plastic case, and an unbendable plastic screen that smudges easily. these materials conduct heat away from your hands quickly. some have pointy styluses.
this is not something that you want near you when taking a bath, reading in bed, or cuddled up on the sofa.
contrast that with a book, even a hardcover: the pages are soft and bendable. you can write on them, if you want. the cover materials are more like insulation than conductors so your hands stay warm. if you accidentally drop it, it won't break or shatter. some books even have a pleasant smell. it's pretty foolproof and if you do manage to destroy it, no big deal it was only $15, not $400 so you don't have that nervous i-have-to-protect-my-tech feeling and you can just enjoy the nice cuddly warm book on your cuddly warm sofa in your cuddly warm blanket.
I could see a Kindle-like device being useful. While it doen't mention RSS specifically, Kindle's product page mentions being able to read blogs. I could see a portable hardware RSS reader being handy. Catch up with some sites/blogs during the commute into work. (So long as you don't drive into work like I do. Please don't Kindle and Drive!) That said, $400 is an insane price point. Give me a similar device for under $100 and I might just bite. At $400 though, I'll nod my head and comment about how interesting it looks and then I'll fire up Google Reader within a Prism instance on my laptop.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
How are they comparing the Kindle with an iPhone?!?!?!? The iPhone does have a nice big screen, but the e-ink displays I've seen are just much nicer on the eyes despite being less pretty, and genuinely comparable to reading printed paper. They've been beaten to the punch more by Sony's Reader which is already onto version 2. I'd much rather see a comparison of how those two stack up than against the iPhone.
For me, the price of a book is essentially $4. This is $3.99 shipping plus the symbolic $.01 that most used-book dealers charge as the nominal price for used books sold on Amazon (hardcover or paperback, the same). Dealers get their profit from the difference between the shipping compensation that they get on the sale from Amazon and the actual cost of shipping the book. There are more expensive books on Amazon marketplace of course (textbook, non-obsolete computer books, ...), but these aren't going to be available from $10 on Kindle are they ? If books on Kindle were $5 for novels and about $15 for "useful" titles, that would seem more fair to me, given that the publisher does away with printing, logistics and the possibility that the book will be read by more than one person (in a library, borrowed by a friend or re-sold as a used book).
This, or the device should be at an aggressively subsidized price, made up from sales of content.
I like the device, and love the business model independently of the price point though.
i was shocked to see that the two-year-old photo of the Kindle actually turned out to the Kindle...
this ebook leads me to believe that Amazon's new ebook reader was designed by the same engineers who brought you the Pontiac Aztec and the Honda Outlook...
I don't think this is nearly the issue you're making it out to be. The iPod touch could offer e-book reading capabilities just like the iPhone, and you need no monthly contract for it. The books could be purchased (or free ones offered online for download) from iTunes on a PC or Mac, and sync'd into the memory of the iPod touch or iPhone to read later - regardless of connectivity during the time you're viewing the book.
Battery life becomes sort of a non-issue too when you think about it practically. Who is going to read a Kindle for anywhere near the 30 hours of promised battery life, non-stop? If you just recharge your device each night before going to bed, either Kindle or iPod touch/iPhone will get you through hours of reading during the day with no problem.
The Apple alternatives win out in size/portability too. Sure, the screen is smaller - but it's bright and easily readable. I have the iPhone (currently hacked with 3rd. party apps), and I've already read a book on it using a free e-reader application on it. It's quite usable, and nice because it's always with me. (I'm already going to carry my cellphone all day long, on my belt-clip, so I don't miss calls. It's nice to be able to grab it and read a few pages of a book I'm working on reading whenever I get a few free minutes here and there. I doubt I'd be lugging a book-sized, $400 Kindle with me everywhere I went too, just to accomplish the same thing.)
I do agree the Kindle could find a great niche market in colleges/universities. It'd sure beat a book-bag full of textbooks. But how durable is it going to be? Can you trust it to work reliably and not develop stuck buttons, a cracked screen, etc. etc. ?
An iPhone is *not* the form factor I want when I read a book. Never mind all the (cogent) battery and functionality issues brought up here. Who wants to sit down with an iPhone and read Bleak House? (And yes, I read Dickens :-) )
IMO, Amazon has the right idea -- a book-shaped object that doesn't require tech-savvy, computer syncs, etc. to use. My only issues with it are that a) it's ugly and b) it still feels like you're holding a technology. But the ability to keep bookmarks, search, sync periodicals, etc. are awesome. It's not an eBook, it's a portable *library*.
What I'd like to see: Kindle v2, which looks like a lovely leather-bound book. The controls are on the edge, inset by the cover, and the text shows up on both faces of the book. Only it holds up to 1000 books and all major periodicals.
What are we waiting for?!?!?!?
PSP wins hands down w/a hacked firmware and the Bookr PDF/text reader, along with built-in Wifi and Web browsing on a nicely sized screen!
oh, and a PSP is US$169 new, plays movies, mp3s, and does slideshows...
p.s. you can also use it to play some neat games
Is it just me, or is the iphone's tiny screen not conducive to reading? Does anyone really want to spend hours squinting at that tiny screen?
No, Palm beat them both to the punch 10 years ago. I have read more books on my palm than on any other medium....including paper ....I could literally carry a small library of books around with me in my pocket that could be easily accessed to read a few pages, or paragraphs or sentances when i got a minute or two. Waiting in line? Read a page...in the waiting room? Read a chapter....on a plane? Finish the book.
The only thing missing from the equation now is a distribution model. Amazon's got it.
The only problem now is that I don't know of anybody who would actually WANT one of these things. Believe it or not, not that many people read on a regular enough basis to justify dropping serious cash on a device that *ONLY* reads ebooks. While I probably would, to compare this thing to the iPod is, simply, ridiculous.
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Reading just PDFs off Google gets old fast unless you're really interested in 19th century Victorian travelogues. The best all purpose 3G-enabled multi-format ebook reader now with the best resolution is the Toshiba G900. It's a PocketPC phone with 800x400 colour screen. Because US carriers are loathe to offer any advanced phones besides Apple's, it doesn't seem to be subsidised. Google says it costs $600-$800 unlocked. There's a couple of HTC smartphones Athena, (640x480, $900!) or Universal (640x480, $200-$600 on eBay). The Universal has a lot of different OEM names. If you restrict yourself to non-3G carriers, and want to leech off WiFi, why not just get an EEE or a Nokia tablet? Cheaper, better screen than most phones, and more flexible. Hacking the ip[hone repeatedly is a bit like the entire PSP debacle. Too much time spent noodling with exploits, not enough time spent developing apps. Sure next year migth be different, but won't there still be signed apps? And you'll have missed out on real ebook reading for months and months.
Da Blog
I expect that the ebook reader of the future will look a whole lot more like the iPhone than the Kindle.
A keyboard is only used a tiny tiny fraction of the time on a ebook reader, letting one account for that much of the device's size is just bad engineering.
E-paper should look as much like normal paper as is technically possible. Normal paper does not have a bezel, and can be printed upon all the way to it's edge.
I do like the Kindle's free EVDO "whispernet" model, but I think they're way to aggressive in trying to get that money back (Amazon won't even let you load your own documents onto the Kindle without paying them a $.10 fee for each one you load, and they charge even more to access otherwise free content like blogs and public domain books from Project Gutenberg and such. And while Kindle offers "experimental basic web browsing" at the moment, they have made no commitment to continue offering access to anything but their paid download store.) If they expect me to pay $399 for one of those gadgets they're going to have to let me do a good bit more without sending them all my money and private data.
Eventually I look forward to a tablet with all of the advantages of LCD, OLED and EP displays, a cheap optional mobile broadband plan (possibly with free access to online stores), and decent local connectivity. But for now there are a lot of compromises to be made no matter which device you choose. Given my presonal mix of phone use, web browsing, music listening, video watching, reading of free online content, and reading of bought or borrowed printed content, I'm probably going to go with an iPod Touch when they release the SDK. Someone who spends less time reading things online, or more time on the phone (enough to justify buying $40 a month worth of minutes) might be better off with something else.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
Where do you get the idea that it is "almost entirely proprietary"? If you look at the technical details section, it says it supports "TXT, Audible (formats 2, 3 and 4), MP3, natively; HTML, DOC, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, MOBI, PRC through conversion".
- You can use USB if you don't want to use "Whispernet", and saving the cost and energy usage of another chipset is fine by me. You wouldn't want them to pull the EVDO feature, would you?
- PDF support in Sony Reader (the competition) is crap. The minute you go with PDF, you lose all the control the user has over presentation. I'd like to be able to munge PDFs into the thing, but only if they can be handled primarily as text, which is not trivial in the general case.
- If you bought DRM-laden MobiPocket books, go figure, you're out of luck. (Why are we arguing for *more* DRM?)
- Who needs a paper backup when you can always re-download if something happens? (Isn't the absence of paper rather the whole *point*?)
- Would you rather pay a "transfer fee" per purchase or a monthly subscription *and* the price of the reading materials? (Plus, if you want to copy your converted material, you can just use the USB interface to avoid the ten cent convenience fee.)
- They're not selling access; they're selling bandwidth. Frankly, more power to them, as that's another feature *I* don't have to pay for. My recurring cost would be zilch, and that's a good thing to me.
- Can't argue with you about the high cost, and I was trying to come up with what it looked like. It is a bit like Coleco, or perhaps like the version of the 2600 that was all black, sharp-edged plastic with not a hint of wood grain.
Anyway, looking at it from a reader's perspective, I dare say that the only prohibitively negative line item is the price. If I could get one for $200, I'd give it to myself today. (It's my birthday, after all.) For $400? I just can't justify that, especially considering the complete lack of books such as the Homecoming saga from Orson Scott Card (which is my current reading material). If I were more into best-sellers, it might look a little better.Honestly, though, if I bought one, I'd likely use it primarily with Project Gutenberg texts, as I really enjoy them, but it's unpleasant reading them on any of my current devices. The thing that really intrigues me, however, is the whole Whispernet thing. It almost looks like this is the beginning of the Star Trek PADD. Wherever you go, you've got universal wireless access to all data -- it's not nearly to that extent yet, but you can see how it's a glimmer of the future.
Ok, so the Forbes video link has a 20 second advertisement before the actual content. That's fine--I can stand that. However, the content is a lady on for about 12 seconds introducing what content will show up "after the break". Then there is ANOTHER advertisement. What the hell?
TODO - Insert Creative/Witty Signature
I saw his enthusiastic promotion of the Kindle on Pete Rose last night. However he was twitching all over the place. I would have thought he has a dyskinesia like Parkinsons. Extreme stress can increase the symptoms, i.e beingin in interviews from morning to night.
The Kindle may fail but not for the reasons you speak about.
"Profit on hardware, profit on software, even profit on content the user already owns."
Sounds a lot like the iPod and iTunes which of course were total failures...
This is about providing content people want in a very convenient fashion with a nice interface...just like the iPod and iTunes. Amazon is going one better though by offering books for significantly less than what you'd pay for their paper-based brethren.
As for the lack of PDF support...this is a non-issue since you can get free software that will convert PDF to mobi (which kindle does support). I also think the need for PDF support is way overplayed. If I bought it, it would be to read books -- not to read random white papers I downloaded from the web.
Kindle may fail but it will fail because people simply can't make the leap from paper to digital when it comes to books. There's something about holding a book in your hands that can't be beat, imho. That said, having a dictionary at the ready as well as wikipedia look-ups is very nice. When I read I usually keep a dicitionary nearby but it has to be a fat one with a huge number of entries to be worth a damn and I don't like keeping a fat book on my bed like that. The Kindle is cool but paper may still be cooler.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
Not dumb everyone thinks the same, but I've been using my laptop as a reader for so long and it works very well. I've had long discussions about this with an editor of childrens books, she really loves books too. There is no way to convince her or you that this is the shit, because it isn't.
There are issues to solve, and it's going to take a while to solve them, but what is fixed on this is that you can get lots of books fast (1 minute to download), and cheap.
But it's not free, it's a lock in. Perhaps these kind of devices will win over a greater mass to the Free Software/Against DRM movement.
... and it would make a REALLY shitty eBook reader. The screen is tiny and it takes WAY too much effort to (accurately) change pages. If I've got to read anything on a tiny screen, I'd rather use my Axim, which has a similarly-small screen but it also has higher resolution (640x480) and hardware buttons to neatly, easily jump a page (screnful) at a time.
I'm all for having multiple redundant copies of every manual ever made at my fingertips no matter where I am, and I'd love to have some handy PDFs on my iPhone for God-knows-what, but when I hear 'eBook' I think "something that I'd like to curl up with for a few hours," which definitely ain't the iPhone.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
It was easy on the eyes, and in dark situations the indiglo backlighting worked great.
Not to mention that it has SD card support.
this is utterly ridicolous. Compare reading from the iPhone's tiny display to reading from a laptop's screen. I would summarize the former as torture and the latter as mildly functional.
Now compare both to reading from paper... ah yes, now there's a ginormous quantum leap in ergonomy isn't it? If the Amazon e-paper gadged delivers on its promise, the iPhone will just never be considered a device for reading books.
Now, I know there are people with vastly better eyesight than me. Still, I would hope that they, too, aprecciate ergonomy of reading long texts.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Nokia N810 The iPhone putatively requires carrier contract, has lower resolution, and isn't a full blown browser, but the N810 is. Plus the N810 is Linux and open. Whether it is Project Gutenberg, Google Books, or whatever, the N810 is perfectly positioned as a book reader and oh-by-they-way a fully functioning computer as well. No affiliation with Nokia, just been following the latest in this area.
I worked at a small company here in Dallas, TX that made manufacturing equipment that goes into bi-stable lcd assembly lines. That was five years ago. So, as with many products of this type (Ipod), the marketing hype has caught up with the technology.
Furthermore.. I'd be surprised if there is a big market for an ebook reader these days with cheap laptops everywhere or PDAs. My Palm IIIe was able to read text files just fine with great battery life. So.. Where is the benefit to the consumer? Will Amazon distribute digital copies of their books to Kindle for a cheaper price? Will Kindle do much else besides read books?
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
My wife and I recently had a new baby, born preemie, and we ended up spending LOTS of time in the hospital. It was driving my wife crazy to not have things to read while staying with the baby. She bought an iPhone so that she could browse the web. A little while later, I bought a Sony Reader (PRS-505, the one that came out only about a month ago) which is like the Kindle in terms of how you would use it while reading.
After a week, my wife "stole" my Sony Reader, and uses it much more than the iPhone. It's much easier to read a full page of text on the 6" screen with the higher resolution. And, it's easier to use one-handed, because there are dedicated buttons to flip through pages.
Reading a website on the iPhone reminds me of the bad early days of HTML when people would put large pages inside a scrollable frame, and you were 'looking through a port hole' to see the entire page.
The other nice thing is that she could read continuously for eight hours. The iPhone, with its backlight, can't do that.
Who needs it? Here's my "dream" device: it automatically loads whatever you want from the world's libraries for free. It has the Dewey Decimal System encoded in it, and anything available for Inter-Library Loan can be downloaded in seconds. It looks a lot less dorky than this hideous design -- who did it, the guy who designed the '60s Paper-Mate pen? -- and it costs what three or four hard-cover books cost. Then I might be interested. Until then, haw haw, it's Kindling. Lose a book in an airport, you're out $10-$30. Lose this, and Jeff Bezos gets another $400. No.
you'll have an instant competitor to Kindle -- one with a touch interface and the ability to play movies and music, too.
Oh yeah, it's a phone too.
www.joshferguson.org
Ihave not seen an iPhone yet but based on my experience reading ascii books (from the Baen Free Library) on the video iPod the screen is definitely not good for books. It hurts the eyes terribly to the point that I am wondering whether there is significant UV or IR being emitted from it; when on a train if I turn it on to start reading a book my eyes immediately start to feel leaden. You can't change the fonts, you have to scroll in a circle,you can't change the fonts, etc. In comparison reading books on my Palm Clie was excellent, even without backlight, and the memory stick was useful when I had my vaio (before it fell to starbucks).
So the iPhone could become a reader but it might have a much worse screen than the amazon unit for book reading. I think you want a cool, crisp feel. I'd like to hear rather a comparison of the amazon and sony ebook units (and there was another good one mentioned).
I would love to get my magazines on the iPhone and carry them around with me for whenever I have some downtime. A iPhone version of Zinio Reader? Perhaps when the SDK comes out? Here's hoping...
A lot of the complaints about the Kindle center from it's high starting price. While Bezos can make the comparison that the iPod came out at the same price point and succeeded, there's one critical difference between the two: free import of already owned content.
That's right. Forget that iTunes had a store all set up for digital distribution, as Amazon is aiming for with their Kindle. Anyone who paid $399 for an iPod got to include their ENTIRE CD COLLECTION for free, and iTunes did all the work! It checked CDDB, put the artist's name and title right on the track, and did the encoding while you went and read a book. People who could put their thousands of CDs onto one little box weren't just intrigued, they were sold.
You cannot compare the complete conversion of an entire media collection to a device that charges you for everything you want to use it for. The iPod never would have gotten any bigger than 5 gigs, never would have had video, if it wasn't possible to take already owned media and put it into it. And there is no equivalent solution for the Kindle, at least not without some mighty legal and technological leaps that Amazon doesn't have the infrastructure or the cajones to implement.
In short: you're paying for device to buy stuff you already own, again. Apple didn't try and charge you for importing your CD collection, and that's why the iPod is the iPod and the Kindle isn't.
You can move content wherever you like, but the Kindle won't recognize or display it (unless it's an MP3).
.doc or .pdf or what not) on the Kindle in a form that it will read, you have to email them to amazon and pay $.10 each to have them converted to .azw and loaded on your Kindle.
If you want to put your own text documents (or
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
They fixed one of the problems with the Sony Reader - they have 8 times the selection of DRMed books just going in, and the Amazon store is head and shoulders better than the Sony store when it comes to usability. From the looks of it, they didn't fix the other part of the problem: free content - they'll charge you for reading a Project Gutenberg book? They should also be offering free downloads of Kindle editions when you buy the print edition - as a way of developing something analogous to ripping a CD.
Actually, with the iPod and iTunes, it was made really easy for people to rip CDs, and was advertised as such, so most people could load the content they already had. It also supported the mp3 format, used by popular P2P services so many people re-downloaded music they had in other formats (as well as other music). How are you supposed to quickly and easily load your current books onto the Kindle?
It is also interesting that Apple ran and runs the iTunes store at near break-even pricing so they only really make money on the iPod, not on music sales. This somewhat appeases the publishers who are still super worried about how much this undermines their position as gatekeepers to the point that those publishers are willing to sell at lower prices to smaller volume online stores in order to prop up potential competitors. Apple refuses to sell content directly, requiring it to come from a publisher, whereas Amazon immediately started a program to sign up writers to sell directly from them, cutting out publishers entirely.
Kindle is a blatant power play by Amazon and they're trying to use their leverage as the biggest online seller of books to get both end users and publishers to slit their own throats by permanently locking themselves into Amazon as the only gatekeeper for books. I don't think they will pull it off though, since they have not provided enough value or ease of use.
They do have a mechanism to help ensure that you don't share the books, and that is they use your credit card number that you used to purchase the book as a "password" to unlock the book. So as long as you don't mind entering your credit card number into your buddy's Palm (can't be seen otherwise), go ahead and share.
Plus you can find tools -- I think that they want to charge for them, but I have old copies -- to convert text to the eReader format, so you can take content you own and read it. OTOH, I'm sure there are other formats that have freer tools that you can read on your Palm. And there's a free reader for your PC, too.
I'll just keep reading on my Palm for the time being until Amazon figures out that they have to make their razor a lot less expensive before they can sell razor blades.
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
Not according to sections 8.2 and 8.3 of the product manual. It can directly read TXT, MOBI, PRC, Audible and play mp3s without any conversion. It can convert other formats, and the conversion is FREE. There is only a charge if you ask them to send them wirelessly to the Kindle.
I thought iPods already had Ebook functionality? Or I might be confusing it with audiobooks and another device.
However, to be honest, which would you rather have: something that costs $49 a month and looks good, fits in your pocket, doesn't need a stylus and also functions as a music player, web browser, phone, IM client, stock ticker, barometer, and a portable video player, or something that costs $1.99 a month, has a B/W display, looks like something you'd find in a government office, and needs a trolley to carry around?
While an iPhone or iPod Touch are both currently out of my reach financially, I could do what this Kindle does with something that costs £50 from a local supermarket, fits in my pocket, functions as a phone, and, while it doesn't have the best user interface ever, won't tie me into a contract where I have to pay Amazon every month to get unlimited access to the library of books.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
More likely they will want to charge full price AND make the textbook evaporate after 2 semesters.
Evaporating textbooks isn't a problem for some subjects, for example, law, soft business classes, or general education classes.
However, other subjects (such as, engineering, science, hard business classes) you use those books later in life as a reference.
I still use my engineering books from 1990-ish. And no, Wiki and the Internet just isn't good enough. You either get overly detailed IEEE/PhD papers or you get half ass journalistic explanations.
I'll also use my accounting/investment books. But the legal books were casebooks not outlines or hornbooks, and the statues are 5 years out of date.
So, we'll eventually get electronic textbooks, but they will be DRMed out the ass.
-_-
art is science made clear. -cocteau
And if Jobs lets the iPhone show PDF files then they've for the Kindle beat quite nicely. I seriously do not understand why Amazon wants me to convert things to their format. Especially since a lot of what I'd like to have in an ebook are work PDF files, chip specs, protocol spcs, etc. that NDAs forbid me from emailing to Amazon for conversion. I think that whole thing is absolutely silly.
Another point is that you can leave a book unattended for a few minutes in public and not worry about someone walking off with it (especially if it's "Bleak House":-)).
Seriously, go read the Amazon comments about Kindle. None too kind.
The reality is that paper has better battery life, looks better in sunlight, is cheaper, and is more environmentally responsible (easy to grow trees and dispose of paper - not so with toxin-laced electronics).
Advice: on VPS providers
I must have read 100+ books on my various Palms, starting with the original Palm Pilot. When I first saw the Kindle I thought, as I have with every other ebook, "No way". Too expensive, too limiting. But the more I read about it, the more I think it might have a chance. Getting books from Gutenberg, newsgroups etc is hit and miss in terms of quality. The more I think about it, the more the wireless aspect seems to me to be a great idea. Buying books easily, with guaranteed quality, is a good thing. The newspaper & magazine subscriptions are also a really great idea - I haven't subscribed to a paper for years & years, but I might consider it on this thing, and access to Wikipedia anywhere would be nifty. I still think it's too expensive, and a bit ugly, but I can tell you that it's easy to lose yourself in a good book even on a crappy little Palm screen. Here's hoping the 1st generation ones end up on Woot cheap real soon!
"Actually, with the iPod and iTunes, it was made really easy for people to rip CDs, and was advertised as such, so most people could load the content they already had."
I beg to differ. There were numerous easy to use tools available for ripping CDs long before iTunes. It was the full integration from top to bottom with purchasing albums that put it over the top. Although, it really doesn't matter. You can't "rip" a book except in the literal sense anyway and 99.99% of the population doesn't already own books in electronic form. So, they don't give a damn about that.
As for Amazon locking people in...well, that's worked pretty well for Apple. The millions of songs they sell via iTunes (with the exception of very recently) have all been DRM laden and the DRM they use is even proprietary. Apple also strong-arms the record companies. Amazon DOES, in fact, work with publishers (look at the damn catalog if you don't believe me). They offer direct publishing to authors as well but that's mostly to appeal to the self-published at this point. I don't see major authors switching to this model anytime soon. Even if they do, why do I give a damn about the publishers? If their business model is dead, then that's just too damn bad.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
Apples versus Potatoes, the eternal struggle.
E-book readers are cool, electronic paper is cool. However the kindle is ugly. It should not have a border, but it does.
Between the edge of the e-paper and edge of the kindle there is a HUGE amount of space. That is UGLY. Thick a** frames MAY be ok on wall paintings
I'll take an OLPC thank you very much. Not only would an XO be cuter, its also probably more cuddly...
Seriously, open software, excellent resolution and readability (in and out of sun) and battery life. From the looks of this 80's calculator the XO is probably smaller too.
"how can they call it a MINE if everything here is THEIRS?!?!" -Straight Jacket
In fact, the problem with the Kindle is worse - leave it unattended for a few minutes, and you'll find someone's dumped theirs on you as well.
Really. I was hoping to replace my Ipaq 1410, which i've had now for about 4 years (and read hundreds of ebooks on), and my cellphone, with something that does both in slick style. Unfortunately the iPhone is awful for ebook reading. What it's missing imo is a side button, something so i can hold the phone and read all with one hand (the side button would be for page changing). Oh, and 'legitimate' ebook reading software i suppose.
flat fee access to Wikipedia from anywhere where there's EVDO
Just get a $30/month Sprint SERO plan with smartphone and you have voice and unlimited data at EVDO rates + free roaming on Verizon's network without Verizon's insane overage charges. I have one and it works very well. I am actually thinking that eventually, if the iphone gets hacked enough to support bluetooth modem tethering easily, that I might get one without a plan and tether the Sprint phone to the iphone to use it as its data source.
Da Blog
I believe that the Kindle allows for annotation by the reader. I don't know if it's written (with a stylus) or typed, but it's definitely one of the features that I think they got right.
Can anyone with experience with either of these devices remark on their functionality as an eBook reader?
In particular, I understood the OLPC to have some sort of eInk like ability in the screen. Given the option of paying $400 to get a small laptop that can run Linux and read eBooks plus some kid in a third world country getting another one, or paying $400 dollars for a device with some subset of the functionality of an XO without any charitable contribution built in, why should I choose the Kindle (or sony ebook reader, etc)?
They've beaten the cinemas because you can watch a movie on the tiny iPhone screen!
Can someone please tag this slashdot story as "wrong". Its foolish to think that anything based on LCD technology will become the reading device of choice. We've all tried to read novels on our handhelds back in the heyday of the palm and handsprings and discovered that the experience sucked.
I've now read 2 or 3 books using a Sony e-Reader and the iRex Illiad, and it works so much better than anything I've seen. There is no reason to believe that a LCD-based cell phone is any threat to this new e-Ink technology. Anyone who would post such nonsense is clearing grasping for something to writeup for the viewers.
I love reading documents on my iPhone. I can email PDFs to myself, then read them in landscape mode. The resolution is better than anything I've seen before. I can zoom in to the column's width and flick down the page to scroll, reading about a paragraph or two at a time, it feels very natural. The only thing lacking is a convenient way to jump around long, multipage documents.
So as long as you don't mind either emailing all your private data to amazon, or reading it as unformatted plain
That's not as bad as I'd imagined, but I'm still somewhat unimpressed.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
Apple would have to come out with an iPod touch or iPhone with a larger screen. This is rumored to be in the works. So hardware wise Apple could compete but not on content. The idea that Google has all these clasic texts does not matter much. People don't read those BY DEFINITION they read "best sellers" and this is what Amazon has. Googel has ten bazillion "non-sellers" that people don't read.
If Apple wanted this market they could do it but they'd have to get contet from the publishers just like Amazon did. And what's to stop Anazon from getting Google's ten bazillion "non-sellers". Google offers this to anyone who wants it, you, me or Apple.
The problem for Apple and Amazon is that the technology is not really there yet. The e-paper screens are to slow the LCD screens are not as good a paper yet.
The compelling value proposition for the end-consumer would be in technical books, reference books and documents, such as the Universal Building Code books which are updated periodically, could be used quite often in the field, and are massive. (My parents are in the construction business, and they have a closet full of books which they have to refer to periodically that are otherwise a waste of space.)
Having all of these technical references (which are dated material and tend to go out of date about a half-dozen years after being first published) in a portable and convenient format would be a god-send to those who for business reasons have to refer to these documents and may wish to be able to use them in the field where there isn't even working electricity much less an internet connection.
I can think of literally dozens of different categories of technical reference books which contain dated material, which are used in a professional capacity, are more often referenced than read, and the convenience of having them on hand in your backpack rather than consuming a couple of dozen feet on a bookshelf would be a massive win.
I'd actually buy one except that I'm into reading technical books and it looks like Amazon hasn't made enough of them available for the Kindle. One of my reasons is that I think over time it costs less. Technical books are expensive to replace (they cost more and once they go out of print they are easily over $100.) With Kindle, Amazon keeps all your books on their server, so you can always download them again free of charge. Also it would be cool to carry a Kindle to work and have my entire library of reference books right there without having to lug around a briefcase. But like I said, until they heavily increase the number of books available for Kindle, I won't spend the money for it.
the iTablet or Mac Tablet, whatever they call it, will have a bigger screen than the iPhone and will be better for web browsing than either the iPhone or Kindle.
-- Boycott Shell
I read exclusively on my PDA. I have for many years now, as I find it more convenient than carrying around books, and at least on my Clie, the screen is more than acceptable. In fact, since I mostly read at night, the fact that it provides it's own light is a big win, as I don't have to use external lamps, possibly keeping others awake. Battery life is decent.
I have no problem with the cost of this device if it lives up to it's claims, but if it only handles locked down formats, there is no way I would buy one. It sucks that nobody seems interested in producing something useful, one that actually makes sense. For the cost of the Kindle, it really shouldn't need to be subsidized by sales of DRM content.
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
(Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)
I am reading books with the iPod touch (same display, hard- and software as the iPhone) using books.app and it works fine. The screen is small, but not too small. No need for using EDGE (you can install quite a few books in 8-16 GB of flash), the bookmarks are fine and it's a great reading experience overall. The iPhone MAY one day compete with these other technologies, but to insist right now that it's everything and a bag of chips is just plain naive. Yes, this day will be the one when Apple lets you install software (like eBook readers) on the frigging things without having to hack them first.
The music industry courted by Apple by a slice of the online pie, vs their old slice of none, agreed to try this iTunes experiment, and it was a success. Before iTunes, there was Napster and the rest to prove that people were copying songs around online. So it was obvious to the music industry there was a pie they were missing out on.
The book publishing industry has been seeming rather left out from copyright violations on the internet, save for the high profile Harry Potter book leak, which came out the weekend before the book was released from stores. A quick search on thepiratebay indicates there are ebooks out there to be found. Napster's successors being able to search for different types of media, ebooks included, aren't as obvious to the casual internet user, nor is the process of scanning it in as trivial as ripping a cd.
The internet, rife with music copying, does not have as much copying of books online, so why would book publishers agree to let Apple sell books online? Baen aside, book publishers, like the record companies, will have to be dragged, kicking and screaming into the future. Amazon has the leverage to get licensing for ebook versions, especially on long-tail books not widely carried in retail stores. Which means Amazon will have lower prices if given competition, which will make them that much more palatable to customers.
I would welcome Apple selling ebooks online, and while the iPhone is far from perfect for reading books, it is a step in the right direction compared to a desktop, portability. Of course, I doubt Apple will, simply because reading isn't glamorous unless the librarian is a slim brunette with glasses, and then it still isn't reading that is glamorous.
With really popular books, like Harry Potter, there are enthusiast OCR-teams -- sort of a book equivalent of warez cracking teams -- that take pride in getting the book into digital form within the 24 hours of the book's release.
.pdf's and other formats.
If you look hard enough (and, really, it's not that hard), you can find all sorts of eBooks that have been DRM-busted and/or have been scanned in and turned into
I have a Sony Reader... While I mostly have legitimate content (paid or free no-longer-copyrighted works), I certainly have "sampled" other books... (And, interestingly, like in the argument about digital music, reading an eBook has actually resulted in some actual purchases of the 'sampled' book...)
* (I used to work at a used-CD store when CD-ripping started to become popular... There used to be a saying: "buy it, rip it, ship it".)
Contrast that with books. There's no easy way for me to transfer the 200-odd books Delicious Library tells me I have to one of these devices. They're a mix of hardcover and paperback, new and used, and I'd be comfortable wagering that they average out to costing around $10 each, and I'm not about to throw that investment away for a digital reader that, just to get the reader, costs as much as 40 books. There's no way for me to easily transfer The Atlantic and The New Yorker to it whenever a new issue comes out. I don't want to read books on my computer screen, even though I have a nice shiny aluminum iMac with a monitor nicer than 90% of those used by people in the industrial wirkd on my desk, so I haven't bothered becoming a digital ruffian and downloading books from p2p or Bittorrent networks, assuming they are even available. Amazon isn't going to have every book I want available, and every book I want that I can't find and have to buy or check out of the library represents another reason not to use their system. This goes back to the digital ruffian issue that made mp3 players so appealing.
If I'm still reading thirty years from now, I probably won't be doing it on dead pages of ground up trees. The question is how the transition will happen. Maybe someone will come along and give me a free e-book of every book I already have. Maybe the piracy networks will develop, although this seems unlikely given the number of books out there and the difficulty of converting them from bound paper to digital files. Or maybe environmental problems will make printing and shipping books so cost ineffective that we'll end up converting to these devices for reasons other than those I'm imagining. Whatever the shift, I don't see it happening until someone solves these problems.
Apple would have to come out with an iPod touch or iPhone with a larger screen.
Only if they believed in the fantasy that you just need a good enough display and you'll finally get the eBook-reader market to take off.
It ain't so. What's keeping the eBook-reader market from "taking off" is that a dedicated reader with a big high-quality screen is completely irrelevant. There is no "eBook-reader market" at all. There's no demand for a digital device that's the size and shape of a book, for reading novels on. There's very little demand for any kind of expensive dedicated devices, for that matter. What categories have really taken off?
Cameras.
Music players.
Cellphones.
Handheld games.
GPS/mapping devices.
PDAs.
General purpose handhelds.
Combinations of the above.
And all the successful ones are small enough to easily fit in a pocket or a purse. Bigger handhelds, like the Newton and notebook replacement devices, are gone. I can't imagine any device that's bigger than something like an iPaq getting much traction.
And once you remove the big screen, why should your eBook reader be a separate device? Books don't take up much space, and you don't need to store that many... the 8M in my Clie is plenty big enough for more books than I can comfortably scroll through already, and reading a book takes long enough that you really don't need storage for more than a handful. Once you get even a 2" screen, you've got enough text on the page to comfortably read.
The eBook market is currently doing OK, but it's stagnating, there's enough eBooks published to let me keep an unread one on hand for when I'm stick in a queue or a waiting room, but what's keeping it from taking off is the idea that DRM is needed, and the halo effect from the ongoing failure of dedicated readers.
Put out eBooks in an open unprotected format for paperback-like prices (ie, half the 10 bucks that Kindle books cost), with readers for the larger-screen cellphones, the PSP and other handhelds, PalmOS, Pocket PC, and such music players as have 2" or better screens. Then watch the market take off. I suggest an HTML-like format like Mobipocket's, rather than one that's trying to emulate the printed page like Microsoft's or Adobe's: Fictionwise and Baen make their books available in at least HTML, PDF, Palm Reader, Mobibook, and Microsoft Reader.
How is it for reading, say, War and Peace for several hours at a stretch?
Best Slashdot Co
I know people who installed iTunes solely for the purpose of ripping their CD collection, because that process was too hard with the software that came with their mp3 player. Heck, two people came over to my place to rip their collection on my mac, because they could not figure out how on their own system. "Easy to use" is relative, and I'm not sure you're considering it as it applies to the general populace instead of geeks.
It was the full integration from top to bottom with purchasing albums that put it over the top.It was the full experience, but not so much for purchasing. Last time I saw a survey something like 1.5% of music on the average iPod was purchased from any online store, with the rest being ripped CDs and P2P downloads.
You can't "rip" a book except in the literal sense anyway and 99.99% of the population doesn't already own books in electronic form. So, they don't give a damn about that.People had collections of CDs and were using portable CD players. Almost no one owned an mp3 player when the iPod premiered. The iPod was a success because it let people easily move that music onto the iPod without repurchasing everything. Some ripped it and some just snagged it from P2P networks. People do give a damn about repurchasing all their books, although it is questionable if anyone will have a solution. One possibility is if the reader hardware becomes good enough, P2P networks will start carrying books. Another, is this will cause people to be more price conscious. If they're not just buying new music, but repurchasing their entire library, they will not be willing to pay more than the cost of a used version of that book for old titles.
As for Amazon locking people in...well, that's worked pretty well for Apple.Ahh, but as I stated, Apple did everything possible to be non-threatening to the existing publishers who control all the legacy content. Amazon is not being non-threatening at all, directly competing with them as well as trying to get them to cooperate. As for Apple's lock-in, in case you hadn't noticed they're now selling DRM-free content at the same price they were selling DRM'd content. In truth, Apple doesn't care about control of the publishing, they just want it as cheap and easy as possible to sell more hardware.
Amazon DOES, in fact, work with publishers (look at the damn catalog if you don't believe me).Of course they do, I never claimed otherwise. The difference is Apple refused offers to publish directly through them, strictly requiring a publisher of music to offer it to them. Amazon on the other hand has initiated a program to lure writers away from existing publishers and cut that publisher out of future profits. If it works, it will mean a lot more money for Amazon, but I doubt it will work unless Amazon has a lot more leverage than I think they do.
Even if they do, why do I give a damn about the publishers? If their business model is dead, then that's just too damn bad.You don't have to give a damn about publishers, but surely you recognize that publishers give a damn about themselves and their profits? It speaks to whether or not the publishers will continue to cooperate with Amazon and if the device will be successful. A reason to care is because instead of having a loose, fairly weak cartel of publishers with room for independents, if ebooks take off, and Amazon grabs a big chunk of the market with DRM'd ebooks, that will no longer be the case and there will be one major publisher that can control prices, and extort more money via DRM, for example, by switching DRM schemes when moving to a new version of the device forcing you to buy all your content yet again once your existing reader dies. A little foresight can go a long way towards avoiding this crap.
Just as counter-point, for years I read books, including most of the Baen library, on a HP iPaq PDA in true uber-geek fashion. I think I had maybe a hundred titles on a device I could slip into a jacket pocket. The screen, while not great, was eminently readable due to the backlighting, high contrast, and Microsoft Reader's sub-pixel LCD addressing.
All-in-all, it was just a little paperback on which you turned pages a bit more often.
Move into the future, and we have the iPhone, with a screen resolution that leaves the iPaq's in the dust. While the iPhone may not be the perfect book reader, it has two MAJOR advantages over a Kindle.
First, the Kindle means I have to carry and manage yet another device, and charger, and cables, and who knows what else. Second, and related to the first, no matter what I'm carrying I ALWAYS have my iPhone with me.
When Apple releases the iPhone SDK I strongly suspect that Amazon will port the Kindle reader to it. They are trying to expand the ebook market, after all. And when it happens I'll probably buy a few.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
I read "War and Peace" on a Clie and "Ana Karenina" on a Palm III. You get used to it.
True, I'd much rather read on an eInk screen, but reading in an LCD is certainly doable.
The cake is a pie
Oddly enough, I found my Clie perfect for reading in bed as it had its own light, so I could read when my wife was asleep.
I find it amusing that the first thing that gets brought up is the bath...do people really read in the bath? Do people really take baths anymore?
The cake is a pie
I'm not going to buy a Kindle. It's too expensive, it's ugly, it's big--and a lot of the space is wasted by stuff that isn't screen. And it doesn't sound like it has a backlight, which to me is one of the key advantages of a book reader--the ability to read in low light.
On the other hand, I like the idea. If I could download Kindle books to my iPhone from Amazon, I probably would do it, even though the iPod's screen is a bit small for a book reader, because I already have an iPhone, I always have it with with me, I can read it in the dark, and it has a touch interface (which is really how I'd like to flip pages). What I'd really like would be something about the size of a small paperback book (not a trade) that is all screen, with an iPod-like touch interface. I like the idea of a low-energy screen to extend battery life, but it should have a built-in light for reading in the dark.
Web browsers and PDF readers are not really good 'book readers', it's nice to 'page' rather than 'scroll'.
Cell phones seem to make fine eBook readers, mainly because you are already carrying one. I've not found _Harry Potter_ but you can get free PD and CCL books at http://www.booksinmyphone.com/.
You're right, it's not an issue. I have an ebook reader on my iphone thanks to jailbreaking it, and was able to read a pdf book on it during a trip this last week quite easily. The font rendering made it easy to read, there were nav buttons in the ebook reader, it resumed in the place I left off at, and the touch screen made going up and down chapters a breeze. I was also able to listen to my music properly, instead of in the half baked random play only manner that The Kindle uses.
If I could download Kindle books to my iPhone from Amazon
Kindle books are just Mobipocket files. You can already read these on Windows Mobile, Palm, Symbian and Blackberry phones. Plus a bunch of other hardware readers. Maybe *if* Apple finally gets around to releasing an SDK that doesn't suck and *if* Apple "blesses" a Mobipocket application for it to be signed then you will get your wish. However, Apple's never shown much enthusiasm for approving DRM content on its devices that isn't through iTunes or Apple directly. So I have my doubts that this will happen easily without some hardcore backroom dealing.
Da Blog
I have an iPlod Touche (same size as an iPhone), as an eBook, it's too small. I would consider a paperback size eBook as the minimum. Personally A4 would be nice, or a twin A5 size?
There was an unknown error in the submission.
...several years ago, there was a credible media report that Apple were/are buying up the rights to a large number of books. Further, the multitouch interface used by the iPhone and iPod Touch would lend itself perfectly to an 'eBook'. No need to use external buttons like the Kindle, simply drag your fingers across the screen to turn the page, or pinch your fingers to zoom in. Not to mention using iTunes to make a purchase and download it. Oh, and most importantly, it won't be the iPhone that allows all this, but an all new device under development by Apple. Where's the iBook laptop? No where. But the trademark still exists. Go figure...
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
As soon as I can go to my library and check any book out in digital for that they have on their shelf.
Hell, I would pay for a netflix model! Let me rent books for 9.99 a month, read periodicals, etc. They can limit the number at one time, but at least I can go through books I want to read and not buy. There are many old books which cost $40+ in hard cover as they are out of print (hell some cost over $100 - and even paperbacks might not be cheap)
The real problem I see is that they want nearly as much as it cost to buy a paperback. Get the price down to $1.99 per current paperback release ($4.99 for hardback only releases - after all they will eventually go PB if you wait long enough) and I will eat them up like I do music on iTunes
So there are two different models that would get me in the game
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
my question is exactly what formats does it read.. it has an SD slot to expand storage - but can i just copy over my existing eBooks or stuff from random projectes to the sd card and read it that way?
while i find the instant download from amazon very very very nice - and i would love to buy and use one and to support this - i do NOT want to have to rebuy my current 300+ book lib to be able to read them on this thing.
also the price is understandable but..
100 = i would already own one
200 = i would have grumbled and ordered it tommarow
300 = i would have looked more in to it and even the chance it would work right buy it
400 = i am going to have to give it time and have all my questions answered befor i think about buying it..
they need to work on the price point if they want to get these things out there.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Apple partnered with Audible
Audible was around before Apple, and had what passed then for a market-lock on DRM'd spoken audio... multiple platforms and huge back catalogue of content. It's simply too big a competitor to go against. Apple also partnered with Creative to use MusicMatch (now with Yahoo) when the Windows ipod launched. But then it dropped MusicMatch when it had its own solution. As regards DRM "NIH", it's not about where it was made, it's about control. You really think Apple wants anyone deploying DRM within "its" market? Apple wasn't content to just licence FairPlay for itunes, it bought it, brought it in-house, and prevented it from being licenced to any other companies. Apple even blocked Real from selling its own reverse-engineered FairPlay tracks that were higher quality than what was available from ITMS at that time. Or look at it another way - for years the ipod shipped with PortalPlayer chipsets which came with a Windows Media SDK. Implementing PlaysForSure would have been trivial, if Apple had not deleted those drivers from the firmware. There was simply no way Apple was going to allow a bunch of companies to deploy DRM files within its hardware channel without going through ITMS.
Da Blog
Can you imagine having every O'Reilly book ever made on the thing, and the ability to do full text search/grep capability through your entire library of technical books?
I pretty much do that on my Windows phone right now (complete with annoyance of having four or five different ebook formats). It's okay. But you know what it has that beats the Kindle though? I can push a button and speak to people as well. Unless someone hacks the Kindle to do VOIP, it's a goner.
Da Blog
The iPod handles proprietary free formats (MP3, AAC)
The iPhone handles the same proprietary free formats.
The only insidious proprietary formats on recent music players have been Sony's ATRAC and Microsoft's Windows Mobile, and thank god both have been neutralized by the iPod
Rise of the iTunes Killers Myth
Apple had never competed in audio books against Audible, so it partnered with it to use its DRM in that field
That's exactly why now, today's much stronger Apple is unlikely to promote Amazon's DRM when it could use its own. Apple traditionally now doesn't enter a market until its quite mature and can promise a good ROI. I am not privy to whatever spreadsheets Apple's managers present to their VPs to get a go-ahead, but I think it comes down to whether the ebook market is now sufficiently large enough, and growing quickly enough, to satisfy an investment here. Given that this market has been moribund for years, until Amazon kicked off this latest round I'd have thought that a non-starter. However, following the Newsweek article Amazon seems to have got some traction. There is of course a huge bitorrent scene in scanned, DRM-stripped, and OCR'd ebooks. If Kindle did sell reasonably well. and had homebrew software, and could read these, and if some publishers decided to sue Amazon (or another ebook manufacturer) then maybe we'd see more action. It would be like the RIAA kicking off the MP3 market with a bang by going after the Diamond Rio. That kind of publicity might compel Apple to enter the market.
The rest of your article is something about dissing hardware standardisation, mistrusting Microsoft yet quoting the Gospel of Steve and other stuff which I am not going to get into here. I am not making value judgements about the worth of being under the yoke of either Apple or Microsoft DRM. I simply stated why I felt Apple made certain decisions in the past, and why I think it will make certain different decisions in the future regarding its DRM partners.
I also don't understand your decision to insert adverts for only very vaguely relevant articles that are not on this website after each of your responses.
Da Blog
1) Device: way too expensive for a f... ugly device (right out of the late 1980's...). How pays for designers??? 2) e-Books: why are ebooks only a minor discount over the price of a paperback??? They are saving on: a) printing, b) stocking, c) distribution, d) over- and under-printing, etc, etc. E-books should be 10 times cheaper than a printed version given the smaller cost. 3) DRM: again related to the price of the e-books: if the ebook cost was 10 times less than a regular book I'd be willing to get a drm-d file that: a) cannot be shared even with family members (can I put the same e-book in my wife's reader, I guess not); b) cannot be lended to a friend; c) cannot be donated to my kid's school or to the public library; etc, etc. Again, given the minimal discount, I see no point in it. 4) How am I going to decorate my home without a nice set of books on the shelves? (I like them!). 5) Would you really like amazon to hold a virtual monopoly on what you read and to let them know ALL of your reading habits??? 6) PDF anyone? 7) The only advantages I see (and they are quite nice, but not sufficient at this point): a) portability (last year I spent a lot of time traveling and would have loved to be able to carry 20 books with me...); and b) the opportunity to have essentially all your books with you all the time and be able to search them. That is really nice and this may give e-books a chance. Well. I am not jumping on this device quite yet... (I do have a hacked iphone, though, love it!).
I tried downloading an e-book of Ender's Game, but all it displayed was "COVER YOUR BUTT. BERNARD IS WATCHING. --GOD"
1) Device: way too expensive for a f... ugly device (right out of the late 1980's...). How pays for designers???
2) e-Books: why are ebooks only a minor discount over the price of a paperback??? They are saving on: a) printing, b) stocking, c) distribution, d) over- and under-printing, etc, etc. E-books should be 10 times cheaper than a printed version given the smaller cost.
3) DRM: again related to the price of the e-books: if the ebook cost was 10 times less than a regular book I'd be willing to get a drm-d file that: a) cannot be shared even with family members (can I put the same e-book in my wife's reader, I guess not); b) cannot be lended to a friend; c) cannot be donated to my kid's school or to the public library; etc, etc. Again, given the minimal discount, I see no point in it.
4) How am I going to decorate my home without a nice set of books on the shelves? (I like them!).
5) Would you really like amazon to hold a virtual monopoly on what you read and to let them know ALL of your reading habits???
6) PDF anyone?
7) The only advantages I see (and they are quite nice, but not sufficient at this point): a) portability (last year I spent a lot of time traveling and would have loved to be able to carry 20 books with me...); and b) the opportunity to have essentially all your books with you all the time and be able to search them. That is really nice and this may give e-books a chance.
Well. I am not jumping on this device quite yet... (I do have a hacked iphone, though, love it!).
My wife has a Sony e-book reader and prefers it over paper books because she doesn't have to hold it open (bending the spine of the book) as she reads. With small paperback books this can be a pain as they're usually tightly bound and don't hold themselves open. With larger books holding the book with one hand can be tiring. You also don't have to keep moving your fingers out of the way of the text.
Another plus is the ability to enlarge and shrink the font on the e-book, which can enhance readability.
So, she likes curling up on the couch with the e-book much better.
We initially bought it because it's a great way to go through all of the books on Project Gutenberg, so the reader will easily pay for itself over its lifetime. Yeah, yeah, I know the books are free from the library, but you do have to get to the library to get them.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
How are you supposed to quickly and easily load your current books onto the Kindle?
If it's a Mobipocket device then there's already convertors. PRC is the Mobi format and it's pretty widely used for non-DRM stuff. I have much of the Gutenberg ebooks in PRC for my phone. If ebooks ever take off then there's literally tens of thousands of ebooks on the torrents in every format from simple PDF/DJVu scans to various OCR captures. I'd say ebooks are about where mp3s were circa-1995 or so, hardware wise, before the HanGo and Rio came along and gave people a reason to put them on handhelds, and software distribution-wise about where mp3s were in 1999.
Da Blog
Via Daring Fireball, here's Mark Pilgrim on The Future of Reading. John Gruber of Daring Fireball has raised some questions about the DRM in Kindle ebooks (he loathes it): it's not possible to share books, even with other Kindle owners.
But it has been cloned.
So much to say about someone who tried to game Digg.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Kindle costs as much as an OLPC. (That is, as much as getting one in your hands through the give-one-get-one program.)
... well, I guess I am.
The OLPC (in monochrome mode) has a 7.5" 900x1200 display.
The OLPC is also a (tiny, low-power) laptop computer capable of reading your average PDF (and DjVu) file, plus it has a video camera and an SD slot. It can sit in front of you propped up on its base, or it can be held book like in tablet mode. (A read-only tablet, I realize.)
I know they're not in "the same category" -- only, what category do you mean? For me, for many purposes, they *are* in the same category, except the XO seems to win in all categories except pure battery life, and really, considering how small the XO's power adapter is, and that I have an inverter in my car, this does not bother me much. The XO is also a bit bigger, but they'er both in "small backpack" range, anyhow, not in pocket-sized.
(I'd rather be able to purchase some spare XO batteries, though -- anyone know where that will be likely?)
I wonder if Quanta's under an agreement not to make a run of XOs in deepest black or blandest putty and sell them as "featureful eBook readers."
I suspect I'm missing something cool abuot Kindle which throws off this comparison, but
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I have been reading books for years on my smartphones, and I find it very comfortable - especially in bed at night, where the small size & weight and backlit screen are huge advantages. Turning pages is trivial with a scrollwheel, and more than makes up for the smaller page size. It's searchable, and never loses my place. It's also great to have a small library with you at all times. 10 minutes waiting for the bus? Read a few pages. My wife tried it, and now she reads most of her books on her E65 too.
That said, I recognise that reading LCDs is not for everyone - and this is the Kindle's advantage (only advantage IMHO). The display is gorgeous, and much more familiar to traditional book readers. It'll bring new blood into the ebook market, but I don't think ebooks will truly take off until phones have e-ink screens (or equivalent), and we get the best of both worlds.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
There's already an ebook application (books.app) for the iPhone/iPod Touch and if you've used jailbreak, you probably already know about it.
In terms of how it looks, the text is incredibly smooth even at small sizes and using the touch interface makes it easy to move forward in the book. For someone who read a few books on my old Palm Vx, this is the perfect size and shape for a reader.
Books, including most of the Gutenberg collection, formatted specifically for the iPhone can already be found at manybooks.
And it includes a backlight. For me, one of the key advantages of an ebook is not worrying about the light source and therefore being able to read in places where the light isn't good or when the person next to you in bed is trying to sleep. I'll never understand why the various e-paper devices don't have some sort of integrated lighting.
I don't want to turn this into a flamewar (I own a WM6 phone, but I like the iPhone too), but I do need to point out a few errors in the above (which strikes me as rather biased).
It ain't sexy, but it's very functional. It has an open SDK and countless third-party apps, supports copy/paste, records video, sends MMSs, and has a LOT of little usability touches added over the years (e.g. counting SMS characters) that I'm sure the iPhone will eventually get. The sheer usefulness of my WM phone (and apps) is what I'd miss most if I swapped it for an iPhone, no joke. I have a 4GB MicroSD card always installed (no juggling), and 8GB is becoming available. If I want to "juggle", I can have far more storage than the iPhone. No question that the iPhone's media handling is sexier and more intuitive, but OTOH I can and do wirelessly stream mp3s from an 80GB DNLA server store (or from iTunes) and Divx shows from a 300GB SMB share - can the iPhone's media apps manage that? WM6 can (and third party clients could). And it can delete multiple emails at once too. That'd be nice, but it's really just a carrier thing. There's no reason at all my carrier couldn't MMS me my voicemails for the same result. They just don't want to. Credit to Apple for persuading AT&T. Incorrect. Everything can be done via screen taps, except powering up/down. The buttons are there for convenience (they're easier to use one-handed, or in the dark). It can be used with an onscreen keyboard, with handwriting recognition, with Jot/Graffiti-style characters AND a slide-out keyboard (which, bulk aside, is significantly faster and more accurate than the iPhone's onscreen keyboard, good as it is). I have and use the WM-native Google Maps app which is almost identical to the iPhone version. Yeah, it's nice to have a choice about that. Riiight. I don't need to comment on that.Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I wouldn't think that it's an issue only because they are totally separate things. Even if you could read a book on an iPhone not many people would. It's not that it's terrible, it's just that you can read it more comfortably using a different medium. I've read several books on my PDA and it's easy enough to do day to day. But at the end of the day my eyes are more comfortable with something like Sony's Reader.
This is where the comparison goes horribly wrong. The iPhone's very existence(and to some extent the iTouch) is meant to do many things, most of which is media centric. What I want from a eBook, is almost completely opposite. I don't want it to have flashy graphics, output sound or require me to anything fancy to just start reading. And I want to not charge it for months at a time. And last but not least, I want it to have a clear picture that I can read for hours and hours without a hint of eyestrain. I want it to be a freakin book but in electronic format. This is where Sony got it right. All these things can be found in Sony's Reader but not the iPhone and that's the way they should be. They are separate types of devices and trying to combine these into something "cooler" just makes my brain hurt.
A better comparison would be vs XO. XO has a better sun-light performance, comes at $400, better battery performance in blank&white mode, and can give you a bit of good karma, as you are giving away one to needy child. It can also do much more than what Kindle can do.
Big companies make these mistakes from time to time. They salivate over a goal. They see a picture of what they want, and they'll engage MILLIONS of dollars to attain the dream.
Sadly, while obsessing on what the company wanted, it never did a reality check, "Does this deliver the dream of the consumer?" -- was never asked.
We saw this with the CueCat, DIVX, and the Zune. Amazon got suckered into paying some third party to create this device with the hope that bunches of people will pay them $9.99 for books. That isn't any dream I've had in the past 30 years.
It solves several pain-points for the company (shipping, printing, etc.), but not much for the reader willing to shop used book stores.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I do want one. However, I am not prepared to shell out 4 Bills for it. Thing is, I do not want it to fail. This device is what we have all dreamed of when the web was starting. Having your papers delivered electronically, Blogs updated on the fly, No Service fees, access to HUGE Amazon library as well as AudioBooks, (Shame about the pdfs though), I wish them all the best and cannot wait for the cost reduction process to move forward. I only wish I could afford to help support the effort.
Seems like I could put together the hardware minus the EVDO and EInk, and battery life and amazon library, blog and newspaper subscription. Well maybe it would be nothing like it, would it. Using wifi and and a small arm and a 5.7inch screen I have an ereader here on my desk. Unfortunately it is not as comfortable to read. I looked into the Eink developer kits but thet are prohibitively expensive for a one man engineering team. Good to see somebody is using it though.
Is it wrong that I was totally against it until I watched Neal Gaiman go on about it? Yeah probably. But the points made in the videos are valid.
Looking at the comments on the Kindle Site, I think Jeff Bezos is well aware of our concerns, Price and no PDF support seem to be biggest complaints and I agree. Both are easily solved though. Really its not as ugly as it appears in close ups pictures.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
I read Harry Potter on a P800. In comparison, the iPhone screen is pure luxury. Yes, it's absolutely possible to read books on the iPhone. It's even pleasurable: the iPhone's typography and sharpness beats every other portable device I've ever seen. A "real" e-Book reader will have advantages, but the iPhone absolutely can be an alternative.
There already are e-Book reader apps for hacked iPhones; they work perfectly well, too.
Mac OS X Leopard (includes Alex) + iTunes == iPhone that reads books to you.
The article is outdated and was wrong even when it came out. It was wrong because auto-checking mail was always optional. It's outdated because roaming can be disabled in current firmware versions.
Except for the fact that you actually can.
Why make up reasons for disliking the iPhone when there are real reasons you could use?
Then you're not in the target audience of the phone. It's not for everyone.
The iPhone looks nice but doesn't give me anything I didn't already have in terms of functionality. Now if you give me a nice-looking shiny product with features I don't have then you might have a winner!I see two issues here:
Obviously, you do not understand why people would want to buy an iPhone. That's okay: there are a lot of phone that give exactly what you want from a phone. The iPhone is not among them.
What the iPhone offers is not more features. It's also no "teh shiny." What the iPhone offers is the features most people use most of the time, in an UI that makes these features easy to use. Having owned such phones as the P800, the Treo 650 and the P990i, I can see why the iPhone is such a success: These phones offered a ton of features, but made the features I actually wanted to use hard to use and slow. Entering an appointment into the P990i took almost 20 taps with the stylus. Even stopping a phone call could lead to errors, because if the other person stopped the call before you did, tapping the "hang up" button would instead call somebody from the fast call list. In short, using these phones was an annoying experience, and I hardly ever used the "advanced" features, anyway.
The iPhone is the first smart phone I actually like. It does what I want in an elegant way. It doesn't fill the UI with useless features. Since my iPhone is unlocked, I can even install all kinds of games, e-Book readers and other stuff, and I can use my iPhone with local carriers.
It's not the marketing department. It's the fact that the iPod (as well as the iPhone) combines
- the features people actually want
- in a small case
- with an UI that actually works
Pre-iPod, no MP3 player offered that. Pre-iPhone, few phones did.Its look has been cloned. Believe it or not, the look isn't what makes the iPhone.
I'd mod you up if I could. Thanks :-)
Don't you cell phone junkies realize that the rest of us will not even take a bribe to view any media at all on the tiny screen of a cell phone? It just won't happen. This whole article is based on the erroneous and naive assumption that no one would have a huge fucking problem with a tiny fucking screen.
I call FUD.
It's easy to read ebooks on the N800 using FBReader, which is open source and free. Fiddling? Er, do you mean pressing the nice big round button in the center of the D-pad to turn pages?
At 800x480, the screen resolution is perfectly clear and being backlit has a big advantage over e-ink: I can read at night. Disadvantage: it's poor in direct sunlight. The next gen Nokia device claims to be better.
There are two further advantages, depending on your tastes and eyesight. In FBReader, background and font colors are selectable -- for me this is easily preferable to staring at the grey Etch-a-Sketch setting of an e-ink screen. Further, there is none of the hideous redraw flashing that makes e-ink seem less like a contemporary than a retro technology.
No, the real sticking point is DRM. It's circumventable and that *is* fiddly. But there isn't a soul on this board who couldn't, say, buy an ebook in Microsoft Reader format and within three minutes have it depolluted and up on the N800 screen.
That said, I think the Kindle has a cool delivery mechanism and I'm in favor of anything that makes more books available digitally. It's simply overpriced, klunky and too damn proprietary for me.
Let's see. Grab a good book. They're not scarce. Borrow a copy from a friend who's raving about some book. Go to the libary and take it out. Take a few days to read, right? In most people's lives, you read 10-50 pages and then have to do something else. Open it a few hours later and there's the bookmark, right where you left it. Lose it, buy a new one for a few bucks. Finish it, put it on your shelf, loan it to a friend, start a fire with it if it stinks. What exactly is wrong with this? I can read a bit on the train, and before I go to sleep, and in that nice chair on the porch, and-- you get the idea. What would be better? If I could buy something that cost 10 books, say, but gave me access to everything from Beowulf to about 1927. Call it, "The New York Public Library," and there would be an annual membership fee, subsidized, to pay for servers and those great heroes of civilization, Librarians. No battery. Works on solar, stores a charge. Bright and readable in all lighting conditions. Reads to you if you're blind or you've just gone to bed and want to hear a little Shakespeare as you go to sleep. It could tell when you went to sleep, and start up again at that point. Then you might think, "This is an improvement on the book!" Then, and only then, could you also buy the latest and greatest from Amazon or Barnes or whoever. No copy protection. What are you, nuts? Haven't you learned anything from music? The medium that brought us human progress beyond belief from the fact that it is completely portable and instantly available to anyone who has learned how to read, and that it compresses almost all information far better than anything else -- this, you want to copy protect to protect the profits of Random House/News Corp. Inc.? No sir. Love the music store, Jeff. Take the Kindle and stuff it.
It's funny to see the dichotomy in here between people who Get e-book readers and people who Don't Get them. The latter are the ones trying to make the argument that the iPhone could do the same thing equally well. They are obviously not avid readers.
The whole idea behind ebook readers is that they have to be able to replace books in all the ways books are used. That means you have to be able to curl up with them on a couch with a glass of good wine, which has certain implications. They have to be a certain minimum size to be able to hold comfortably, and so they can contain a page of text at a size you can still read by candlelight, if necessary. They can't be so bright they would light up the whole room. Etc., etc..
None of these things apply to an iPhone (or iPod Touch). Sure you could use them to read a reference manual or a text book, but you wouldn't want to read the latest Nikki French off one! Or at least I wouldn't.