Amazon's Kindle
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My quick take: No. I gather that it won't read PDFs so no dice; I won't even consider buying one as PDFs are the lingua franca of the web and it's crazy to not be able to have them available on a portable device. (PDF stands for Portable Document Format.)
No, the Kindle is not a herald of the ebook revolution. Amazon has made a wireless version of the Sony Reader with a less sexy design. These manufacturers are all buying the same eInk technology from the same place.
The main problems with their devices are price and selection. $400 and $10 per book are too high for a new market. A $50 LCD-based ebook reader with $2 or $3 books is what the world needs right now. Eink is nice, but so was my Ebookwise 1150 -- LCD, but backlit with instant page turns and _much_ cheaper than my Sony Reader.
Amazon's selection, at 90,000 books, is not what I had been hoping for. If anybody could do this right, I thought, it had to be Amazon. Unfortunately their selection is only 3 times what Sony offers. They need at the least two orders of magnitude above that for people to start spending comparable amounts of money on electronic books and paper books. For example, I looked up "Rex Stout" in the Kindle section of Amazon and found all of 4 books. New books fare better, but the back catalog makes paper the better deal. Large selection is not what they need, instead, they need comprehensive selection, which means nearly everything. At some point it'll probably take electronic copyright reform from Congress to get the publishers on board -- so I'm thinking the year 2050.
Unless, of course, the pirate market forces the publishers into action, like it has forced the record labels. The iPod was able to take off because it was the perfect device for everyone's pirated mp3's. In turn, this allowed iTunes and the legal music business to take off.
What someone needs to do is to invent the perfect (which means cheap and open) device for reading pirated ebooks (#ebooks and #bookz have Amazon beat on selection, btw), and to treat the store side of things as a joke. Sell the books for 99 cents or something. It'll take 3-5 years for market saturation, and at that point publishers will be forced to offer their back catalog for sale or see people respond to the "fuck you, we won't sell you our books electronically" by downloading them for free, as happened with the music industry.
Posted by: Thras | Nov 19, 2007 at 08:54 AM
Also, who's gonna pay $300-400 for a reader when they can still buy books for less than $20? And that discounts all the other drawbacks of the device.
Posted by: Gomez | Nov 19, 2007 at 12:20 PM
Don't write this gadget off so quickly. The Kindle DOES accept and display PDFs, very well. Read the Amazon reviews. Everyone (like me) who owns it, loves it.
Posted by: Milam Command | Nov 28, 2007 at 08:28 PM
The price shall come down considerably once it hits the markets and a few pieces are sold. Or they might comeup with a stripped down version. They have to reduce price, because nowadays, most readers are from eastern countries and they see $400 as quite expensive. But its an useful device and could become quite popular.
Posted by: clickbank shopper 1 | Mar 20, 2008 at 01:18 PM
"No, the Kindle is not a herald of the ebook revolution. Amazon has made a wireless version of the Sony Reader with a less sexy design" right
Posted by: free-ebook-download | Dec 26, 2009 at 01:46 AM