Sep 6 2007
Revived Amazon Kindle Rumors
I awoke to find several of my favorite ebook blogs posting about the Amazon Kindle and its purported release in October according to the NY Times. The news is nothing new except for still another release date. The Kindle is rumored to have built in wi fi so that you can purchase your books “over the air” instead of being tethered to a laptop or desktop.
Frankly, with the reduced priced iPods that also have wi fi not to mention 8GB or 16GB internal memory, a color screen, a keyboard and a hot form factor, I can’t imagine anyone jumping on the Kindle bandwagon when the price point is rumored to be between $400-$500 and is fugly to boot.
I have heard some whispers that Amazon might subsidize the price of the reader by requiring the purchaser to subscribe to Amazon’s ebook service.
Send to Kindle
Sep 06, 2007 @ 11:23:11
What a technological dead end!
The only possible reason for this object is to tie consumers into Amazon’s DRM protection. And we know how thats turning out for the music industry…customers just don’t want DRM, so avoid it and it will die. I don’t see why the book market would be any different.
Its even worse for electronic books because physical paper books are still a serious competitor. Electronic music was a great leap forward but electronic books don’t give you much that paperback doesn’t. Apart from limited battery life and difficulty lending it to your friends or selling it on! You may be able to carry 80 electronic books around with you at a time, but really all that is required to kill one train journey is one book, they last so long.
Electronic books are getting more popular, but this thing is not going to have much to do with it.
Sep 06, 2007 @ 11:31:19
Why don’t these companies ask ebook READERS what WE want? They all seem to get close, but then blow it. I well remember the Beta versus VHS fiasco. So I skipped the Sony Reader because their ebooks were in their own unique format, plus with no backlight, it wasn’t much use to me. Now Amazon has come close, but THEY didn’t quite get it either.
So for now, I’ll keep my iPaq PDA with Microsoft Reader. And when the price goes down, I’ll look at UMPCs. PDF and MobiPocket files may be more universal than LIT files, and conversion programs allow reading in different formats, but the user friendly navigation in Microsoft Reader, combined with all the Windows Mobile features (including wi-fi), makes the iPAQ a much better buy for around the same price as the dedicated ereaders. Now if only they could make them “talk” to Vista.
Now, I know nothing about iPods. I mean SERIOUSLY nothing– I wasn’t aware you could even read ebooks on them, I thought they were for listening to music/audio books like an MP3 player! So what ereader software is available for them?
Sep 06, 2007 @ 11:48:42
Bev, the new IPods have a big screen – 3.5″ and there is a hack that you can use to add an ebook reader for the ipod. it reads only htmls and txt files.
Sep 06, 2007 @ 12:22:28
Ah, so still not much reason to replace my iPAQ/Microsoft Reader. How odd that the iPod also came so close but then dropped the ball, too. Like I said before, they should ask US (current ebook readers) what we want. If they get it right, then ebooks will probably gain in popularity.
Sep 07, 2007 @ 04:02:54
Meh. For less than that sort of money I could buy a Palm TX or one of those new Nokias, and have a better screen on something that does other things as well, and doesn’t tie me in to someone’s proprietary DRM format.
I must drop into Baen’s Bar and check what’s happening with the Barfly ebook reader project. Now *that* is a by readers, for readers device. If they can get that into production at a reasonable price, I’ll be very interested.
Sep 07, 2007 @ 07:42:36
I’m not excited about the Kindle. But the Bookeen looks good. I convert all my books to HTML so as long as a book reader can read it, I’m happy.
The ipod screen is still too small for me and I wonder at the battery life.
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