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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.
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..."
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
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?
I've never bought a DRM afflicted text and I never will. But the hardware's a different matter; the fact that it can display DRM doesn't preclude the device as long as it can display free texts.
Sony is kind of schizophrenic; their hardware is usually excellent but sometimes crippled by the media lobe of the company. In the case of the Sony Reader the hardware was left relatively unharmed, but the marketing of the device was absolutely crippled; they were so keen to push their online book store that most people don't realise it can display unencumbered texts just fine.
The Sony Reader is pretty damn good, though not perfect. For example, it doesn't have a page turn button on the right hand side more or less forcing you to hold it in your left hand or uncomfortably in your right. The iRex Iliad looks excellent, but it's pricier and the form-factor doesn't appeal to me.
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
Esoteric? Typical American attitude. Why, Korean Automotive Foreign Direct Investment in Europe: The Effects of Economic Integration on Motivations and Patterns of FDI and Industrial Location (Kindle Edition) is standard bedside reading for many of us 50 million South Koreans, thank you very much.
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.
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
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.