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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.'
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.
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.
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?)...
If you also forget that the Kindle will have similar monthly access fees ($1.99/mo for RSS or more for books which would then have no printing fees and almost no distribution fees) and it looks like something from 1989. Not only that but what else does it do? Not much compared to any mobile device out there.
I'll stick with reading Foo on my mobile device and will continue to happily pay for monthly service and free reading of shit on the web.
... 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.
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.
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.
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 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. ?
I'd buy a Kindle if I knew I could get all my college books on it.
When some big company figures out that college textbooks are going to be the first big market for ebooks, I'm going to invest in them.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
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".
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?
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.
Come on, the iPhone & Google Books competing with an e-Book reader? I own an iPhone and love it, but it's the proposed situation is only possible if you overlook:
- A 3 inch screen that involves constant movement to see more than one paragraph at "text book" level font sizes
- A slow EDGE connection (at least an e-Book can cache the entire thing easily).
- Lousy bookmark system.
- Poor back & forth or history functionality.
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.
You think if Apple and Google decided to make this available as a feature with GBS that the publishers wouldn't be screaming blue murder (and, in my opinion, rightly so)?
Agreed. The iPhone is a great phone (and general information-finding device), but peering at it for long periods of time on that tiny screen? No good, not for book-reading. This isn't to say that an iPhone-like solution might not be a really amazing reader... but the iPhone and the Kindle are trying to solve very different problems.
And as much as 'all-in-one' devices can be nice, sometimes you just make 'all' features suffer by cramming them into 'one' device. I think this is one of those cases; an eBook reader is meant to replace a book, which means it has different requirements (in terms of readability, power-use and form-factor). Trying to cram the functionality into other devices means the functionality suffers.
--Rachel
it automatically loads whatever you want from the world's libraries for free
The year this happens, is the year that writing fiction stops. Think about it. If a rock star loses the revenue he gets from CDs/mp3s to illegal downloading, he at least has revenue from radio stations and concerts.
Unless you pay to read a book, the writer stands NO chance of being paid. Period. If books are free, writers make no money and writers stop writing. No more new books
The company that implements the following plan wins:
Charge $3 per book.
~$1 goes to the writer
~$1 goes to the publisher
~$1 goes to the download provider
Your book MUST be DRM protected, but it should be printable, and work on any possible eBook reader.
Since it's cheaper, I, as a consumer win, and the writer/publisher make out because they're paid even though they don't have to produce any physical books. My $0.02.
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.
1) The iPhone screen isn't that much smaller than a paperback page. Not so great for textbooks, but pretty good for novels. It's bigger than the Sony Clie I used to read lots of ebooks on.
2) The idea is that you'll sync through iTunes, via USB. The iPhone has quite a bit of storage space, way more than you need for an ebook.
3) Software. There would be a new app for e-books.
4) Ditto.
Nobody is saying that the iPhone, exactly as it is now, is a great ebook. But the hardware is pretty good and Apple could turn it into a pretty good ebook with just a software release.
When I hear a suggestion which seems totally ridiculous, I try to reexamine it to see if there may be a more likely interpretation. The idea that Google would start to distribute entire copyright works, on a large scale, for profit and without a license is utterly ridiculous.
I think the point was that it wouldn't take much for Google to start an e-book selling service because they already have most of the data in a suitable format, not that they would consider selling e-books in violation of copyright. I bet just getting the digital copies together has been a significant hurdle for Amazon, one which Google has already crossed.
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