Slashdot Mirror
Hands-On With The Kindle
Amazon's Kindle e-book may have sold out in record time, but there's still a lot of discussion about the device's merits. Neil Gaiman likes it well enough, but it's sent Robert Scoble into a fit of apoplectic rage. For a real, meaty, hands-on look at the way the device operates in everyday life, Gamers With Jobs writer Julian Murdoch has a slice of life with the Kindle. He takes us through his Thanksgiving holiday weekend with the device, noting the quirks (good and bad) that cropped up with Amazon's new toy. "Short of reading in the tub, the Kindle is easier to read in more places, positions, and situations than a physical book ... But it's far from perfect. It is expensive. The cover, which I find completely necessary, is in desperate need of more secure attachment (Velcro works great). The book selection is less-than-perfect, although I imagine this will improve with every passing day. And Amazon needs marketing help. The Kindle's launch reeked of 'get it out fast.' The big-picture marketing efforts (like video demonstrations and blurbs from authors) were great, but simple things like communicating how freakin' easy it is to get non-Amazon content on to the device, for free, remain horribly misunderstood."
>but simple things like communicating how freakin' easy it is to get non-Amazon content on to the device, for free, remain horribly misunderstood.
And it is in Amazon's interest to show people who might otherwise buy material how to avoid buying material... how?
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
easy it is to get non-Amazon content on to the device, for free, remain horribly misunderstood
If I'm not tied to a single source for my books then I may consider it, but I still enjoy they actual book feelings though. Weight, smell, etc... Some parts of reading a book have nothing to do with what is written... At least for me.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
-It's going to be a while
-They are
-Explain to me how you do this with paper books?
-Good point, something that must be addressed by congress. So get involved.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If you load up a few hundred titles, it is no longer heavier.
You don't have to back up a paper book because unless your house burns down (and sometimes even in that case) you will still be able to read it.
Electronic digital data is very fragile in comparison to it's analog counterpart. The benefits of that fragility however is the ability to cheaply make exact duplicate copies of the data.
When you have digital data with DRM, you have the worst of both worlds essentially.
Says who? What he's suggesting is a list of features/wants for a hypothetical competitor to the Kindle. There's nothing to stop anyone here from developing one. Make up a prototype, make sure you aren't stepping on any of Amazon's patents, power the thing with free/open source software. Find a way to get it produced, either by pitching it to an OEM or contact or line up some offshore manufacturing muscle in Taiwan or Korea (you may have to do your own manufacturing engineering or hire one), and then find a distributor to sell your wares or hawk it yourself via the Web. Better yet, once you get 'em produced, get Wal*Mart to buy the suckers. Amazon may be big, but they're peanuts compared to Wal*Mart.
My blog
If you can't say it with written words, it wasn't worth saying. These "video shows" and "podcasts" are nominally entertaining but worthless for conveying any kind of real information. Please don't link to them like they're big-people essays -- it doesn't matter how smart you are, I can read ten documents written by people almost as smart as you are in the time it takes your stupid "veeblog" to buffer, play its stupid intro, and replay the series of meat noises you've encoded the information into.
Please. Just pass them by.
Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
You know, I think I have a theory on why people get so upset about the idea of digital book readers. It's not the DRM, it's not the batteries, it's not whether you can loan your book...
The biggest problem is ego.
People who read a lot of books LIKE having huge bookshelves to impress people on how many books they have. "Yes, as a matter of fact, I DO read more than thou, hence, I am more intelligent. Bow down and kiss my ring!"
How many of these people keep around books they know they will NEVER read again? Why not donate them to the library, and clear up space on the ol' bookshelf? Because they like having the scorecard on the wall. Having an e-book spoils all the fun.
I think this is actually a generational thing. I'm noticing that younger people have no problem downloading scanned books, reading them, and moving on. I think the ego stroke of the big library will eventually be extinct, like we're seeing with big walls of record collections.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
All I can say is take an economics class. You aren't entirely off base, but a good microeconomics class will pretty much explain why it is as it is and why your points aren't entirely accurate. But the key point is that you seem to think that you are paying more for the materials than the content and also ignoring the costs of servers/bandwidth/etc. If I were to open my own "Sahara" book store and sell every e-book for $1 how long do you think it would be before I went under from having smoking servers, angry employees wanting to get paid, and a disgustingly large electric and bandwidth bill? The "e" part only takes out one tiny slice of the cost...the actual printing...which is pretty small over a large enough production. You are still paying an author, a publisher, a retailer, and all the associated employees in getting the book from draft to print and all the marketing in between.
I agree that the price of ebooks will likely come down as the demand for them increases, but I doubt they will get to be as cheap as you want them.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
And what happens when the Kindle fails and Amazon stops selling the books? Or they release a new format and stop supporting the old one? Or any other of umpteen donzen scenarios whereby you can no longer access these "backups" Amazon so thoughtfully decides to hold for you on their own servers?
Don't think it can happen? It already has. http://www.google.ca/search?q=mlb+drm
Really? Okay, I'll just toss these ebooks in the fire and stuff a dozen hardcover books into my jacket pocket. While I'm walking home in the rain I will open one up and yell "SEARCH, DAMN YOU!" at it until it flips open to the page I need. When I get home I will tear out the pages I need, fold them up and slip them into the CD-ROM drive on my PC, hoping that it will somehow figure out how to import the a few sentences and a diagram into a paper that I'm working on...
And then I'll go out and search for some more non-existant benefits to using eBooks.
Don't get me wrong, I like real books just find and am quite happy lugging around big stacks of paper, but there are many cases where eBooks are much more convenient than traditional printed volumes.
Memo to Bezo-man, CEO d'Amazon:
... a lot
... or ... if this thing pisses me off I want the option to take all that shit I paid real money for and really keep it _and_ use it on something else. ... without stupid converter tool ... you know ... the ebook equivalent of the stuff a lot of us book people and geeks --your core audience-- do with paper books
Preface,
Dude you really really need to talk to people outside the early adopter, gadget/freak crowd. In anything remotely resembling the device's current form, this device is doomed.
First give it buying appeal:
*) Drop the price
*) Make it a _lot_ less ugly...
*) I shouldn't have to pay Amazon everytime I blink
Make it a little less geeky
*) Make it so the keyboard can be slid out of the way
*) Make it a _lot_ less ugly...
Make the content have a life longer than the device
At some point your content will outlive the device:
1) It fails (and stockholders will make them pull the plug)
2) It succeeds (and to survive the imitators, it becomes non-backward compatible)
3) You just want the latest version and want to take your content with you
4) The darn thing breaks/gets stolen/etc
Since everything has to go through Amazon for a fee, if you want to keep all that stuff you paid for, you're going to pay how many times per device switch times how many devices in your life?
Give me the ability to do all those book things
*) Support more document formats (text, pdf and html should be a bare minimum)
*) Have content longevity (see previous section)
*) Don't give me anything in a proprietary format
*) Let me push stuff from my computer to my kindle directly
*) Let me do annotations/notes/highlighting on pdfs and ship the modified doc back to my computer
*) For bonus points, give me the option to search both the content of books and my notes
*) For double bonus points, make that search rip through my annotations
*) For even more bonus points, give me a Mac/Windows App to manage my docs (think iTunes)
the clock on the wall says 4 til 7
Heresy!
But it's true, and I've been saying it for at least five years, ever since I first got my Rocket eBook reader. Read the article, and you'll understand why. Yes, eBook readers have some downsides, but not many, and they're trivial compared to the upsides -- assuming, of course, that you can get the books you want in electronic format.
Until you've done it, you simply can't understand how liberating it is to be able to read without holding the book in your hands. As the author of the article says, he found he could read while eating, holding his daughter, even running hard on a treadmill. And he's absolutely right that a good eBook device is "invisible" -- within a minute or two you completely forget that you're using it, because it gets out of the way of the content that it's presenting. Reading on your PDA or your laptop is not the same thing at all, because those devices don't get out of the way. Laptops are too big, too heavy, too powerhungry and PDAs are too small.
Here's my bottom line on just how much better eBooks are: My choice of reading materials has adapted to what I can get electronically, because I find paper books so annoying. Luckily, I was already a fan of much of the stuff from Baen Books, and they provide all of their stuff in electronic, DRM-free format for a very reasonable price (half the price of a paperback for single books, and about $2 per book if you buy their Webscription bundles). Because of the super convenience of an eBook, I now read almost nothing but Baen's titles.
BTW, as for reading in the tub: I've been doing it for years with my eBook. Just don't drop it in the water and you're fine (have you ever dropped a paperback in the tub? I haven't). If you're really worried about it, though, there's a very inexpensive and simple solution: Get a big ziploc baggie and put your eBook in it. Seal it up tight and you have no worries about water, sand or anything else getting in, and you'll have no problem pushing the buttons or reading through the clear plastic. I find that I can read eBooks in many places that I wouldn't take a hardcover book, because I'd be too afraid of damaging it, and it's not feasible to read a paper book wrapped in plastic. I also like the fact that my LCD-display eBook reader is readable in the dark. The Kindle isn't, but it's better in daylight (my eBook works in full sunlight, too, but it is a little harder to see).
eBooks are the future not because they're cool gadgets but because they make for a better reading experience.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I keep hearing this described as the iPod for books, which strikes me as a really misguided goal. I don't want an iPod for books, and most serious readers I know wouldn't either. There's something fundamentally different between flipping wantonly through my ever-shifting collection of 10,000 albums and singles, and spending days or weeks immersed in a single great book. I couldn't give a hoot about being able to store 200 books, or download a new title at the drop of a hat. What is the point of wireless? The most voracious readers I know would not find themselves constrained by the need to occasionally hook up to a PC and 10 or 20 more titles. I could map out my entire reading for the next five years in about 5 minutes of downloading from Project Gutenberg. The reading world just doesn't spin as fast or as serially as the iPod world. It's off-putting to see it now falling under the iPod rubric, where it will be forced to compete for a dwindling slice of our increasingly short attention span.
:-) Anyways, going solely on what I've heard from reviews, I'd have to say I agree with the assessment that it probably should have gone on sale in time for Christmas `09. Technology will continue its inexorable march towards perfection, and in a couple years today's screens will look primitive. Early adopters and gadgeteers will snap this up, but readers will stick with our dead trees for a few years yet.
Don't get me wrong, I'm completely open to the idea of an e-book; as an environmentalist I positively love it. But it seems like too much attention has been focused on making an iKindle, to the detriment of the actual reading experience itself. e-ink is much better than LCD, certainly, but anybody who would claim it's is as pleasing to look at as even a $.99 paperback has pretty low standards. And I feel like a real opportunity has been missed in making it waterproof, too. Who wouldn't love to be able to read in the shower!
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
I received my Kindle two days after launch and have been using it steadily since then. What do I like best? Bottom line it's the "always connected" capability. I use this for downloading books (natch), newspapers, blogs (/. was the first...) and web browsing (lost count of the number of times that a quick check of Wikipedia has settled a breakfast/lunchtime/dinner argument). I've also taken to downloading the first chapters (free) of books in which I may be interested. I'm glad I did in many case - the hype behind books does not always match reality (natch again). I downloaded chapter 1 of Steve Colbert's "I am America" - god knows how that's at the top of the NY Times best seller list, it's *awful*. Glad I could read chapter 1 and realize this was not a book for me. (and no, it wasn't the politics that turned me off - it's just poorly written prose. Mr. Colbert should focus on what's he's good at: TV)
As for the cost: It's fine given that it has bundled always-on wireless access. If I had to pay $25 a month for wireless for the device and if the device was, say, $100 - I'd be out of pocket in 12 months. TCO is good. Look past the $400 price tag and realize what you are getting for the money. A version 1 ebook (it's pretty good - will get better with V2, V3.....) and 24x7x365 wireless access to a huge library. Good value in my book!
Rich people are eccentric. Poor people are strange. Me, I'd be happy with odd.
bandwidth cost is much lower than the same costs for physical books which include not only printing but also shipping and handling, which alone is probably more than the bandwidth on a per book basis. The grandparent might be a bit off on the $1 number but he is right that nobody is going to pay the same price for a text file that they would pay for a paperback.
Books arent like music, they dont have as much replay vaule, your not sitting on a train thinking, "man, if only I had that book I finished last week I would read it again right now." Most people read one book at a time, or a few books at a time in some cases and there is much less value in carrying your entire library with you. So given all that, why would you buy a device to do that just to pay the same price for the book as you would for a nice bound copy?
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Yeah, but the fact that Amazon is threatening to delete everything about you, including digital things you've paid for just shows how nefarious DRM is and how draconian Amazon can be when you do something they don't like. How about just making a business rule in their software that doesn't let you buy more than 3 Wii's instead of letting someone potentially do it with a huge threat over their head. And I'm also mad about the fact that I paid for content that I feel that I don't really own and they can take away from me at any time.
I think that people who look down on people with lots of books are insecure about their own reading habits.
What - that's a load of crap I pulled out of my ass? Congrats. You're right.
Here's what I do know though - you're full of crap about why people like having books, why people read, and ultimately, why people like large libraries. It's for the same reason that people collect records, plates, coins, stamps, insects, door knobs and other things: they like the objects, and they like collecting them. Books tend to have a specific place of honor because for the longest time, they were the only way that knowledge was passed down. As a result, a large library correlated strongly with being learned, which was why they used to be status symbols.
Today, they're merely an indication of a person's passion. Looking down on people with large libraries says the same thing about you as does looking down on people with any other pastime; be it baseball, baseball cards or collecting train tickets: you're a pompous ass who needs external validations for why you're a worthy individual.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
This is suppose to be a READING device and it's got a keyboard that takes up like 30% of the surface area... That seems like very bad design to me!
Do you really think that you're paying $100 for the physical artifact when you buy a textbook? You're really just paying what the publisher can get away with because everyone has to buy it.
Go to a normal bookstore and look at the prices for books that are the same size and weight as textbooks. They're all around $50 or $60.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
As others have mentioned, eInk basically works like paper. The brighter the light, the easier it is to read. It's also much easier on the eyes than a traditional screen.
However, when it comes to reading traditional books I often find it hard to find a position that's comfortable for holding the book open and also turning the pages (this is particularly a problem in bed). Being able to hold the device stationary and just press a button with my thumb to advance is quite appealing.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
"Well if you see the DRM on the Kindle as a selling point..."
I don't, but I'm sure it had a lot to do with convincing the content-types to come on board. No mainstream content, no mainstream device.
"... still make a healthy profit as BAEN books seem to do."
That topic is open for debate. Baen releases a lot of books for free in electronic form in order to generate print sales. This works because, currently, there isn't really a good solution for reading ebooks and as such most people will pay for the printed versions if they think they like the story or author.
But will that model continue to work as we transition into a reader-based world?
Let's say we go a generation or five down the road and have a slim, light, long-lasting, durable affordable reader with a nice bright high-resolution high-contrast screen (OLED?) that can be read under any lighting conditions. Instant downloads of content, magazines, and so on. Which, in turn makes reading ebooks such a pleasure that the market starts transitioning more and more towards that format.
So in that case, do you still give away your content for free when there's no "print" version to buy?
Remember the early digital camera market? Electronic book readers are currently at the 1981 Sony Mavica digital camera stage , where everyone looks at it and says, "Why on earth would you use that and not film?" Now, just a couple of decades down the road, how hard to you have to look to find a film camera at Best Buy?
And in many cases it's still not because digital is better, quality-wise, than film. But it's definitely good enough for most purposes, and it wins hands-down in the convenience category.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Let's see, compared to the OLPC XO laptop, this thing ain't that great.
The OLPC has a keyboard, and has the ebook mode. You'll get something between 20 and 24 hours of reading in the ebook B/W mode on the OLPC. It has a great shock and water resistant case, I believe you can leave it out in the rainstorm.
David Pogue with NYT demonstrated dropping it on a really jagged rock from about 5 feet off the ground, then threw water on it, then through dirt on it. Plus the OLPC is 400 AND you are donating one to a child in a developing country.
You could get 2 OLPC and totally share ebooks instantly. The mesh networking allows download, plus has regular internet and browser.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBoghPvyhts
...::----::...
I am in no way affiliated with this sig.
Factor the risk into your purchase decisions. That may well mean that you don't buy a Kindle or any books for it, but don't be surprised when a bunch of people do. I mean, how many people literally piss away $10 a day at the bar? They aren't going to sweat the $10 fee for a book that might disappear.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Now, start browsing. Yes, New-York-Times bestsellers are $9.99 or lower. Sadly few of the books in the Computers and Internet section are significantly cheaper than the physical versions: Fred Brook's Mythical Man Month - $25.91 in eBook format. Martin Fowler's Refactoring - $35.87. Joshua Block's Effective Java - $39.99. To be fair, not all computer-science books cost that much but $25+ for an eBook is too much for me.
So while the overall selection is good and the prices on a lot of large-print-run books are great, it looks to me like the publishers are sticking with the view that books with low print runs must be priced higher, even when electronic. Too bad. I was hoping Amazon eBooks would let me carry more of the stuff that interests me beyond literature.