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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 wonder how many units were made available.
I somehow doubt it is a case of 'we made lots, but demand outstripped supply'. More likely this was a limited production run to test the waters.
The Sony reader had a long latency to flip a page, as well as some stuff going on with the ink rearranging itself. If one could just flip fast without any image artifacts, it would be great. Most people will want color, but I think this is more important.
Let the Early Adopters try it out and send in the bug reports. In a year or so, there'll be a version 1.1 that doesn't have as many annoying misfeatures as 1.0.
There's an old rule in the computer biz: Don't ever buy anything whose version number ends with an even digit.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
1. There are always a number of people with "state-of-the-art-addiction" who must have the hot new gadget.
2. There are always people looking to profit from the above people, who jump on these product launches to then turn around and sell the product on Ebay.
Beyond that I wouldn't read too much into this just yet. The Kindle may be a success, or a flop. All we know is that it a newly hyped gadget that sold out at launch, like most new hot gadgets.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
it's not an LCD, it's e-paper or "electronic ink".
Yeah, they finally got that technology out of the lab about a couple of years ago.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Well yeah it was the front page of amazon, yeah the entire front page.
Basically the best advertising that any device could have.
Kill it. Now.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Kindle doesn't have an LCD. There are no polarizers, liquid crystals, or bending of crystals to change the direction of the polarization.
Kindle has an e-paper display, which uses something resembling ink that can be turned black or white, or a few shades in between, and doesn't require any power to maintain that shade. It looks very similar to paper, and isn't color so the resolution is pretty good.
The Sony e-book reader also has an e-paper display, so LCDs aren't being used on new e-book readers.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
1. Market new product & advertize initial sale date
2. Do not reveal how many (hand fulls) of product units are available
3. On day of initial sale, reveal that product was sold out in 4 hours!!!!
4. Let lame media pick up stories
5. Enjoy free advertizement & viral marketing
6. Pick another date to release a few more units
7. PROFIT!!!!
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
It does play mp3s. And you can copy things via USB to avoid the fee. You can even have Amazon convert them to its special format for free, email the doc back to you instead of transferring it wirelessly, and avoid the fee.
~ roscivs
Looks good, but it's way overpriced.
Either have cheap books or a cheap gadget, not both.
No sig today...
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
A lifetime of free wireless access to Wikipedia for $399 - that's a pretty good deal.
I'm surprised it doesn't include "amazon email".
No sig today...
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.
Nice to see linux across the board for all of them - even running lots of proprietary stuff. :)
http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E-book_Reader_Matrix
So... you're saying that a book has all the advantages of an abacus?
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
At first I was ready to buy the thing. It seemed wonderful with a long battery life, the ability to purchase books right from the device, and Wikipedia all the time. Then I noticed the price...what a shock.
I think I would have paid up to $125, as I still need to actually buy books to read on it. But $400? Either the device is expensive to make or the market researchers grossly over estimated the publics need for such a device. $400 buys some really nice toys, much nicer than a e-book reader. I think I'm going to spend my money elsewhere this holiday season.
What a shame, too. I would really like to own one when they become reasonably priced.
-- Posted from my parent's basement
The sony ebook reader has one great advantage over the kindle: it reads .pdf files directly, and you don't have to pay Amazon for the privilege to have the .pdf file converted to the Amazon DRMed ebook format. This is a crucial difference.
That said, I would need a device with larger screen than either the kindle or the Sony gadget.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
What's with these companies and "special" lockins? Why do they crave control over items they sell so much?
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
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.
Too rich for their own good, money to burn, since to own this device, you would already have a laptop, an ipod, a cell phone, digital camera, etc. etc. If you have the money to fork over $400 for a device less useful than just about everything else on the market, you probably own a Segway.
Not to say that its not nice being rich, but you're also an idiot since this overpriced, semi-useful device is full of DRM and all your books will likely be gone as soon as amazon decides to discontinue it or not to support the old form of DRM with their new model.
But hey, if you're both rich and dumb, its perfect for you. Maybe someone will invent a clip to attach it to your Segway so you can read while you ride.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
When you manufacture a mass market item, you're not in a position to say, "Let's just make 100 of them for our first manufacturing run, so we can boast that it sold out in a few hours." There's a fixed cost to starting up and shutting down a manufacturing line, and that means there's a minimum number of items you have to make if you want to make them at a reasonable cost. If you shut down the run before you reach that point, you end up saving little or no money.
So what you do is make some kind of estimate as to how many you're likely to sell during an initial period. (Obviously, if that estimate is lower than the manufacturing minimum, you've got another Foleo on your hands.) That estimate has to be be pretty low for a new e-book reader, a product with a really dismal track record. It's probably not much more than the minimum manufacturing run.
This device has some features that may or may not cause it to break away from the pack. The big one is that you don't need any kind of network access to download content; it has a built-in EVDO device that you can use without a monthly fee — network charges are included in the cost of the stuff you buy. (That's the main reason I considered buying one.) On the negative side, the thing's pretty expensive (the main reason I'm didn't) and a little bulky. In that kind of situation, the smart thing to do is do a short initial manufacturing run and see if the product develops a following. And in this case it has. Standard business practice, no Machiavellian scheming required.
I have to say it again: we're all hi-tech geeks here, and hi-tech doesn't work without economies of scale. Yet nobody on Slashdot seems to grasp the concept. Pretty sad.
More versatile, has a camera, reads a wider variety of formats. It's a (funny little, purpose-built, not-your-ordinary) *laptop*, but it has a book-reading mode and a 200dpi screen (in monochrome mode).
:)
A bit bigger than the Kindle, sure, but sure seems like the one I'd rather have in my backpack / fallout shelter / carry-on bag. After all, does the Kindle have a game pad?
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
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.
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.
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
and running them on my ~$100 Palm Zire 31. In fact, that's how I usually buy fiction. And since most of my leisure reading is SF, I get DRM-free downloads from Baen Books. I can also convert documents most major formats into something readable via Palm.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Actually it only has something like 2.5 stars on Amazon. Not a good sign.
In all fairness though, just about all of the 1-star ratings seem to be from people who haven't even used the product yet.
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.