Today Amazon officially announced the Kindle E-Ink based digital book. It ain’t pretty but it packs some impressive features.
- EVDO wireless connection with included service. That’s right, no wireless bill.
- Access to Wikipedia and dictionary included. Reading Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver on your Kindle and want to learn more about bastinado? Cake. Select it and off you go. Wirelessly and for free.
- Your library remains your library for as long as Amazon keeps the service around. Supposedly the device holds about 200 books and has removable storage support as well. If that’s not enough, simply clear out some space on the device so you can hold your new books and revisit those old ones at your whim.
Unfortunately, it’s not perfect yet.
It’s hideous
The form factor will change for revision 2. It has to. This is meant to be a replacement for a book, yet the actual reading area is perhaps half of the front panel surface area. The keyboard takes up a significant amount of surface area and yet the buttons are small. We’ve had sliders on cell phones for years, this product cries out for it. Make the entire front panel readable with a comfortable bezel for the next and previous page buttons.
There are good things: they’ve really thought out the page buttons. The weight and size is about right.
It’s limited
Amazon has a stock of about 90,000 books you can purchase to read on the Kindle at prices ranging from $0.01 to over $1,000. You can read the first chapter of any title for free before deciding to buy. You can purchase subscriptions to magazines, newspapers and blogs (?).
That’s pretty cool and all, but the breadth and depth of titles obviously isn’t there yet. Chances are if your reading tends off the beaten path you might be out of luck right now. Amazon aims to build the library further, of course, and I’m sure they will. But it will always lack something given the entire output of humanity since Gutenberg’s time.
Note also that there’s seemingly no support for personal PDFs which seems like a grand omission.
It’s expensive
The biggest shot against the device is the initial buy-in price of $399. No doubt, people paid more for their iPhones initially. The iPhone is meant to replace a host of separate electronic gadgets: phone, music player, video player, PDA. This thing is meant to replace a cheap commodity, the paperback book. You can walk into any used bookstore in the country and there will be a book to read for $1. Only the hardest of the hardcore book reader will find this proposition even remotely appealing.
Books seem to be priced reasonably — I can buy Peter F. Hamilton’s entertaining and sprawling Night’s Dawn trilogy for $8 — though one could make the argument that since there’s no physical medium being produced, stored, or delivered we should expect to pay far less but Amazon still has to subsidize that data plan in the background, too. Your 400 clams and ~$10 per book doesn’t just buy you that reader hardware and something to read on it. That always-available EVDO data plan that Amazon is footing the bill for is a large investment. They have to plan for customers to use that thing day in and day out for a long time. Especially given the Wikipedia access, some customers might buy one book a decade and ring up charges for Wikipedia access.
I’ll take rev 2
I’m interested, actually. I’m a voracious reader and I go through books pretty quickly. I also tend to re-read books, often in the same year like I recently did with “The Baroque Cycle”. I actually purchase a lot of books as well and the thought of finishing a book and being able to browse a bookstore, read the first chapter and buy the book from wherever my ass happens to be planted is exceedingly appealing. There are a few things that have to happen first.
- Looks aren’t everything, but I’ll wait for rev 2. I think we’ll get a bigger display with the next revision of E-Ink. Color? Maybe.
- A larger library and a deep and expansive technical reference library. I’m thinking of something with a catalog like Safari with cross-references and web links.
- The price must drop below $200.
It’s a very good first effort, but the steep buy-in will deny it “grand slam” status. Hopefully Amazon will be able to survive the initial pains and do what needs to be done to make it succeed.
Very interesting product but I just can’t imagine ever using something like this… I’m down with still having some things that aren’t electronic I guess. I like holding a real book.
Looks like something I would skip for version one. On the other hand, the Sony Reader is at version two and though it has a long ways to go, I’ve heard good things about it from eBook readers. http://www.learningcenter.sony.us/assets/itpd/reader/