Amazon reader device

Brad Stone reports information about the Amazon Kindle in the New York Times:

In October, the online retailer Amazon.com will unveil the Kindle, an electronic book reader that has been the subject of industry speculation for a year, according to several people who have tried the device and are familiar with Amazon’s plans. The Kindle will be priced at $400 to $500 and will wirelessly connect to an e-book store on Amazon’s site.

In the same article, Stone reports plans from Google to roll out a service to access digital versions of books this fall (presumably copyrighted books with the permission of the publisher).

Read below for my thoughts.

  1. For those of you daunted by the high prices, don’t forget the Sony Reader $49 offer for those who obtain a Sony Credit Card. (See TeleRead commentary here). NYT reports ebook devices as though the Sony Reader is a luxury device. It is not. The Sony Reader (quoted erroneously at $300 in the article) is well within the budget of people who can obtain a credit card. Yes, the offer isn’t valid for Europeans; sure, the Connect store isn’t wonderful; no, and graphics support on the Sony Reader isn’t wonderful either. But author creation tools have made considerable headway in the last few months, and Fictionwise has started to offer unencrypted LRF files.
  2. Amazon.com has been particularly stingy about revealing details regarding the Kindle. Is this e-ink? Is it the standard screen size? Will mobipocket continue not to support jpeg for its ebooks (the best it supports is 64K gif files)? Pre-holiday is a good time to introduce products. Why hasn’t amazon provided more advance information to the public?
  3. Who cares about wifi access? The only advantage I can see is automatic loading of RSS feeds. But really, are we that hindered by being unable to download RSS feeds on existing devices? (There are RSS feed readers for PDAs, and there are utilities for doing that on the Sony). But if wifi sucks up battery life, I’d rather do my transfers through the USB.
  4. The killer app is annotations/keyboard. The more I use the Sony Reader, the more I miss having the ability to highlight blocs of text and to make short notes. But when you’re talking $500, you’re talking the pricerange of tablets. At $500, a device would have to be pretty super not to need to be available for websurfing. If Amazon.com had a system to support uploading and sharing annotations, that could help them to capture the educational market.
  5. The fact that Amazon.com/mobipocket has not indicated intent to support .epub natively is both strange and interesting. Does this mean that instead of offering .epub files publishers and distributors would prefer to offer proprietary files converted from .epub files?
  6. I’m all in favor of more devices to hit the market (and I think this suggests the importance of mobipocket as a reading platform). But frankly, I’m surprised that Amazon didn’t simply partner with Cybook (due to arrive at the end of September). Yes, Amazon is many times the magnitude of the Cybook and Baen/NAEB people. But amazon.com core competence is distributing digital content, not producing hardware.
  7. Frankly, it’s surprising that PODs like Lulu have refused to deal with multiple digital formats like the mobipocket format (and .epub formats when tools like that become available). It’s beginning to seem like Fictionwise is the only distributor positioned to handle the Mobipocket vs. Digital Edition vs. Windows Presentation Foundation format wars that is quickly approaching.
  8. So in the next month or two, there will be two irresistible choices for Mobipocket consumers: the Cybook 3 or the Kindle? Kindle is more full-featured, more expensive and more likely to have some introductory ebook offer ($50 of free ebooks?) Cybook is more open to various standards, more likely to receive enthusiastic support from the development and reading community.

These next few months will be interesting indeed.

8 COMMENTS

  1. You asked, “Who cares about wifi access?”

    Young people do. My son wasn’t the least interested in e-books or e-book reading until he caught a glimpse of my Nokia 770. “You can surf the web on that?” Then he took it and didn’t give it back for more than a day–when it ran out of juice. He’s a reader, but he wouldn’t buy a standalone e-book reader, nor, he says, would any of his friends.

  2. I agree with Deena
    As “literacy” diclines so does “on-screen literacy” increase.
    Attention spans get shorter, people read less books and novels and more articles and blog posts.
    which means… having an RSS reader is a must have.
    And if they want to enter into e-newspapers – something that they definitely should do – then instant access is crucial.

    But there’s more…
    The .epub standard is pretty much packaged XHTML; in other words web pages.
    The only software that can process .epub at the moment is Adobe Digital Editions; which uses WebKit – the same HTML rendering engine that powers Apple’s Safari browser on Mac, Windows and on the iPods.
    So once you can get .epubs it would take little effort to have a web browser.

    And who on Earth wants an RSS-only-reader anyway?
    Wouldn’t you want to read the whole article in a “normal” way, in a browser? – especially when the feed only contains a teaser…

    If you think about it… this sheds a whole different light on the iPod-Touch/iPhone.
    To pick the Sony Reader or the Cybook or the Amazon Kindle over an iPod the only reason is having the e-Ink screen… but you loose having a multi-purpose device.

    I guess until eInk comes in color and fast enough to have video we cannot have everything.

    Maybe the OLPC display would help?
    Maybe eInk should be a secondary display for a PC or a PDA?

  3. Based on the original FCC filing, “wirelessly connect to an e-book store” means using an EVDO (cell phone) network, not WiFi. This may have changed, since WiFi is becoming more popular, but you don’t need WiFi’s potentially higher bandwidth for most e-books.

  4. I have nothing against wifi. The problem is that it uses battery. For the battery life to last as long as the Sony Reader, web surfing can’t be too long. That also means there needs to be an on-off switch for wifi and a clear indicator light of when it turns on. I guess it would be nice to have a timer that automatically fetches RSS feeds and newspapers, etc. But you could just as easily do this through the laptop/PC. Laptops have more power and capability to fetch this stuff.

    A usb on the other hand is a quick connection and a mouseclick from the PC (or maybe a syncing tool).

    The question depends on whether the syncing tool/conversion tools are able to be housed in the device itself, or must reside on the more powerful computer.

    Tamas: “Who wants an all RSS reader anyway?” Most reading on the web could just as easily be done via a RSS reader. RSS has proven to be a very portable format; I’d almost prefer an ebook reader to be able to read the RSS feed itself than to convert it to some binary file.

  5. I agree with Mr Nagle about wifi killing the battery. Better have a shutoff switch!

    But I suspect the wifi is also in there for the newspaper/periodicals subscription deals mentioned in the article. The publisher of the New York Times was quoted last year saying he intended to be all-digital in a few short years — and this is the NY Times itself. To do that, the Times is sure enough going to have to partner up sometime quick, and the Kindle might be the first step there.

    Check into Starbucks, dial in the latest edition, read away.

  6. Having used a Sony Reader since launch, my killer app would be PDF’s. I don’t want it bad enough to get an Iliad, but I’d really like to see a sub-$500 eInk machine that could render PDF’s decently.

    Mobipocket’s odd server behavior awhile back makes me nervous about their activated books staying activated. If your signal is bad or you have no wifi, are you left stranded without your books. Yuck.

    Also, the Sony Reader does read TXT/RTF files with no conversion (from an SD card, no less), so I’m not sure why (other than perhaps cosmetic reasons) one would mess with LRF any further. I’ve read a good many torrented ebooks this way, myself.

    Lastly, the comments on Engadget were pretty revealing. People would much rather have a pretty device from a company they hate (Sony) than an ugly device from a company they like.

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