Slashdot Mirror
The Cult of Kindle
DaMan writes "ZDNet's Hardware 2.0 blog is pondering the Kindle this week. There have been many attempts at an ebook reader in the past; why does Amazon think it can do any better? Given the high cost and DRM issues, will cachet be enough to win them financial success? Will the 'Cult of Kindle' help guarantee Amazon's success in the ebook reader market? 'A group of people willing to give it a five star rating just because someone else didn't, willing to back up every design, engineering and marketing decision that Amazon made, willing to defend the Kindle with their last dying breath. The Kindle doesn't cost money, it saves money. That 0.75 second flash as the pages turn isn't a downside because it gives you an opportunity to take in the previous page. It doesn't harm your eyes, in fact, it fixes them. Ergonomic issues that other reviewers have bought up are dismissed by the Cult of Kindle as flaws with the reviewer, not the device. The Kindle is perfect, and the Kindle 2.0 will be a little more perfect.'"
I didn't realise the Kindle was made by Apple.
Almost every product has them. I think even the Zune has two.
Pass on this one. This is about the worst article trolling I've seen. All it does is attack a particular set of supporters of the project. It is designed purely to incite flamage. It's disgusting. Zonk please think before approving this crap. The article doesn't want to start a debate at all. It's already made all the conclusions in an extremely prejudiced manner. I'm sure there are supporters of the kindle for legit reasons, and if I was one of them I would be horribly offended!
Disclaimer: I've never used the product in question or even amazon.com for that matter. This was just a particular revolting piece of garbage.
I got a catholic block.
Amazon has been watching the iPod and iPhone phenomena, and it wants the same thing. What company wouldn't? Whatever you say about Apple, they know how to make stuff sell.
The quote above is exactly the fanboi-ism that Amazon is looking for: "This gadget has absolutely no flaws, except for whatever Amazon deems are flaws, and then we will curse those flaws after the fact."
Sam! If you will let me be,
I will try them.
You will see.
I don't really get the whole ereader thing; sure the Iliad looks nice, but my Palm TX works perfectly. I have 4 ebook applications on it and combined with FontSmoother it looks great. I always have it with me (because it contains my calendar) and it plays MP3's at the same time. Why would I want to spend twice that money on a dedicated reader?
Amazon has a problem in that, books are a "traditional" thing. Most of the books that Amazon sells are for personal enrichment and entertainment. I mean, there's more to a book than its content. Sure, if we're working and doing techy stuff, Google is good for finding things, but, if you want to just relax and unplug, a book is a beautiful thing. You hold in your hand a tradition of printing that goes back hundreds of years, of writing that goes back thousands. There's a whole literary culture floating out there, waiting for you to join it. For a brief time, when you do read a book, you do.
Yes, you could argue, that an e-book could hold 10 million books. But, what of it? A book by itself is something that holds more than enough for you to read for a few hours, and you get the smell and feel of the paper, the binding, the immediacy, history and intimacy. An e-book is just another plastic appliance, lacking in craft.
This is my sig.
And as the reviewer points out, $400 is a load of money for what is essentially a blank, fragile, battery-powered book.
To be fair, it's also a cell phone that you can't make or receive calls with.
I wonder how much more affordable the Kindle could have been if they had cut the EV-DO radio and network stack from the hardware design, and didn't have to incorporate the cost of a lifetime service agreement with Sprint into the price of the unit?
People don't seem to have any problem plugging their MP3 players into a USB port every once in a while to synchronize new content; so who decided that it customers would not tolerate doing the same thing with an e-Book reader?
Wrong.. That newton was 480x320. The screen was physically smaller. It didn't have nearly as much contrast. The battery life isn't the same (the Kindle is measured in page turns, it will hold a page image practically forever). Newtons were great (I had one), but don't kid yourself. They aren't equivalent.
The Kindle is interesting. The keyboard is ugly. The screen refresh time still seems like a problem for me (although I know it is a problem with all E-Ink stuff now). I think the Sony device looks much better. Still, these are quire an advance. My brother has one of those RocketReaders (or whatever) from ~2000 that is thicker than my MacBook Pro, heavy, ugly, and has a LCD screen about as nice as the Newton.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
All eBook readers will come with heavy and draconian DRM (as mandated by the book agency) until one vendor (also with heavy and draconian DRM) significantly corners the market through a beautifully easy to use device, tied in store and large volume of works.
This one company won't licence their DRM to anyone else and uses their huge market presence to force book publishers to accept the price points and the restrictions they want.
Given that the only way to get books out to everyone with that reader and avoid partnering with the one big company, publishers will find themselves having to accept that they're going to have to start looking at DRM free books.
Sound familiar?
(All I can say is thank god for Apple not licensing their DRM. If they'd done a Microsoft and licensed it to everyone who asked, music publishers would never ever have been contemplating DRM free media)
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
I do not own it, but I was able to borrow it for 48 hours.
In reading other reviews, I think most of the reviews I have read are talking about the "eBook" concept in general. That, to me, is separate from a review of the Kindle. I have no idea of "eBooks" will catch on, or if people will generally like them. If you like the idea of an eBook, I thought the Kindle implemented the eBook concept quite nicely.
I thought the platform was very nice. This is not a laptop, it is a book. And, for reading books, I thought it did a great job. I liked the the form factor for reading. It was comfortable to hold and comfortable for reading. I really liked the ability to "impulse buy" books. I only downloaded samples (as it wasn't my Kindle or Amazon account), but it was fast and enjoyable. I also liked the ability to change the font size. It allowed me to place the Kindle in a position that was comfortable on my arms and comfortable for my eyes. I really can't say I cared if it did PDF natively or not. I read PDF's on my laptop. I'm not sure why this has become some huge deal. I didn't feel Kindle was trying to replace all things paper.
Darn right, its like I've been telling the upstart RCA: People who don't like radio aren't going to come around if you put it on a screen. People who like radio like RADIOS.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
The price I've seen is 700USD and for that price I can buy a cheap laptop that is way more expandable.
If you think this, then it is clear that this technology is not for you. I read a lot of this in slashdot but what people fail to see is that there is a specific market for this kind of devices. Specially for the ones that allow making some kind of notes.
As an example, both of my parents are biologists (they go to field trips to that strange place called "the nature" quite often). They sometimes stay camping when doing field trips which are usually done to catalogue species and the like. One of the main problems in those trips is that students may have to take their field guides (which are supposed to be special editions for field work but, are akin to our "SQL pocket edition " manuals, with lots and lots of pages). The problem is that sometimes they have to take two or three guides with them making it really painful to pack 5 Kgs of books...
Now, they usually can not take a laptop because trips last for a lot of time, and they need access to the books quite often. Hence, a laptop which battery lasts for 4 hours at *most* wont be useful. However a device which lasts 15 hours or more will be very very useful.
That is why, when I showed my parents and my flatmate (who is a zoologist) the OLPC, they got fascinated as it really solves quite a lot of problems for them. Specially, my flatmate goes into the Selva Lacandona and stays there camping and examining animals for weeks. A computer which can be powered by turning a crank and which power lasts longer (they do not need fancy graphics, even black and white is great) will be the perfect sollution.
The problem is that from our closed computer cube world, this kind of devices only make sense as gizmos. But there *are* several uses for this technology.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
it fixes the end-to-end DRM problem. The device is completely locked.. but you don't have to put soul-stealing DRM on your PC desktop and beg permission every time you update either. You can buy a new book from anywhere, so they turned lock-down into a feature. I could see this being a method for delivering content like magazines and newspapers because of the push ability, that could save some publishers.
What people REALLY want is something e-paper about 13x19 tabloid size at 300dpi & reflective that can roll up. Better yet, have 2-3 that network to share a books on different pages. The current e-books are too small to be useful for anything other than reading sitting down.. like a book, and don't have things like tabs to mark sections of multiple open books. For most "geeks" to use this instead of books (like say O'Reilly material) you'd need to have 6-10 books open and 5 places bookmarked in each with both pages visible and stacked so you can quickly switch between them... just like a stack of real book when working on a project. It also needs to be the 13x19 because without that it eliminates using it for any kind of blueprint/charting work (another thing people would pay big $$ for)
One of these days mankind is going to have to forgo the luxury of killing trees because they smell nice. Why not today
Trees are evil. They are always taller than we are, which means, they always look down on us. They hard and practically unbending, meaning they are inflexible.
They stand before humanity, and mock them, continually. And yet, you support these things?
I enjoy chopping down trees. The mighty axe puts any in its place, and I enjoy wood furniture and flooring as a symbol of my domination over nature.
This is my sig.
If you haven't seen this baby you really should take a look, and be sure to click through to some of the photographs of it with the link at the bottom.
I absolutely will not, under any circumstances, willingly purchase a device that uses DRM or locks me into using one vendor to buy books the way Amazon's Kindle does. Not when it's so easy to make a device that does what I want it to do instead of what the vendor wants to be done to me.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I was given a Sony E-reader recently as part of an airline promotion. I was as skeptical as most in this thread about their utility, etc., but have become a bit of a convert:
1. On vacation they're absolutely brilliant. I was out of the country for two weeks. The reader plus charger took almost no space, especially compared to the space ten or eleven books would have taken. I had my notebook with me as well, and was able to buy additional books -- which let me keep going on a series I particularly liked.
2. The slow page refresh isn't terrible, and I gather the Kindle is faster than the Sony.
3. I like the feel of the Sony reader. I suspect the Kindle is clunkier, but I defer to Pogue in the NYTimes who said it was fine. The screen works well in open daylight, and I quickly enough was able to ignore the medium and get into the content.
4. It looks like Amazon is given customers a price break on e-books. Sony charges as much as a paper book.
Bottom line: they're more useful than would appear to a non-user -- especially during travel.
And to the cult thing: I suspect like most people, I am not particularly loyal to any online store. I am willing to pay *slightly* higher prices to Amazon for both the convenience and their excellent handling of (very rare) problems.
I just got a Kindle, but I feel like both sides of the debate are being unreasonable. First, probably the reason that most people who buy the Kindle give it very good reviews is that they researched the issues with the Kindle beforehand and decided that those flaws didn't matter to them (I know I did, before I paid my $400). Those who give it horrible reviews decided the flaws made it not worth it to them. (I also suspect people are inflating their good reviews to compensate for all the 1-star reviews by the Kindle-haters).
Now, why did I get the Kindle?
First of all, the argument that book-readers like physical books isn't always true. I read a lot of law books (big, heavy, unwieldy things that are miserable to handle). I need to read the content. I hate the physical book. I have to lug several around with me when I travel (my backpack is fantastically heavy) and I can't read them in bed without wearing out my arms after a few minutes. The Kindle solves all of these problems. This applies not just to law books, though. Even moderately heavy hard-backed books are difficult to read in bed for long durations.
As to the Kindle vs. other devices, I keep seeing people claiming that their iPhone is sufficient. Maybe they don't get eyestrain reading backlit lcds, but I do. The e-Paper is much easier on the eyes. It's not QUITE at the level of printed books (and you have to be a little forgiving of the typography--the Kindle doesn't seem to have a hyphenation dictionary), but I can read it for long durations without going blind.
Finally, the biggest attraction for the Kindle is that it has the books I want or need to read. Amazon has law books (at least some, and hopefully more will be coming soon). They also have novels, etc. that I want to read. I looked into other e-books in the past and the major reason I didn't get them (even if their specs are better on paper) is because they don't have the content I want or need. The Kindle (mostly) does.
As for the other issues, I would like PDF ability, but from what I understand there is no ebook reader that handles PDFs really well, and you CAN convert PDFs to Kindle's format if you need, though it is a hassle. The Kindle's web browser is decent, and makes a nice backup when I'm not around a WiFi spot, but there is Sprint service (and it's free). I also don't care about the looks of the Kindle (it actually looks better in person, I think, but even if it didn't, I want it for its function, not its form).
Sure, the Kindle isn't for everyone. If you read mostly paperback novels, one at a time, the Kindle isn't for you. If you read enormous, unwieldy books that you have to lug across the country when you go home for Christmas vacation so that you don't fail your exams, the Kindle is wonderful. Same if you don't travel, but just like to read big, bulky books without having to sit up. Anyway, yes, there are legitimate reasons for the Kindle.
I have both the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle.
1. The Sony Reader displays PDFs natively. The small screen makes this nearly useless except for especially formatted PDFs. PDFs can be converted for the Amazon Kindle and the results are generally not all that bad, except for complex formatted PDFs. (But most PDFs are formatted as 8 1/2x11 inch paper; to read that properly you'd need a 14" diagonal screen--and instead of a handheld device the size of a small book, you'd need something the size of a laptop.
And guess what? A cheap laptop fits that bill perfectly.
2. The Amazon Kindle in fact does allow you to annotate a page. Select the line using the menu scroll wheel, then select "Add Note". You can then enter a note that then stays associated with the line. On the main page a small 'note' icon shows up on the page. You can also browse your notes by selecting "Menu" at the bottom of the page, then select "My Notes & Marks"; this shows a list of all the notes that you've taken. Selecting the note allows you to go directly to the page where the note was set; you can then read your note. (The Sony Reader doesn't allow you to do this because it has no keyboard.) Both devices allow you to bookmark a page.
3. You can browse web pages; use the menu wheel to select the line where the link is on, then select the line. A pop-up menu will then show a list of the links on that line, as well as give you the option to look up the meaning of any of the words on that line. Not exactly as elegant as using a pen or mouse input device to click on the line, but it does work.
4. Sprint EVDO is more than fast enough and has wider coverage than a hodge-podge of WiFi hotspots. The price to surf using the Sprint cell network is built into the device--meaning that it is effectively "free."
5. The resolution is 600x800x2bits/pixel, for 4 levels of gray, which is the current limitation of e-Paper. What makes e-Paper cool is that in direct sunlight or in a bright room, the e-Paper is extremely easy to ready. The downside is that it is unusable without a nightlight in the dark, and it is much lower resolution (and has no color resolution) compared to LCD.
The Newton (which I also had) had a smaller screen, shorter battery life, did not have the ability to surf the 'net and had no content.
(As a footnote, this is the thing that fascinates me about Slashdot: if a post sounds informative, it gets marked informative--even if the content was clearly pulled out of the poster's ass...)
The Device Software will provide Amazon with data about your Device and its interaction with the Service (such as available memory, up-time, log files and signal strength) and information related to the content on your Device and your use of it (such as automatic bookmarking of the last page read and content deletions from the Device). Annotations, bookmarks, notes, highlights, or similar markings you make in your Device are backed up through the Service.
That's what really disturbs me about the always-on EV-DO. I really don't like the idea of Amazon knowing everything that I have on my reader. It's one thing for them to keep track of everything that I buy through their service, it's quite another for them to track any content I have on the reader. If I download a copy of the Koran through Project Gutenberg and put that on my Kindle, am I going to be paid a visit by Homeland Security if I view the wrong passages too many times? Or what if I spend too much time reading a copy of "The Communist Manifesto"? Can you imagine if information could have been tracked like that during the McCarthy era?