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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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. ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I actually enjoy reading with my iPod Touch. My site is http://www.textonphone.com/ it has 20,000 titles and you can upload your own content. It's a web app running in webkit/Safari, but it does cache content so that you can read offline, and it also has bookmarks. I just load up a story or book at home or work by WiFi and then read it on the subway.
...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.
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.'
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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