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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."
I don't understand why people would buy this at ~$400. May as well just go and get a low end tablet pc, which you could use for a multitude of other uses.
I'm not the NYT's typical top-ten reader, so I'm not sure something like this would immediately appeal. The last few books I've read were printed from 10 to 50 years ago, which would place them well beyond this device. Pros and Cons just don't weigh enough in favour and like I said, what does this do that a tablet couldn't do? Maybe when they drop it to ~$50 and I can sync it like my iPod to my favourite content feeds each morning it would hold some promise.
Also, books don't require batteries. I've got several devices around now, which all have some form of rechargeable (and expensive to replace) cells. I worry a bit about the availability of replacement cells several years down the road.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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
Have you ever seen a grown server cry before?
I think the Kindle will be to traditional books as this device is to walking.
Inventor of the LOLbalrog meme.
Take a look at the specs.
This thing doesn't sync, nor use WiFi. Instead, it downloads content through Sprint's wireless 3G network (the same one that their phones use). There is no subscription fee for this (the data service). It will also download newspaper and magazine subscriptions daily (no syncing or need to find a WiFi hotspot).
Perhaps their pricing model is built around including some type of specially negotiated data plan with Sprint that is amortized over the projected lifetime of the device. (Just speculation).
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
It doesn't handle PDFs natively, but FTA apparently it is extremely easy to convert .pdf's before download to the Kindle.
art is science made clear. -cocteau
Actually, you can download the manual from the Amazon site. However, it still isn't clear in the manual. You have to put two and two together, and those sections are about 15 pages apart in the manual. Nowhere does it explicitly state, "Hook the Kindle up via USB and you can transfer certain files for free". That would have been nice, but I think the GGP was somewhat correct in saying that there's not a real big advantage to Amazon in making the explicit statement. It also doesn't really jive with their main marketing point, the wireless connection through Sprint and lack of a need for a computer. There are some good discussions on the Kindle page regarding this topic, but, as with most of Amazon's Customer Discussions, you have to wade through a ton of crap.
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.
The Kindle might make it. That's a very convincing review.
.LIT, Adobe eBook Reader, and Gemstar--no format had more than three of the books available.
It's not a hardware problem; it's never been a hardware problem. My year-2000 Rocket eBook is more than good enough to read books for pleasure. Seven years of progress is seven years; all they needed to do was not screw up, and it sounds as if they didn't.
The biggest problem by far with previous efforts was title availability. Sure, they would have an eBookstore with "thousands" of titles, and if you asked the question "is there anything there I want to read?" the answer would be "sure."
But ask the question the other way around, as someone who buys books rather than someone who is sold books. The question then becomes "is book XYZ, that I know I want to read, evenavailable?" The reviewer makes it clear that this is an important question for him, too, and that he thinks Amazon falls a little short. But only by comparison with the ideal. Comparison with earlier eBook efforts is like night and day.
Just before the "eBooks are dead" meme hit, i.e. at about the peak of the craze, I took a look at the book list for Oprah's book club. I thought that was a very fair test. They were scattered across publishers, they were not so old as to be out of print and mostly old enough to allow time for format conversion, and all of them were good books that some disinterested party thought were worth reading. I compared eBook formats and audiobook format, audiobook being an example of a non-print medium for which the conversion costs and distribution costs were far higher than for an eBook.
As I recall, of about forty-four books, something like thirty-eight of them were available as audiobooks, i.e. most of them. And a grand total of six were available in any eBook format at all. And of the three dominant eBook formats at the time--Microsoft
Now, the very first precondition of eBook success is that, darn it, the books you want need to be available. That's not sufficient, but it's necessary. The holes in title availability were huge. For example, to pick one of my favorites at random, there was nothing by Barbara Kingsolver available in any of the three formats.
On a very informal test recently in which I just listed ten books I had bought or was considering buying, I found that eight out of ten were available in Kindle format. Including nine books by Barbara Kingsolver, two of which I haven't read yet.
The second thing is price. By the way, Amazon is honest in saying most books are under $9.99. Many of them are priced a little lower, in fact. These days mass market paperbacks are costing $6.99, $7.99, $8.99 and trade paperbacks are mostly above $10. So it's fair to say Amazon is charging paperback prices, even for books that aren't out in paper. Do I think that's a good price? No, I think it's way too high. But it is much much much better than before. In the old eBook days, the uniform policy was that if the book wasn't out in paper yet, the eBook price matched the hardbound price.
I must have had a dozen conversations with strangers watching me read my Rocket eBook, and they all went the same way. Increasing interest. Not deterred by the $300 price of the device. But when they asked what the books cost and I said "Hardbound prices if the book isn't in paper," the conversation would stop dead right there and I could see their interest level plummet to zero. Maybe they didn't actually roll their eyes but it felt like it.
DRM is sucky. Half the fun of books is being able to lend them. Can you imagine not being able to lend a book to your wife even if you each had your own device? And I am stuck with DRMed Gemstar-format content that will die when my Rocket eBook dies (and its battery life, once 20 hours, is now down to about 2). Locked to a hardware serial number in a proprietary format, and the company is bust and their servers are shut down and no customer-service people to help. So d
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
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.
eh, Apple sells songs for $0.99 each which weigh in at about 3-4mb each.
A 50,000 word novel with an average word length of 5 characters (plus 1 for spaces or punctuation), is only 300k. Let's even up it to 150k word novel that's a bit wordy, maybe 9 characters a word (plus 1 for spaces or punctuation). That's still just 1.5mb, half the size of a song. As long as we're talking just plain text, it's pretty cheap. You could even compress it, and text compresses very well.
I can understand having to pay the people who write and maintain the software, the editors, authors, marketing people, possibly artists for cover art.. but bandwidth for the actual transport of the written text is so small that it really shouldn't have that much of an effect on the final price. I can't imagine that the bandwidth costs to transfer 1.5mb of text is greater than several hundred pages of paper, glue, ink, and physical transport to a store (and the store clerks, and all other costs associated with physical retail).
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
I remember the slashdot comments about the iPod when it first debuted. For those who don't, let's just say it looked about like these comments on the Kindle, lots of hate everywhere from people who had never seen, let alone used the device. The complaints were pretty much identical, too (DRM!, too expensive!, how is this better than a laptop?).
Thus, I'll go ahead and predict the success of the Kindle here and now. Within 2 years 90% of slashdot readers will own one, and those who don't will own a knock off that runs open source firmware.