The Amazon Kindle is scheduled to release real soon now. It’s another offering on the eBook market, and it aims to advance the field by adding a lot of features to the concept, tying it in with a store and its own internets, and charging end-users money for things other book readers do for free.
First up, they’re using an EVDO instead of 802.11x technologies. I can understand the reasoning,
and it probably had something to do with some back-office bribes. I’m sorry, but I can’t bring myself to think it was done for a technical reason. There are two types of 3G mobile networks, EVDO and E-GRPS are your two choices. I wonder if one will have to pay a monthly fee out the gates to use the Kindle online. With this EVDO-only arrangement, it’s without a doubt. It seems that they arranged it to be on EVDO for free. No word on coverage areas.
A plethora of content will be available on this ‘Whispernet’, including magazines and newspapers. However, charging $1-2 per month to pull weblogs to the reader is asinine. It’s already free content! If Mr. Bezos going to compare Kindle to the iPod, then web feeds should be free, just as podcasts are free in iTunes.
The WSJ is dropping its subscription model for online content. People with Mobi-capable devices can already sync rss feeds on a schedule. If Amazon owns the controlling interest in that company, I can see that feature ‘disappearing’ from the syncing software.
Being able to go on the web is nice, I just don’t know how practical it is, viziplex or not. I haven’t even tried it with my iLiad yet. Seems like a waste to me.
Books don’t have keyboards, so all affordances toward the end of making it ‘bookish’ are lost by adding a keyboard. While I like the character reading and on-screen keyboard on my iLiad, I use the device mainly for reading, not for annotations. YMMV, I suppose.
Of course, I’ll be expecting soft-updates to the Sony and iRex readers to challenge some of this. So far the iLiad’s connectivity and 2 of the four buttons at the bottom have been a big disappointment.
From the article:
“You can also get classics for a song: I downloaded “Bleak House” for $1.99.”
I just downloaded this same book from manybooks.net for free–in the same Mobipocket form. There is a serious freedom issue here–the book is over 100 years out of copyright! Welcome to the perpetual re-copyrighting of old texts. Everything old is e-newed again.
Every industry must recognize that after anything jumps to the digital domain, it can be copied. Any business model based on selling ‘x physical copies’ dies when it is met with a copyable medium. Anybody can emancipate a ‘keyed’ book if they have the key to it. If they can’t there are alternate routes. The Usenet contains several groups dedicated to .lit versions of many popular modern works. ConvertLit, Mobipocket Creator, and an upload to your reader is all it takes to start reading them.
all the talk on the 5th page about the money game around books is what surprises me the most. The publishers and Amazon pretend they are taking a loss on the books by selling NYT bestsellers for $9.99. I know that publishers try to get their money back on books they produce, it’s only fair.
However, the games industry have already proven that you can sell 20-year-old games for a few bucks online. This is similar to the above comment about getting a Guttenberg press book for free when amazon charges two bucks. Since ebooks never go out of “print”, they can be sold for much longer, and no longer need to ramp-up production like was case for many book-to-movie translations. The book is right there, ready for download.
Selling a hard-bound copy of a book for $24.99 and the electronic equivalent for the same is ludicrous. Printing, binding, shipping, storage–none of these costs incur with eBooks. The server just has to hold a few 1MB copies (redundancy is good) of the book, and provide keys to match it to readers. The whole process is highly repeatable and far cheaper!
All the while, I’m willing to be that authors don’t get more than a few points of the cover price of a book. Since expenses aren’t going to all of that distribution, etc., can’t the authors get more money out of an eBook?
Can’t authors, with a small and reliable team, self-publish? The method working for independent labels on iTunes. If kindle is such a revolution of an iPod level, then let it be so.