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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.'
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.
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.
The attraction of the iPhone is that it isn't just a phone. I don't have one, and probably won't get one for some time, but there are times--like when I'm traveling--that I would prefer to have one device that fulfills the functions of my Palm, my phone, and my video iPod all at once. The fact that this device does all this and more, including what I believe is a best-of-breed palmtop web access interface, puts it well outside the "just a phone" category.
But the real point here is not that it's the best thing ever. It's not. The point is that people only have (a) so much money, and (b) so much patience and space for carrying around gadgets. If people didn't want to carry a phone, a palm and an iPod, and consolidated them into an iPhone, then they aren't likely to want to add a new device for reading purposes unless there is something really revolutionary about the device. For someone who has to read on a portable device for a living, I can see them getting this and using it. If it were really cheap, I could see it being a popular gift. If the interface were sleek and simple, maybe it would be successful. But unfortunately, it's not all that awesome, and it's not cheap. I'd be very surprised if it gained more than a tiny niche audience.
People don't want one more thing to sync, to charge, to update, to carry, to protect. The iPhone is not the best at each thing that it does. However, it's good enough at a lot of things, including, potentially, at being an e-reader, that it's probably going to be tough for an expensive, single-function device to compete with it without some major advances.
The CB App. What's your 20?
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.
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