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Amazon Kindle 2 Leaked, Sony Reader To Get Touch Screen
suraj.sun writes with news that the e-book reader market is getting more competitive. The Boy Genius Report got its hands on pictures of the Kindle 2, successor to Amazon's first e-book gadget. The new version is a bit bigger, with edges that are less awkward, and it has a revamped key layout. On the same day these pictures were found, Sony announced that a new model of its Reader would be getting a touchscreen, allowing users to "turn the page by swiping their finger across the screen" and "annotate text using a touchscreen keyboard." The advances for each gadget may help them regain market share against the iPhone, which, according to Forbes, has eclipsed both in popularity as a reading device. Hopefully the competition for sales and the work being done by the OLPC Project will help to drop prices as well.
Wouldn't a scrollwheel be better than a joystick for the purpose of this reader?
I had been considering purchasing one, now I wonder if I should hurry up and buy v1 before the new one comes out.
"turn the page by swiping their finger across the screen"
Only appeals to those whose laptop screens are encrusted with fingerprints. Ugh. Gross. I'm also not impressed with cellphones that accumulate a "face-print" on their LCDs.
Yet another product that looks great until actually used. I'm sure the focus group loved it.
Perhaps the target market is those folks whom still run their finger along underneath the words?
It's like promoting the "quality" of HDTV to nation where 90% of sets have 1/4 inch of dust and pet hair and badly maladjusted picture controls.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
popular if they had any decent books in their store or actually supported non-windows platforms. You would think that in the face of the growing popularity of the mac and the heavy competetion they are facing that Sony would try to expand it's potential audience, but we all know modern Sony rarely displays anything that could be considered logic...
Monstar L
At least you can clean this, unlike paper books.
Thing is, with a cell phone you only need the screen for a few seconds, you won't be trying to read text with no backlight for hours and cursing every single page turn.
Still, it'll look cool in the marketing videos and that's what counts.
No sig today...
They're single-purpose devices with closed formats in an increasingly multipurpose open-format world. Why would anyone in their right mind spend about $400 on a device that is locked to proprietary formats and doesn't do much else except "read books." Just one more [expletives deleted] gadget to carry around.
On the other hand, smart phones like the iPod and Android, which can also presumably serve as schedulers, notepads, book readers, mp3 players/audiobook players and *gasp* phones?
Kindle and Sony were effectively obsolete the day they were released.
Speaking of pages smeared with Cheetos marks, I can't wait until I can get a set of DnD books for the reader. PDFs get the job done on my laptop, but the form factor of the Kindle would be a real win.
You gotta find first gear in your giant robot car
? batteries on the ipod touch last about 5-6 hours of reading, and if you make the font small enough (and read landscape) you can fit about 1/3rd to 1/2 of a standard paperback page on the screen. I am a very fast reader (120-140 paperback pages/hour usually) and I haven't noticed any decrease in reading speed using the touch, it was more of an issue on the librie since changing pages took 0.5-1 seconds, which is an eternity.
-- the cake is a lie
I don't disagree that they're pricey, but they're definitely worth it for a certain segment of the population, and not just limited to early adopters. I do a lot of traveling, and when I'm not I have about 3 hours/day of commute time to work via public transit. For me, the huge battery life is incredibly important, as is the ability to bring a LOT of reading material with me in the same small space. I absolutely hate the fact that my laptop won't last throughout an entire flight unless I bring extra batteries with me, and my phone only has enough juice for about 3-4 hours of display use (whether reading or doing other stuff with it) and I *really* don't want to land only to have my phone be out of juice when I need it.
For me, it isn't just reading for pleasure that I use it for. I'm a researcher, and I've got a few hundred journal articles on my Kindle right now (along with the clippings from them I've made and my "margin" notes) and it's just incredibly useful to have. Yes, I can get that same functionality on a computer or phone, but not combined with the nice form-factor and extreme battery life.
This isn't - yet - a mass-market technology. Just like laptops were originally so expensive that it only made sense to some people to buy them, e-readers are still expensive enough that most people couldn't justify the cost. Once they come down in price (and I have absolutely no doubt that in a few years we'll have sub-$100 devices that are at least as capable as the ones we have today) they'll really take off. Right now, though, you clearly aren't their market, but people in my circumstances are, as well as the early adopter types.
One market the manufacturers need to focus on is the textbook market. If I'd had the choice when I first went to university of picking up a $500 widget and getting *searchable* electronic textbooks with days of battery life, I would have done it in a flash, even if I still had to pay roughly the same price for the books themselves. Tha market is huge. I could see a clamshell type of deal with 2 e-ink screens. One for the text, the other side for notes/search results/definitions or whatever kind of reference stuff the student would want to have there. Students already budget for laptops etc, this would just be rolled into the costs and would pretty much just be a marginal increase.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
It's still not clear to me why precisely I want a hardware keyboard in my ebook reader. There just aren't a lot of reasons to interact with an ebook reader that can't be done with a couple arrow buttons.
Frankly, the Kindle looks like a bargain-basement product, with an upper-tier price. Yes I know most of the cost is in the screen, I just wish it didn't look like crap. Also, open formats would be nice...
The PRS-505 launched in the UK recently, and I was all set on getting one until I saw the price of books for these things.
When I buy a book from Amazon, it's delivered the next day and at least two people read it. The same titles as e-books cost the same amount on the Waterstones store, if not slightly more than on Amazon, and only 1 person can read them unless I shell out for a second reader. And in some cases, I was able to get new books from Amazon BEFORE they would be available on the Waterstones store.
E-books have to be at least 30% less than their physical counterparts before I'll start buying them or a reader to read them.
Of course, if I could find a decent site on the net I might be convinced, but I never managed to find one that caters to most of my reading tastes.