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Amazon's Kindle Sells Out In 5.5 Hours
necro81 writes "As reported on Engadget, Amazon's Kindle e-book reader has sold out. Charlie Rose's interview with Jeff Bezos reveals that the Kindle sold out within just 5-1/2 hours of going on sale. Amazon hasn't revealed how many it had in stock at launch, so it may just be that they didn't anticipate early demand. A check of the Kindle's product page shows that more will be rolling out starting December 3rd." Wired also has a brief head-to-head of the more prominent ebook readers and PCWorld has a review of the new gadget from Amazon.
I have to say I am impressed with their selection, which can get downright esoteric. Sony's selection(which has gotten better recently) has always left me wanting. I would watch Jon Stewart interview some author and then I would go see if I could find their book only to find out it's either not there or too expensive.
One of the things that really showed promise was having comic books delivered to the device. However, it never really panned out for Sony, one year on and there are only 14 items in the manga section, and Kindle isn't looking much better. The sample they gave with the Sony eReader actually looked pretty good in terms of readability, shame there isn't much content that I want on it though(I suppose I could go track down pdfs, but too much of a pain)
Monstar L
Everyone is bashing this product, and either I'm confusing my acronyms or people here don't realize this things greatest feature. The PCWorld article says it has EvDO, which I thought was a cellular technology, it lists that as the way to get more content on the thing. AND there is no usage charge for that, the PCWorld article says they take care of that in the background, so the price you see listed for the content you can browse is EXACTLY what you pay(OK maybe taxes or something)
So, either I need to cut back on the beers and pay attention to which letters mean what, or this thing is actually kinda cool, not that I'm buying one this year. If I'm way wrong, mod me to nothing, but otherwise, man do people complain about anything here!
Those who can, do.
It Has DRM
Has nobody been paying attention to the many and various articles in recent years about "some random company" who decided to revoke their DRM product (new DRM, dropped product, company died, etc) and totally screw all their customers who had paid license fees to use this DRM functionality?
VOTE WITH YOUR WALLETS people.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
dude, every single review of this device on the Amazon website (famous for nuking bad reviews) has someone saying "the DRM sucks". Probably half the people who bought it are warezing their books and using the unofficial converters to load em onto the device by USB. Early adopters are notorious hackers.
How we know is more important than what we know.
What a mess. I ordered one. They shipped me two. (only billed for one). The one I opened died after about 3 hours. Unit still worked but the eInk screen was dead. Sent that one back for a refund. In my opinion the build quality sucks and there isn't really any good place to hold the unit where you aren't accidentally pressing some button. I still have my free unit new in the box. I'm so un-impressed I may just send it back to Amazon for some other dumb bastard to buy it. I hope this endeavor dies in a big way to warn others.
Yeah, but damn near every review on the Amazon site is written by someone who doesn't own one and thinks the review system is good for expressing an opinion about something they know nothing more about than I do. It's hard to find reviews from actual owners, but the ones I've found are mostly positive.
/. culture, but I would accept DRM as a trade-off if it were just a bit less expensive, came with an integrated book light, and wasn't so goddamn ugly.
I know it's counter to
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
When screen resolutions are dense enough to render serif typefaces without hinting; only then will we have a device that can be often read without eye strain.
Huh? The text higher up in this window (your message) is in Helvetica sans, which I use because it's the font I found on this Mac that gives me the most readable text. This text I'm typing has serifs, but only because I haven't figured out how to change the font for a <textarea> HTML widget; it's noticably less readable (at a larger font size, which I also don't know how to change) than the sans-serif text above.
Font preference seems to be another "no accounting for taste" things. I may prefer sans serif because I've worked with crummy computer displays for several decades, and I've gotten accustomed to reading them. And when we finally got variable-width fonts on computer screens, sans-serif became materially easier for a lot of us computer geeks to read.
Anyhow, I found the screen shots of the kindle quite readable. I'm mostly put off by the small amount of text. When they do get a screen with better resolution, I'll be more interested. But first I'll verify that I can tell it to use a small font size, as I do with PDAs, so I can get more text on the screen. That'll probably wait until they can do a Helvetica sans on their little screen.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
It is however perfectly easy for a company to launch with a limited number of items received from the factory. This is a basic sales trick. Amazon ordered the production of the kindle, but that doesn't mean all the units arrive in one go, that itself would be extremely foolish, it would delay the launch and cost a lot of money to stock everything.
Say that a factory can produce 100 devices per day just as an example. You want to launch as soon as possible so you tell them, when you got 500 send them over, so I can launch. Then at launch those 500 are "sold out". Sure they are, but the factory has been busily producing so they in fact now got 700 more, but because sending small orders is uneconomical you told them to NOT send the daily production over, you told them to wait till they got a 1000.
Bam, you get a head line of being sold out while the factory has plenty.
The kindle ain't sold out because it is still in production. It is trivial to set this scenario up and Amazon should fire its marketting department if they hadn't set this up. It is a basic move. Make the item seem hot, so that people get the idea that they MUST buy it now or they may not have another chance.
Have you EVER sold anything? It doesn't matter what house you are looking at buying, they ALWAYS got an intrested party about to make a good offer, so if you are quick you might just beat them. Decide NOW!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I would've thought that a Mac's default textarea, and thus default monospace, font would be Monaco, which is sans-serif.
Anyway, the point the parent was making is that many people (including nearly all American book publishers) think that serif fonts are easier to read, especially for very long blocks of text. The problem is, computer screens still have comparatively low DPI, and aren't very good at rendering serifs, certainly not as good as they are with sans-serif fonts. This goes even moreso for a device made solely for reading text, even though it does indeed have a higher DPI than computer screens.
Of course, you're right that font preference varies from person to person. Myself, I almost exclusively use sans-serif fonts for screen reading, and prefer serif fonts for print. For example, those annoying "advertising" sections in magazines and newspapers often use a sans-serif font, and I find them much more difficult to read (fortunately they're also always devoid of content).
Anyway, given the specs for the Kindle (167 dpi), it should be able to do a pretty good Helvetica, assuming Amazon felt like getting a license from Linotype (the default serif font they use is also from Linotype, so it's possible).
"to set on fire"
I used to work at SGI (late 90's) and one of their ad slogans was ignite your mind and I think it had a picture of an octane (model name) sgi box there.
the thing is - we sold a lot of SGI boxes to gas and oil companies. 'igniting' from a computer is the last thing they'd want!
for a while, some SGI boxes (their power supplies) had a nasty habit of, well, blowing up or catching fire. the move team (who moved employees when we had our frequent re-orgs) would often have blown power supplies after we powered down systems and moved them, had them sit unused for a weekend and then powered up monday. I guess an always-on system being turned off, let sit and then powered on can cause strain.
PPFFFTT! "stand back, I'm about to power on an SGI box!"
ignite your mind. yeah - and your tie, if you are standing too close by to some of them.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Add Linux e-reader software to a Linux-based Nokia N800 Internet Tablet and you're there, and if you insist on having access that isn't via WiFi, add a
Better performance, and no vendor lockin.
Tech Public Policy stuff
My neighbor got one, and has had it for almost two days now. He let me play with it a few times.
The display is very crisp and clear and easy to read. It has a clear surface over the e-ink display... the effect is like reading a really, really flat piece of glossy paper. Yes, if you have very good vision you can see the pixels, but it's so very very high contrast that that's not a problem.
The unit is much more attractive in person than its photos make it look on the web. It's not beige, it's very white. It's slim, and the angularness of it is less obvious in person than on the web, unless you look at it from the end. It has a nice leather case that it goes in which makes it rather book-like in many respects. When you turn it off, it puts something interesting on the screen (remember, e-ink takes no power to display, only to change, so you can leave something on an "off" e-ink screen) and my friends quite like that. The UI is easy enough to use - a minute or two of poking at it and I'd figured it out more or less. The wireless connection works very well. He downloaded a sample chapter (yes, you can get free sample chapters) in mere seconds after he'd typed in the title.
Overall, I was pleasantly surprised with it, and immediately recommended it to my aunt, who has been searching for a good e-book reader for a few years.
Actually the wireless service has wide coverage, I live in rural Missouri and according to their website would be fine. Obviously you'd want to check that first. You can turn the wireless off so then battery is only drained on page flips.
:)
I actually think its a solid product idea. Basically you pay for content and wireless access at the same time. E-paper sounds legitimately like a great technology. It would be pretty tempting offer if not for having basically no money at the moment and the Asus Eee PC being so damn cute.
"Current incarnations lack the resolution of a cheap laser printer..."
Heh so's your monitor. But that's despite the point: It's 150 DPI, that's definitely more than adequate for reading.
I agree with your other points (although I find the wireless bit debatable... wireless access to Wikipedia? w00t!) but the DPI one? Sorry.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)