Please explain

[james_davis_nicoll]

Why anyone would think that this product is a good idea.

Comments

[drplokta]

Because they want to travel with more books than it is convenient to carry in paper form, or they want to own more books than it is convenient to store in paper form.

[bluetyson.livejournal.com]

Whether another US only one is a good idea, good question.

Project Gutenberg.
Free SF Online.
Baen.
Fictionwise.

Easier on the eyes.

Cheaper books in the long run. (not everyone has the review fairy bring them boxes of books, let alone live in North America, and get charged half the price of elsewhere).

Helix.
Strange Horizons.

Newspapers are dying, dude. :) So are magazines.

Access to older stuff that is out of print - and see above.

Building all that up, we finally get to an Earth-Final Conflict flexible global to carry around.

[winterknight.livejournal.com]

The price seems awful, but what are people paying for iPods and iPhones? *shrugs* I can see several ways in which the thing would drive me around the twist, but it has the potential to get people reading a lot more simply because the books are so accessible.

I would love to be able to carry multiple books around for only 10oz of weight. My disability makes carrying even a couple books difficult at times. I can see that it would be an amazing assistance for students. When they put school texts on it, I'll get really excited. Something along those lines could really make a difference for students.

[winterknight.livejournal.com]

Perhaps more to the point -- why do you think it's a BAD idea?

I should note -- in the ways it would drive me around the twist mentioned above, the fact that it's proprietary and doesn't seem to be able to be synched with a HD, making all your purchases dependent on the continuation of that single device, are near the top.

As a piece of technology in general, I think it looks kind of nifty. Just needs to be more hackable. Open source, even.

[julesjones]

And they are completely unaware of any of the alternative devices which do not tie you to Amazon's servers and DRM. Amazon has actually achieved the dubious distinction of being even more bloody annoying on this front than Sony achieved with *their* attempt to conquer the world through proprietary content.

[montoya.livejournal.com]

Sure. But do they want a device that they can only get books onto via EV-DO? Where, if they want to read a document they've written themselves, they need to email it to Amazon, pay a conversion fee, and then download it wirelessly to the device? Where they have to pay money to read freakin' BLOGS? Where the books they read can't be read on their phone or computer, so can't easily be cut-and-pasted into anything else? Where the whole device, from Chiclet keyboard to monochrome screen to bizarre angular motif, looks like it's right out of a 1984 Tandy catalog?

E-books may be useful; the Kindle is not.

[iamza.livejournal.com]

If it were non-US only, I'd think about buying it just so that I could get instant delivery of books without worrying about being out when the mail delivery happens, or where I'm going to store the books afterwards. Also, it would allow me to go on holiday with a library of books at hand, including one for every conceivable reading mood, and still not exceed my baggage allowance.

It doesn't look very pretty, but I'll willingly overlook the aesthetic issues if it works as advertised from the get-go.

[ohilya.livejournal.com]

The cons are still outweighing the pros. If they want to get a really serious market share, they'd reduce the price, make it DRM-free, and make the texts adjustable.

(Just wrote an essay on E-Books, these some of my central points)

[caias.livejournal.com]

You would be better off buying a OLPC and using that. It will support PDFs and, you know, have a lot of other functions...

[dsrtao]

There are people who will buy anything, including Microsoft products and Apple 1st-generation hardware.

I have a Nokia N800. It fits in a pocket, has a high-resolution screen, is outfitted with 2 removable 2GB cards - which are cheap - and I have about 700 books on it right now. It can also play music, movies, and act as a web browser. Not a great email client. The battery life could be improved, and the screen could be more readable in strong light.

However, I am a technogeek. This isn't just a bookreader, it's a pocket computer. So there.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

If they pay me royalties, it's a good idea...

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

Not *this* device but *such* a device:
1. Portability: airports, always having a choice of books with you
2. Being able to carry both out of print and current books easily
3. Adjustable type size
4. Technophilia
5. Professional use (dependency on big heavy references such as Knuth, OED)

Not my kink, but I'm fond of many people for whom it is.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Yay! Someone is FINALLY using the "electronic paper" idea that was protyped by Xerox PARC in the late Seventies! And which I saw demonstrated in the late nineties!

Basically, you have a matrix of very small electrostatically charged spheres, each of which is white on one side, and black on the other. A charge is put through, which flips each sphere, giving you a black-and-white display which is as crisp as ink, and takes no energy to maintain: in its "off" configuration, it keeps the image last put upon it. It does not work fast enough to do animation, but it works fast enough to turn pages. Since the Eighties, it's been talked about as the technology that would make e-books practical. Now, thirty years after it was invented, someone's FINALLY brought a product to market using the technology.

I think this has the potential to be as big as the Segway. Maybe even bigger.

[montoya.livejournal.com]

If they want serious marketshare, they'll release a piece of software that works on all platforms -- Windows, Mac, UBUNTU, Palm, Symbian, Windows Mobile -- and uses open, un-DRMed files that you buy from Amazon. And then do some really awesome introductory pricing to get people out of their current habits (someone else suggested giving you free e-book access to every physical book you've bought at Amazon; this would obviously cost them a pile of money, but hey, throwing away money to get marketshare is Amazon's founding principle).

Until that happens, paper still rules.

[zarq.livejournal.com]

What a boon it would be to professionals if their industry journals were available. I know quite a few researchers who would love access to PubMed on a portable device that doesn't weigh as much as a laptop.

Students could carry all of their textbooks in a single unit and search and annotate as well.

There's a lot of practical potential here. If only the price were lower.

[montoya.livejournal.com]

Sony's been using that same technology in its reader. And it's not really that crisp -- it's only 160 dpi or so, which is pretty comparable to a high-resolution laptop screen.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

"Introductory pricing" -- the versions of my books list at the same price as a dead tree edition. Not a big selling point...

[kd5mdk.livejournal.com]

The Sony Reader, Cybook Gen 3 and iLiad all use eInk, I believe.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Most people find the work I do to get ebooks onto my Palm TX to be unacceptably dificult (I consider it trivial; but I've been a computer programmer since 1968). This device seems to be offering a very user-friendly process for getting content onto the device.

And for people who buy a lot of mainstream hardcovers, at a savings of say $15 per book, it'll pay for itself in roughly 26 books.

I find the closedness to be a fatal flaw, myself, but lots of people seem to not care -- or perhaps expect it'll get hacked shortly, as the iPhone did?

[insaint.livejournal.com]

It comes with a USB cable, so I'm guessing it should be possible to just upload things to it? Sort of like an iPod -- you can buy DRM'd music from iTunes or you can upload whatever you want of your own instead.

[insaint.livejournal.com]

The product description says you can adjust text size.

Edit: But for reading material only. That's dumb.

[mckitterick.livejournal.com]

Exactly! Also:

6. Textbook storage and affordability (for students).
7. Ease of note-taking without making a mess of a book.

And lots more. However, this is not the right device. It's far too expensive (though the cost could be moderated by including a bunch of credits toward buying books), isn't useful for anything but Amazon books (I want to read my .lit, .pdf, .htm, and so on files), and - critical issue here - and uses really dumb digital rights management. Also, note that it can do neither 6. nor 7. right now.

[mrgeddylee.livejournal.com]

It's so close to being a good idea that you can see a good idea from there.

Amazon's book pricing and DRM scheme say "we expect you to treat Kindle e-books as being every bit as desireable as real books." Sadly the device's cost, size, and battery life all say "Kindle e-books are not as desireable as real books."

As montoya says, if the Kindle experience admitted that e-books were still the ugly stepsister of the real thing, and priced them accordingly, it might go the other way. $10 Kindle editions of $25-$30 hardbacks are a start, but I want $3 Kindle editions of $7 paperbacks, and a further price break on a Kindle edition of any book I already bought from Amazon in paper format. Free would be good, but I'd still go as high as $2. Then when I was travelling I'd have a Kindle and a couple paper books in case of emergency, instead of a big sack of books and e-books on my PDA for emergencies.

Oh, and I hate the Kindle's keyboard. I see the necessity if Amazon expects us to do all our book shopping from the Kindle, but I'd rather shop from my PC and have more of the bulk of my e-book reader devoted to screen space.

[kate_nepveu]

No. It only supports Amazon's own format (e-mail it to them and they will convert, though they will not charge if they e-mail it to you rather than the device) and text out of the box.

[drplokta]

The Kindle does not tie you in unless you want it to. It will read HTML, Word and plain text files which you can obtain from any source you like. Since HTML is currently the only sensible format in which to deliver fiction to be read on a range of different devices, that's not very limiting.