Hands-On With The Kindle

Amazon's Kindle e-book may have sold out in record time, but there's still a lot of discussion about the device's merits. Neil Gaiman likes it well enough, but it's sent Robert Scoble into a fit of apoplectic rage. For a real, meaty, hands-on look at the way the device operates in everyday life, Gamers With Jobs writer Julian Murdoch has a slice of life with the Kindle. He takes us through his Thanksgiving holiday weekend with the device, noting the quirks (good and bad) that cropped up with Amazon's new toy. "Short of reading in the tub, the Kindle is easier to read in more places, positions, and situations than a physical book ... But it's far from perfect. It is expensive. The cover, which I find completely necessary, is in desperate need of more secure attachment (Velcro works great). The book selection is less-than-perfect, although I imagine this will improve with every passing day. And Amazon needs marketing help. The Kindle's launch reeked of 'get it out fast.' The big-picture marketing efforts (like video demonstrations and blurbs from authors) were great, but simple things like communicating how freakin' easy it is to get non-Amazon content on to the device, for free, remain horribly misunderstood."

Pricing is the big hurdle

I don't understand why people would buy this at ~$400. May as well just go and get a low end tablet pc, which you could use for a multitude of other uses.

I'm not the NYT's typical top-ten reader, so I'm not sure something like this would immediately appeal. The last few books I've read were printed from 10 to 50 years ago, which would place them well beyond this device. Pros and Cons just don't weigh enough in favour and like I said, what does this do that a tablet couldn't do? Maybe when they drop it to ~$50 and I can sync it like my iPod to my favourite content feeds each morning it would hold some promise.

Also, books don't require batteries. I've got several devices around now, which all have some form of rechargeable (and expensive to replace) cells. I worry a bit about the availability of replacement cells several years down the road.

Re:Pricing is the big hurdle

Here's what it'll take for me:

+ Reader has to be under $100.
+ Books have to be half the price of print books or lower.
+ No bullshit DRM. I better be able to back the content up, copy it to my ipod, save it on my hard drive. Whatever.
+ I better be able to resell it, just like I can resell a used book. Otherwise, all of this is just a run-around way for the publishing industry to attacked the used book trade, which they hate more than almost anything else on earth (including their loathing of public libraries).

Re:Pricing is the big hurdle

"Hypothetical" competitor to the kindle? There already are such devices which predate Amazon's own release as well. This one [bookeen.com] looks good. Again, a highish price but it looks better than Amazon's own (Linux support being one of, though not the top, reason for that). Sadly, like the Kindle, it has also sold out completely, but I'm seriously thinking of putting one on order.

Re:Pricing is the big hurdle

Well if you see the DRM on the Kindle as a selling point, then that does narrow the field (though the device I linked to does support MobiPocket which is one of the most popular DRM book formats, I'm told). However, DRM is a minus point to me. The frustration it can cause me can actually push a purchase into negative value to my life. There are alternatives to DRM. For example, I have purchased numerous PDF books with watermarks. And given that production and distribution costs fall to close to zero for the publisher, you can even dispense with security altogether and still make a healthy profit as BAEN books seem to do.

Re:Pricing is the big hurdle

-It's going to be a while
-They are
-Explain to me how you do this with paper books?
-Good point, something that must be addressed by congress. So get involved.

Re:Pricing is the big hurdle

You don't have to back up a paper book because unless your house burns down (and sometimes even in that case) you will still be able to read it.

Electronic digital data is very fragile in comparison to it's analog counterpart. The benefits of that fragility however is the ability to cheaply make exact duplicate copies of the data.

When you have digital data with DRM, you have the worst of both worlds essentially.

Re:Pricing is the big hurdle

Moot point since Amazon "backs up" your books: you can re-download the books for free once you've bought them.

Re:Pricing is the big hurdle

And what happens when the Kindle fails and Amazon stops selling the books? Or they release a new format and stop supporting the old one? Or any other of umpteen donzen scenarios whereby you can no longer access these "backups" Amazon so thoughtfully decides to hold for you on their own servers?

Don't think it can happen? It already has. http://www.google.ca/search?q=mlb+drm [google.ca]

Re:Pricing is the big hurdle

how about instead of ebooks being cheap: you purchase the physical book, and get access to the kindle version immediately. that way you can start reading before it shows up if you really need it (think textbooks).

Re:Pricing is the big hurdle

• Under $100: I don't agree. But I think they should bundle it with books to make it basically free.
  
• Books half price: they should be cheaper than paperback. It isn't clear how much cheaper. CDs are basically free to make, and yet expensive to buy when filled with music.
  
• No bullshit DRM: Here I totally agree. Even though books are available now in many formats and comparable volume (e.g. kindle/mobi, microsoft lit, sony lrf) I only buy microsoft lit books. Why? Because the format was broken, so I can save unprotected, and I'll be able to read the books no matter what device I buy in the future!
  
• Reselling of digital books is a bit of a problem, without DRM. Are you sure you'll delete the book once you give it away? It is a bit similar to the problem of digital music. Say you ripped your CD collection to MP3, and then the CDs were stolen. Will you delete now your MP3s? Can you sell your used MP3s? But I think that borrowing of books from friends should be possible with digital books, and the library problem has to be solved.
  

Re:Pricing is the big hurdle

+ Reader has to be under $100.

How about free [mobipocket.com]? Provided, of course, that you provide your own Blackberry, Palm, Smarter-Than-Thou-Phone, PC or other geek-faux-wang. If you don't already have one you can probably find something acceptable at or near your $100 price point. It won't have the big e-Paper screen that the Kindle does, but I have no troubles using a smaller display.

* Books have to be half the price of print books or lower.

e-Book pricing is all over the place right now, with titles ranging anywhere from free [baen.com], free [manybooks.net], or free [gutenberg.org], all the way to about the same as printed books [mobipocket.com]. As the market grows expect to see more pressure on prices which should force things down a bit, but don't hold your breath.

+ No bullshit DRM. I better be able to back the content up, copy it to my ipod, save it on my hard drive. Whatever.

Some books ship with bullshit included while others come pas-des-merde-des-vasche. With a good reader you can feed it anything from flat ASCII text, HTML or PDF files through to insanely encrypted tracts of bull and have something readable come out the other end. The choice is yours.

+ I better be able to resell it, just like I can resell a used book. Otherwise, all of this is just a run-around way for the publishing industry to attacked the used book trade, which they hate more than almost anything else on earth (including their loathing of public libraries).

Yes, you can absolutely resell the hardware that you read books on just like you resell a used book. Reselling _data_ is a trickier problem, as it is nothing like a used book. Besides, the only way for second hand ebooks to have any value would be if they included "Bullshit DRM". Which do you want, resale or steerpoopage?

Sprint EV-DO might be part of it.

Take a look at the specs [amazon.com].
This thing doesn't sync, nor use WiFi. Instead, it downloads content through Sprint's wireless 3G network (the same one that their phones use). There is no subscription fee for this (the data service). It will also download newspaper and magazine subscriptions daily (no syncing or need to find a WiFi hotspot).

Perhaps their pricing model is built around including some type of specially negotiated data plan with Sprint that is amortized over the projected lifetime of the device. (Just speculation).

PDAs: $150. Why get a Kindle?

The Palm T|X sells for around $150 these days.

I've been using one for over 2 years as my eBook reader of choice, and almost never open a regular book now. Toss PalmFiction on it, and you have a top notch e-book reader that can read HTML, MS Word, RTF, Text, PalmDoc and a number of other DRM-unencumbered formats.

Want a more integrated experience? There are over 10 other e-book readers for the PalmOS, some which have their own DRM-encumbered formats, some where you can purchase directly from the eBook app, etc.

Project Gutenberg encodes their documents in Plucker format, which has a native PalmOS reader.

The T|X has WiFi and Bluetooth support, and can connect to the internet via cellphone BT link, WiFi router, USB uplink with a computer, or even IrDA.

It has a 320x480 (2.5" x 3.5") screen, which might seem small, but works really well for reading text. Text can be displayed at any size and be linked to dictionary lookup/wikipedia/etc. Plus, the device fits in my pocket, so I'm actually likely to have it when I want to read a book.

Apart from the eBook features, the device can link to common calendaring and address book apps, browse the web, etc., act as a VoIP phone if you install a microphone, be used to watch movies, listen to music, CREATE content and take advantage of the thousands of software applications written for the PalmOS platform.

Oh, and it can run Linux too :)

Re:Pricing is the big hurdle

"what does this do that a tablet couldn't do?"

- Cheaper
- Lighter
- Smaller
- Doesn't overheat. (Sadly, TabletPCs aren't that friendly in that regard.)
- More battery friendly
- Easier on the eyes
- EV-DO syncing. (Wikipedia in places your Tablet PC would find challenging.)

It's a specialized device. It's not necessarily for you. I wouldn't say it's a total waste, either. If not for the early adopter price, I'd have one right now.

Misunderstood, no: intentional

>but simple things like communicating how freakin' easy it is to get non-Amazon content on to the device, for free, remain horribly misunderstood.

And it is in Amazon's interest to show people who might otherwise buy material how to avoid buying material... how?

Re:Misunderstood, no: intentional

Actually, you can download the manual from the Amazon site. However, it still isn't clear in the manual. You have to put two and two together, and those sections are about 15 pages apart in the manual. Nowhere does it explicitly state, "Hook the Kindle up via USB and you can transfer certain files for free". That would have been nice, but I think the GGP was somewhat correct in saying that there's not a real big advantage to Amazon in making the explicit statement. It also doesn't really jive with their main marketing point, the wireless connection through Sprint and lack of a need for a computer. There are some good discussions on the Kindle page regarding this topic, but, as with most of Amazon's Customer Discussions, you have to wade through a ton of crap.

Free as in Beer?

easy it is to get non-Amazon content on to the device, for free, remain horribly misunderstood

If I'm not tied to a single source for my books then I may consider it, but I still enjoy they actual book feelings though. Weight, smell, etc... Some parts of reading a book have nothing to do with what is written... At least for me.

Re:Free as in Beer?

but I still enjoy they actual book feelings though. Weight, smell, etc... Some parts of reading a book have nothing to do with what is written...

That's like saying you won't drive a car because you like the smell of a horse's ass.

Kindle

Ah, so it's more Kindle-ing for the e-book's fire, eh? OW OW OWWW! No hard fruits! *Watermelowned*

Shock!

Do you mean to tell we that Amazon, a reader that makes money by selling things, aren't talking too much about ways to get non-Amazon content? Besides, what is non-Amazon content? Blogs, RSS feeds, and stuff you upload onto the device. Methinks PR didn't think these were great selling points. That's interesting...

I wanted to see the "fit of apoplectic rage"

But it's a 14 minute video! Linked from the front page of Slashdot!!
Oh my.

Re:I wanted to see the "fit of apoplectic rage"

Have you ever seen a grown server cry before?

easier than a book?

"Short of reading in the tub, the Kindle is easier to read in more places, positions, and situations than a physical book"

I don't understand how this could be true. Seems like it would be heavier, more sensitive to water/rain/mist/fog, harder to see in bright sunlight, etc etc...

What am I missing?

An analogy

I think the Kindle will be to traditional books as this device [segway.com] is to walking.

Re:An analogy

Maybe this particular ebook reader will fail, but I wouldn't write off ebooks in general. Back in the mid 90s as a Uni student I had huge heavy boxes of books which I had to cart back and forth each term. I'd have rather had them all on one little 10 ounce ebook! The same really goes for all of my technical books I keep at work.

As for non-fiction/newspapers/magazines, these are the kind of things I read on the train. Turning a page is quite tricky when you're jammed in like sardines or you only have one hand free. I think ebooks certainly have the potential to make reading more convenient in various ways.

Extra, Extra! Read All About It!

This just in, Gutenberg wins again!

Please don't link to video.

If you can't say it with written words, it wasn't worth saying. These "video shows" and "podcasts" are nominally entertaining but worthless for conveying any kind of real information. Please don't link to them like they're big-people essays -- it doesn't matter how smart you are, I can read ten documents written by people almost as smart as you are in the time it takes your stupid "veeblog" to buffer, play its stupid intro, and replay the series of meat noises you've encoded the information into.

Please. Just pass them by.

Re:Please don't link to video.

If you can't say it with written words, it wasn't worth saying.

While I agree with your point, I don't know if I'd go quite that far. A lot of content, especially in the realm of creative works, is more fully enjoyable in multimedia format. I'd rather hear a band play a song than read the sheet music; I'd rather watch actors perform Shakespeare than read the script.

But for a non-creative work like a gadget review? Put the digicam down. Text will carry the essential value of the content just fine.

Re:Please don't link to video.

Unless its porn. Porn works better as video than text.

Re:Please don't link to video.

> Unless its porn. Porn works better as video than text.

For us guys your statement holds. However the huge 'romance' novel industry argues that for most women text porn is preferred over visual. Whatever. Wonder if Bezos has made sure to have lots of that sort of stuff ready to sell on the Kindle. :)

(And no, with eight gray levels and 800x600 resolution forget jpeg/gif.)

not so much pricing of the unit, as the content

a digital book should *NOT* be 10 dollars. i don't care if its a new book and only available as a hardcover for 18 bucks. i'm not spending 10 bucks for it. when the paperback is released, it still looks like the price of the e-book costs about the same, if not a little cheaper than the paperback. if they were selling new releases for like 2 bucks and paperback-released books for a buck (or just sell them all for 99 cents a piece), it would be a huge factor for people who buy a lot of books. it means they may eventually start saving money in the long run if they read that often. plus, it may entice people just to read more often in the first place or to even purchase books on impulse. they may not even read all the books they purchase if its at that price. i think they'd sell a lot more books and make more money due to having lower production costs. books are priced more than music. once the music/filesharing fiasco ends (which will probably be within this decade), books will be next. its a fringe market right now, but more and more books are becoming available online.

Re:not so much pricing of the unit, as the content

All I can say is take an economics class. You aren't entirely off base, but a good microeconomics class will pretty much explain why it is as it is and why your points aren't entirely accurate. But the key point is that you seem to think that you are paying more for the materials than the content and also ignoring the costs of servers/bandwidth/etc. If I were to open my own "Sahara" book store and sell every e-book for $1 how long do you think it would be before I went under from having smoking servers, angry employees wanting to get paid, and a disgustingly large electric and bandwidth bill? The "e" part only takes out one tiny slice of the cost...the actual printing...which is pretty small over a large enough production. You are still paying an author, a publisher, a retailer, and all the associated employees in getting the book from draft to print and all the marketing in between.

I agree that the price of ebooks will likely come down as the demand for them increases, but I doubt they will get to be as cheap as you want them.

Re:not so much pricing of the unit, as the content

eh, Apple sells songs for $0.99 each which weigh in at about 3-4mb each.

A 50,000 word novel with an average word length of 5 characters (plus 1 for spaces or punctuation), is only 300k. Let's even up it to 150k word novel that's a bit wordy, maybe 9 characters a word (plus 1 for spaces or punctuation). That's still just 1.5mb, half the size of a song. As long as we're talking just plain text, it's pretty cheap. You could even compress it, and text compresses very well.

I can understand having to pay the people who write and maintain the software, the editors, authors, marketing people, possibly artists for cover art.. but bandwidth for the actual transport of the written text is so small that it really shouldn't have that much of an effect on the final price. I can't imagine that the bandwidth costs to transfer 1.5mb of text is greater than several hundred pages of paper, glue, ink, and physical transport to a store (and the store clerks, and all other costs associated with physical retail).

Re:not so much pricing of the unit, as the content

bandwidth cost is much lower than the same costs for physical books which include not only printing but also shipping and handling, which alone is probably more than the bandwidth on a per book basis. The grandparent might be a bit off on the $1 number but he is right that nobody is going to pay the same price for a text file that they would pay for a paperback.

Books arent like music, they dont have as much replay vaule, your not sitting on a train thinking, "man, if only I had that book I finished last week I would read it again right now." Most people read one book at a time, or a few books at a time in some cases and there is much less value in carrying your entire library with you. So given all that, why would you buy a device to do that just to pay the same price for the book as you would for a nice bound copy?

Doesn't handle PDFs?

I read that the thing does not handle PDFs. Is this true?
If it doesn't, why would anyone buy it?

Re:Doesn't handle PDFs?

It doesn't handle PDFs natively, but FTA apparently it is extremely easy to convert .pdf's before download to the Kindle.

About the blogs/slashdot functionality...

Does any know how well, if at all, it handles commenting/forums associated with the blogs? Obviously, I'm most interested in /.'s. Especially 2.0. Any insight would be appreciated.

I'll wait and see

After actaully reading the two articles that I could access (Scobles delivered:

kyte: Browser Requirements
In order to view the kyte website, you will need the following:

1. JavaScript enabled.
2. If using Internet Explorer ActiveX must be enabled.
3. Version 9.0.28 of the

in Firefox on my Mac) I have to say that this thing looks pretty tempting. I too was skeptical, but the authors have me thinking twice.

I'm not forming opinions 'til I can get my hands on one.

Oh gosh - that last sentence probably cost me about 4000 Slashdot karma points...

Kindle whatever. What is Kyte?

I have never seen this Kyte player before but it's really cool. Where did they come from?

Eee PC

For that price, the Asus Eee PC is a better deal. I got one - neat little thing and it can actually be used for real work, since with SSH, I can do anything with it.

cant get there from here

i wonder what robert scoble had to say, probably nothing important, at least nothing important enough to show to people with opera

kyte: Browser Requirements
In order to view the kyte website, you will need the following:
JavaScript enabled.
If using Internet Explorer ActiveX must be enabled.
Version 9.0.28 of the

Theory

You know, I think I have a theory on why people get so upset about the idea of digital book readers. It's not the DRM, it's not the batteries, it's not whether you can loan your book...

The biggest problem is ego.

People who read a lot of books LIKE having huge bookshelves to impress people on how many books they have. "Yes, as a matter of fact, I DO read more than thou, hence, I am more intelligent. Bow down and kiss my ring!"

How many of these people keep around books they know they will NEVER read again? Why not donate them to the library, and clear up space on the ol' bookshelf? Because they like having the scorecard on the wall. Having an e-book spoils all the fun.

I think this is actually a generational thing. I'm noticing that younger people have no problem downloading scanned books, reading them, and moving on. I think the ego stroke of the big library will eventually be extinct, like we're seeing with big walls of record collections.

1984

My biggest problem E-books is how easy they are (the DRMed ones) to centrally control. The Ministry of Truth was an expensive operation, what with collecting, incinerating, and reprinting books they wanted to change. E-books can be "updated" at the push of a button. WORM media and the kind of widespread copying publishers hate are our weapons against the rise of the Ministry of Truth.

Why the hate?

While Kindles blemishes aren't exactly earthshattering, I think it suffers from the negative side of the iPod halo effect. We are starting to expect that electronic equivalents will more clearly improve on the original. Just glancing at the Kindle (without probing its deeper features, since consumers likely won't initially either), I don't quite understand why it's so convoluted. Why is there a keyboard on a book? Why not more screen? Why a button for next page, why not tap the screen? Why does it look like a Mac 128K screen instead of a laptop screen? Don't some books have illustrations? Are they in color? Will my NYTimes have photos and charts and whatnot that are sometimes instrumental to understanding the article?

See, I can see how the connectivity and immediate access to content is an improvement and how it's overall adequate and even good in many places, but we've come to expect more out of a 'breakthrough' device, and this just doesn't seem to have it. Doesn't mean it's bad, but it leaves people expecting that better can be done and will soon.

Publishers, DRM, etc

A lot of the same kinds of comments are coming up here as in other forums about the Kindle.

Firstly, even though this article points out explicitly that you can put your own content on the Kindle, lots of people still seem to refuse to believe it. You can! And you can use USB to backup the files, as well.

Secondly, DRM isn't really Amazon's fault. All publishers are really, really aware of electronic rights. There are major disputes between the Author's Guild and publishers because of this. Recently, in particular, there was a big fight with Simon & Schuster. There is simply no way that anyone, either authors or publishers, are going to give up these rights. Maybe a particular author will give away an old book for free over the 'net, but not in general. Both authors and publishers have to eat. Allowing everyone to copy their books is not going to happen. Amazon had no choice but to comply.

What would be very useful

Reference books in ebook form can be grepped through. So much more useful than paper versions of book.
That is the main draw to doing it on a computer. But if it is so expensive, why not just spend some more and get a laptop?

I used one yesterday; feels old and klunky

A guy here at work bought one. I used it. It is easy to read words on the screen. But it feels like an "old" prototype that he might have picked-up on eBay. I was able to figure out the controls quickly.

Of course, I wanted to try the "basic web browser". Not so good for most sites. But, satisfactory to read text blogs, as long as they are built "special" for text-based browser such as this it seems, or you have to navigate the "vertical scroll" stuff this device creates. Interesting that cell access is free. The scroll-thingy control is fine, but it seems out-dated. Actually reading a couple pages of a book was nice. The page "refresh" on this device seems sluggish at times. The screen response to typing is sluggish as well.

Overall, this just seems like a "let's test the market with this thing we created in a weekend" device.

Content first; price second.

The Kindle might make it. That's a very convincing review.

It's not a hardware problem; it's never been a hardware problem. My year-2000 Rocket eBook is more than good enough to read books for pleasure. Seven years of progress is seven years; all they needed to do was not screw up, and it sounds as if they didn't.

The biggest problem by far with previous efforts was title availability. Sure, they would have an eBookstore with "thousands" of titles, and if you asked the question "is there anything there I want to read?" the answer would be "sure."

But ask the question the other way around, as someone who buys books rather than someone who is sold books. The question then becomes "is book XYZ, that I know I want to read, evenavailable?" The reviewer makes it clear that this is an important question for him, too, and that he thinks Amazon falls a little short. But only by comparison with the ideal. Comparison with earlier eBook efforts is like night and day.

Just before the "eBooks are dead" meme hit, i.e. at about the peak of the craze, I took a look at the book list for Oprah's book club. I thought that was a very fair test. They were scattered across publishers, they were not so old as to be out of print and mostly old enough to allow time for format conversion, and all of them were good books that some disinterested party thought were worth reading. I compared eBook formats and audiobook format, audiobook being an example of a non-print medium for which the conversion costs and distribution costs were far higher than for an eBook.

As I recall, of about forty-four books, something like thirty-eight of them were available as audiobooks, i.e. most of them. And a grand total of six were available in any eBook format at all. And of the three dominant eBook formats at the time--Microsoft .LIT, Adobe eBook Reader, and Gemstar--no format had more than three of the books available.

Now, the very first precondition of eBook success is that, darn it, the books you want need to be available. That's not sufficient, but it's necessary. The holes in title availability were huge. For example, to pick one of my favorites at random, there was nothing by Barbara Kingsolver available in any of the three formats.

On a very informal test recently in which I just listed ten books I had bought or was considering buying, I found that eight out of ten were available in Kindle format. Including nine books by Barbara Kingsolver, two of which I haven't read yet.

The second thing is price. By the way, Amazon is honest in saying most books are under $9.99. Many of them are priced a little lower, in fact. These days mass market paperbacks are costing $6.99, $7.99, $8.99 and trade paperbacks are mostly above $10. So it's fair to say Amazon is charging paperback prices, even for books that aren't out in paper. Do I think that's a good price? No, I think it's way too high. But it is much much much better than before. In the old eBook days, the uniform policy was that if the book wasn't out in paper yet, the eBook price matched the hardbound price.

I must have had a dozen conversations with strangers watching me read my Rocket eBook, and they all went the same way. Increasing interest. Not deterred by the $300 price of the device. But when they asked what the books cost and I said "Hardbound prices if the book isn't in paper," the conversation would stop dead right there and I could see their interest level plummet to zero. Maybe they didn't actually roll their eyes but it felt like it.

DRM is sucky. Half the fun of books is being able to lend them. Can you imagine not being able to lend a book to your wife even if you each had your own device? And I am stuck with DRMed Gemstar-format content that will die when my Rocket eBook dies (and its battery life, once 20 hours, is now down to about 2). Locked to a hardware serial number in a proprietary format, and the company is bust and their servers are shut down and no customer-service people to help. So d

iBias

It would probably sell better if you put it in a shiny off-white plastic case and called it the ibook, which lowers my faith in humanity one notch.

Where do I begin?

Memo to Bezo-man, CEO d'Amazon:

Preface,
Dude you really really need to talk to people outside the early adopter, gadget/freak crowd. In anything remotely resembling the device's current form, this device is doomed.

First give it buying appeal:
*) Drop the price ... a lot
*) Make it a _lot_ less ugly...
*) I shouldn't have to pay Amazon everytime I blink

Make it a little less geeky
*) Make it so the keyboard can be slid out of the way
*) Make it a _lot_ less ugly...

Make the content have a life longer than the device
At some point your content will outlive the device:
1) It fails (and stockholders will make them pull the plug)
2) It succeeds (and to survive the imitators, it becomes non-backward compatible)
3) You just want the latest version and want to take your content with you
4) The darn thing breaks/gets stolen/etc
Since everything has to go through Amazon for a fee, if you want to keep all that stuff you paid for, you're going to pay how many times per device switch times how many devices in your life?

Give me the ability to do all those book things
*) Support more document formats (text, pdf and html should be a bare minimum)
*) Have content longevity (see previous section)
*) Don't give me anything in a proprietary format ... or ... if this thing pisses me off I want the option to take all that shit I paid real money for and really keep it _and_ use it on something else.
*) Let me push stuff from my computer to my kindle directly ... without stupid converter tool
*) Let me do annotations/notes/highlighting on pdfs and ship the modified doc back to my computer ... you know ... the ebook equivalent of the stuff a lot of us book people and geeks --your core audience-- do with paper books
*) For bonus points, give me the option to search both the content of books and my notes
*) For double bonus points, make that search rip through my annotations
*) For even more bonus points, give me a Mac/Windows App to manage my docs (think iTunes)

eBooks are better than paper books

Heresy!

But it's true, and I've been saying it for at least five years, ever since I first got my Rocket eBook reader. Read the article, and you'll understand why. Yes, eBook readers have some downsides, but not many, and they're trivial compared to the upsides -- assuming, of course, that you can get the books you want in electronic format.

Until you've done it, you simply can't understand how liberating it is to be able to read without holding the book in your hands. As the author of the article says, he found he could read while eating, holding his daughter, even running hard on a treadmill. And he's absolutely right that a good eBook device is "invisible" -- within a minute or two you completely forget that you're using it, because it gets out of the way of the content that it's presenting. Reading on your PDA or your laptop is not the same thing at all, because those devices don't get out of the way. Laptops are too big, too heavy, too powerhungry and PDAs are too small.

Here's my bottom line on just how much better eBooks are: My choice of reading materials has adapted to what I can get electronically, because I find paper books so annoying. Luckily, I was already a fan of much of the stuff from Baen Books, and they provide all of their stuff in electronic, DRM-free format for a very reasonable price (half the price of a paperback for single books, and about $2 per book if you buy their Webscription bundles). Because of the super convenience of an eBook, I now read almost nothing but Baen's titles.

BTW, as for reading in the tub: I've been doing it for years with my eBook. Just don't drop it in the water and you're fine (have you ever dropped a paperback in the tub? I haven't). If you're really worried about it, though, there's a very inexpensive and simple solution: Get a big ziploc baggie and put your eBook in it. Seal it up tight and you have no worries about water, sand or anything else getting in, and you'll have no problem pushing the buttons or reading through the clear plastic. I find that I can read eBooks in many places that I wouldn't take a hardcover book, because I'd be too afraid of damaging it, and it's not feasible to read a paper book wrapped in plastic. I also like the fact that my LCD-display eBook reader is readable in the dark. The Kindle isn't, but it's better in daylight (my eBook works in full sunlight, too, but it is a little harder to see).

eBooks are the future not because they're cool gadgets but because they make for a better reading experience.

Not a book iPod

I keep hearing this described as the iPod for books, which strikes me as a really misguided goal. I don't want an iPod for books, and most serious readers I know wouldn't either. There's something fundamentally different between flipping wantonly through my ever-shifting collection of 10,000 albums and singles, and spending days or weeks immersed in a single great book. I couldn't give a hoot about being able to store 200 books, or download a new title at the drop of a hat. What is the point of wireless? The most voracious readers I know would not find themselves constrained by the need to occasionally hook up to a PC and 10 or 20 more titles. I could map out my entire reading for the next five years in about 5 minutes of downloading from Project Gutenberg [gutenberg.org]. The reading world just doesn't spin as fast or as serially as the iPod world. It's off-putting to see it now falling under the iPod rubric, where it will be forced to compete for a dwindling slice of our increasingly short attention span.

Don't get me wrong, I'm completely open to the idea of an e-book; as an environmentalist I positively love it. But it seems like too much attention has been focused on making an iKindle, to the detriment of the actual reading experience itself. e-ink is much better than LCD, certainly, but anybody who would claim it's is as pleasing to look at as even a $.99 paperback has pretty low standards. And I feel like a real opportunity has been missed in making it waterproof, too. Who wouldn't love to be able to read in the shower! :-) Anyways, going solely on what I've heard from reviews, I'd have to say I agree with the assessment that it probably should have gone on sale in time for Christmas `09. Technology will continue its inexorable march towards perfection, and in a couple years today's screens will look primitive. Early adopters and gadgeteers will snap this up, but readers will stick with our dead trees for a few years yet.

Here's the thing I'd buy it and use it...IF..

If they would sell me the eBook with my physical book purchase. I love to read, but I also collect books, I like having that chunk of dead tree sitting on a shelf in my house...SO...if I was able to purchase the eBook as part of buying the book...say it was a CD attached to the back inside cover...or at the very most a minimal additional cost, say $1.99 to $2.99 with purchase of a physical copy, and normal price for the eBook otherwise, then yeah I might bite.

Based on mobipocket reader for smartphone/pc

If you want to try out the software and ebooks use Amazons Mobi-Pocket reader:

http://www.mobipocket.com/ [mobipocket.com]

Available for nearly every smartphone/PDA device out there.
The reader software is pretty much what runs on the Scoble. I mean the kindle, but without the weird physical UI.

Mobipocket also do mobi-pocket publisher (also free) so you can compress and distribute your own works.

Sam

Well I like it...

I received my Kindle two days after launch and have been using it steadily since then. What do I like best? Bottom line it's the "always connected" capability. I use this for downloading books (natch), newspapers, blogs (/. was the first...) and web browsing (lost count of the number of times that a quick check of Wikipedia has settled a breakfast/lunchtime/dinner argument). I've also taken to downloading the first chapters (free) of books in which I may be interested. I'm glad I did in many case - the hype behind books does not always match reality (natch again). I downloaded chapter 1 of Steve Colbert's "I am America" - god knows how that's at the top of the NY Times best seller list, it's *awful*. Glad I could read chapter 1 and realize this was not a book for me. (and no, it wasn't the politics that turned me off - it's just poorly written prose. Mr. Colbert should focus on what's he's good at: TV)

As for the cost: It's fine given that it has bundled always-on wireless access. If I had to pay $25 a month for wireless for the device and if the device was, say, $100 - I'd be out of pocket in 12 months. TCO is good. Look past the $400 price tag and realize what you are getting for the money. A version 1 ebook (it's pretty good - will get better with V2, V3.....) and 24x7x365 wireless access to a huge library. Good value in my book!

Kindle/burn/fire/paper/451

Will we see a major rewrite for the next version of Farenheit 451 slated for 2008? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451 [wikipedia.org] Is this why it was named "Kindle"? Is there room for product placement in the new movie? In this neo-futuristic dystopian society what temperature does a Kindle burn at? So many questions....

Oh dear

Amazon is touting this as the iPod of e-book readers ... it's actually the Zune of e-book readers.

Advantages of real books

- My paperbacks don't cause radio interference with my speakers
- Zoom is really intuitive - just hold the book closer and closer
- My favorite popup books are 3D. The Kindle won't do 3D for another 10 years.
- I actually like the color Best Buy ads when I read a newspaper since I'm a gadget freak
- I can use crappy books for kindling. The Kindle just doesn't live up to its name in this regard.
- While on the subject of fire, blasphemous book burnings are way cooler than blasphemous ebook deletions.

iPod

I remember the slashdot comments about the iPod when it first debuted. For those who don't, let's just say it looked about like these comments on the Kindle, lots of hate everywhere from people who had never seen, let alone used the device. The complaints were pretty much identical, too (DRM!, too expensive!, how is this better than a laptop?).

Thus, I'll go ahead and predict the success of the Kindle here and now. Within 2 years 90% of slashdot readers will own one, and those who don't will own a knock off that runs open source firmware.

no thanks

I don't see myself ever paying $400 for a book reader. I read books on my Nintendo DS. $30 for a flash card and you are good to go. So far the readers just support plain text but I've never found to be a hassle to convert books I wanted to read. You can even hold it like a book and read it with left/right pages. The DS Lite goes dim enough to read it in the dark and not feel blinded too.

What's up with the keyboard?!

This is suppose to be a READING device and it's got a keyboard that takes up like 30% of the surface area... That seems like very bad design to me!

Wireless SD card

A wireless SD card with 2GB onboard, addressable wirelessly, goes for about $100 now. With one in a Kindle, I could send wirelessly all the transcoded material (PDFs and DOC files) sent back to my desktop or laptop email account.

What's the deal?

I've been doing this reading of content with first a Palm III, a Palm Zire and now a Dell Axim. No one ever heard of Avant Go before?! About the only thing that improved was a bookseller offering current books. And streamlined how they get to the device. Of course this only happened when big money got involved in the process. I just don't know about paying $10 for a title. A little hyped up IMHO. Amazing how stuff like the iPhone (like, no camera in it?!) and Kindle get a mad rush to sellout. (reviewer says it's got a poor web browser? Get the Dell Axim on ebay and have both) Kindle is less than cutting edge stuff and if only people knew it they'd save some cash. Cripes! Re-purpose your tired PDA into a reader and save!

Instead of "Where did I place that book..."

it's "Where the hell did I place that book?"

I like the idea of losing one book when I lose a book, not my whole library.

Plus, just having this thing sitting on your bookshelf looks way less impressive than a bookshelf full of books.

What most of you cost-critics are forgetting

It has "FREE" anywhere internet access. With a built-in Web browser. (It doesn't understand Flash, but some consider that a bonus.) $400 amortized over the years you'd use the internet from anywhere (not to mention the reading bit), doesn't start to sound so bad.

Though I have to say, if you have $400 burning a hole in your pocket, I highly suggest you upgrade your phone [apple.com] first. That thing has been amazing on many more levels, and it will load up your PDF books just fine [tuaw.com] (just email it to an account that the phone can check, or go to a URL). And, oh boy, when the SDK gets released, oh, maybe in the next couple of months, it will continue to improve (or you can just hack it now, like I did).

I was going to buy a Kindle for my g/f for Xmas, who loves to read, but she is still using a clunky RAZR, so I think I'm pitching in for the iPhone instead. ;)

just get the OLPC

Let's see, compared to the OLPC XO laptop, this thing ain't that great.

The OLPC has a keyboard, and has the ebook mode. You'll get something between 20 and 24 hours of reading in the ebook B/W mode on the OLPC. It has a great shock and water resistant case, I believe you can leave it out in the rainstorm.

David Pogue with NYT demonstrated dropping it on a really jagged rock from about 5 feet off the ground, then threw water on it, then through dirt on it. Plus the OLPC is 400 AND you are donating one to a child in a developing country.

You could get 2 OLPC and totally share ebooks instantly. The mesh networking allows download, plus has regular internet and browser.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBoghPvyhts [youtube.com]

The real question.... Will it blend?!

Okay, lets get to the important part... Will it blend?!

Look at the eBook Prices

Like others around here I found the $400 price tag a bit steep but after thinking about it decided that for the wireless access and being able to carry multiple books with me it might work. While carrying literature with me is nice I also want to be able to carry reference books as well, or a book on whatever topic I'm studying. So, what's available? Lots of stuff. Checkout the Kindle [amazon.com] library. 91,000+ books! Wow!

Now, start browsing. Yes, New-York-Times bestsellers are $9.99 or lower. Sadly few of the books in the Computers and Internet [amazon.com] section are significantly cheaper than the physical versions: Fred Brook's Mythical Man Month [amazon.com] - $25.91 in eBook format. Martin Fowler's Refactoring [amazon.com] - $35.87. Joshua Block's Effective Java [amazon.com] - $39.99. To be fair, not all computer-science books cost that much but $25+ for an eBook is too much for me.

So while the overall selection is good and the prices on a lot of large-print-run books are great, it looks to me like the publishers are sticking with the view that books with low print runs must be priced higher, even when electronic. Too bad. I was hoping Amazon eBooks would let me carry more of the stuff that interests me beyond literature.

Question about the ebooks

Two questions for anyone who has one, but its about the ebooks not the reader -

1) Can you buy a kindle book from your pc not the kindle, and download it to your pc?

2) Can you read the kindle book on (say) a Sony ebook or on your pc?

Or are these books locked to the Kindle? Is it hackable in that case?

For me at least the books are what counts, not the reader. No way am I ever buying a book I can only read on one particular reader, any more than I will buy a CD that is locked to a Sony or Marantz CD player, or a Tune that can only be played on one particular brand of player....

why did palm fall apart?

I bought an m130 years back and was completely blown away. It was my first pda, pretty color screen, sd expansion cards, totally brilliant. I did a lot of reading on that thing. When my first 130 died I bought another one and it croaked as well. Saying to hell with it, I upgraded to the first Tungsten when it was a close-out special and it's been running strong ever since.

I took a look at the Palm line recently since a friend had expressed interest in an ereader. What the hell happened? I loved the palms and now they're all muddled! So we've got smart phones, the zires are replaced with some clunktastic piece of crap with low ratings, the tungstens are still stupid expensive.

Is anyone making a reasonable, entry-level pda that doesn't cost a mint? Because these things break so easily, I consider them to be consumable electronics. When I compare my tungsten to the blackberry I had from my last job, the berry seemed far more durable. RIM really put some effort into making those devices monkey-proof.

So has palm just gone completely into stupid land? I'd be just as happy to settle for a smart phone except they do NOT have the same flexibility I expect from a pda at the price point I want. The palm phones look too damn expensive. The phone companies also lock the shit out of these phones. I had full web access on the berry. I picked up a basic phone to replace it, not wanting to pay out the ass for the full data plan. I check out the data features on this phone and they want to charge me $2.99 a month just to have access to wikipedia! And that's not even covering airtime for the data, that's a separate charge! Folks, that's the kind of greed we're talking about when corporations take over the net, they're going to nickel and dime you to death just to access stuff you used to be able to get to for free.

But back to the original question, are there any good entry level pda's now?

Re:My beef with Amazon

"If I accidentally buy too many Wii's from Amazon"

You must be one of those REALLY compulsive shoppers. Turn off one-click if you haven't had your coffee yet.

Re:My beef with Amazon

Don't worry, you'll never find 3 Wiis in stock in the same month anywhere anyway.

Textbooks are a problem....

If you could get the content of textbooks or other reference materials for $10 as opposed to the $100+ that they typically cost it would pay for itself in a typical college semester. It would also be a lot lighter, more easily searchable, and generally a vast improvement over any 500+ page reference manual. It isn't anything that an EeePC or a small tablet couldn't do, but it is an alternative which may be more attractive to some people (the EeePC screen isn't great, decent tablets are still more expensive, etc).

Battery usage is probably a non-issue. Everything uses batteries, even the beloved iPod. FWIW, the iPod is also DRM laden, but I guess it's cool enough that people are willing to overlook that.

But if you're just talking about casual reading material, I'd agree that e-book readers are going to be a hard sell.

Re:A solution in search of a problem

There's absolutely nothing wrong with paper books.

Really? Okay, I'll just toss these ebooks in the fire and stuff a dozen hardcover books into my jacket pocket. While I'm walking home in the rain I will open one up and yell "SEARCH, DAMN YOU!" at it until it flips open to the page I need. When I get home I will tear out the pages I need, fold them up and slip them into the CD-ROM drive on my PC, hoping that it will somehow figure out how to import the a few sentences and a diagram into a paper that I'm working on...

And then I'll go out and search for some more non-existant benefits to using eBooks.

Don't get me wrong, I like real books just find and am quite happy lugging around big stacks of paper, but there are many cases where eBooks are much more convenient than traditional printed volumes.

Re:A solution in search of a problem

AC said:

In order to be successful, e-book readers have to actually offer benefits over paper books without significant drawbacks. They totally fail at that.

TFA said:

But in the final analysis, the point of the thing is to be a better book. It does this very well.

Yeah, I know, I must be new here.

Re:A solution in search of a problem

There's absolutely nothing wrong with paper books. I had my two kids sitting quietly on the bus next to me the other day. I read two short stories on my blackberry. There was no need for bookmarks and no bent book spines. I couldn't have done that without damage to a paper book.