Kindle Watch

The media has been abuzz this past week over reports (not from Amazon) that about 240,000 Kindles have been sold in the US.  Portfolio Magazine does the math and wonders if the target audience for the devices has already been reached:

The Kindle is not going to make a reader out of a nonreader. Few will say, “Gee, reading books and magazines was prohibitively difficult before, but now that there’s a $359 electronic reader available, I’m going to start!”

Another look at the Kindle

Most of the early coverage of the Kindle was pretty harsh. Salon has a review of the device that seems to be more even handed, although it is also fairly critical. Some interesting bits from the article:

Overall impression: “this thing is very much Version 1.0; it feels like an early-adopter product, like a concept Amazon wants us to get used to rather than a gadget you could live with for several years. ”

The reviewer notes that the interface is pretty old school. How old school? “…like it was made for cosmonauts.”

While text looks good, “pictures look like they were rendered on a circa-1990 dot-matrix printer.”

Subscription web content looks pretty bad, too. The Kindle version of the New York Times “resembles what the Web version of the Times looked like in about the middle-’90s. ”

The hefty price remains the big sticking point for the Salon reviewer, but he has an interesting analysis of what it would take to make the Kindle worth your while. Assuming that you buy mostly hard cover books,

As I calculate it, if you add in the $400 cost of the device, you’ll need to buy at least 40 e-books at $9.99 each to get an average per-book price lower than $20, roughly the cost of a standard bookstore hardcover.

If you’re sure you can read at least 40 books over the life of your Kindle — let’s say five years, so eight books a year — then sure, go ahead and buy one. You’ll save money in the long run, not to mention 40 books’ worth of shelf space.

Eight books a year? My guess is that the height of that bar includes everyone who visits this site. I’m just sayin’…

(Thanks to F.O.B. Frank for passing this along.)

Update: The Wall Street Journal’s widely respected Personal Technology columnist Walter Mossberg weighs in with what should be considered the final word on the Kindle.

Amazon’s Kindle

Over the weekend I read through a Newsweek article about Amazon’s new e-book reader, the Kindle. The article reads like an ad for the device without much in the way of hard questions about the new gizmo. Lo and behold, the Kindle showed up on Amazon’s web site yesterday, and it’s ready for shipping.

If you read this blog, however infrequently, you are the target audience for what is being hailed as “the iPod for books.” I’m unconvinced, but I’m interested in hearing what other people think.

Here are my scattered thoughts on the Kindle:

First impression: I hate the name.

Second impression: It’s $399. Have they lost their minds?

A few items of interest that come from the Newsweek article:

Here’s a deal breaker for me:

Bezos explains that it’s only fair to charge less for e-books because you can’t give them as gifts, and due to restrictive antipiracy software, you can’t lend them out or resell them.

Saddling the e-books with digital rights management (DRM) means that you won’t be able to use the books that you’ve purchased however you like. That sucks. It didn’t work for the music industry. Amazon knew this and is now selling DRM-free music files for download in a direct challenge to iTunes. In addition, you won’t be able to read Kindle books on your Sony e-book reader and vice-versa. Why does Amazon think that this broken-by-design approach will work with books? Unfortunately Newsweek doesn’t ask.

I don’t know what to make of this:

The Kindle is not just for books. Via the Amazon store, you can subscribe to newspapers (the Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Le Monde) and magazines (The Atlantic). When issues go to press, the virtual publications are automatically beamed into your Kindle. (It’s much closer to a virtual newsboy tossing the publication on your doorstep than accessing the contents a piece at a time on the Web.) You can also subscribe to selected blogs, which cost either 99 cents or $1.99 a month per blog.

Why would you pay any money to subscribe to a blog? Is this an idiot tax for people who are too lazy to figure out how to use Google Reader? The article doesn’t mention the costs of the newspapers, which are all available for free online, too (with the exception of the WSJ which will be free soon enough). What am I missing here?

The Newsweek article also makes some fairly ridiculous statements, such as the following:

“Michael Chabon will have to rethink how he writes for this medium,” he says. Brantley envisions wiki-style collaborations where the author, instead of being the sole authority, is a “superuser,” the lead wolf of a creative pack.

Hey! No need to drag Chabon into this. The article also throws out this bizarre expert reference:

“Book clubs could meet inside of a book,” says Bob Stein, a pioneer of digital media who now heads the Institute for the Future of the Book, a foundation-funded organization based in his Brooklyn, N.Y., town house.

For bonus points, the article also references the assistant director of the Institute. How do I get to start a “foundation-funded” Institute with my buddies that’s run out of my townhouse?

Boing-Boing’s new gadget blog took the Kimble for a test drive. Their findings:

• You can not read PDF files at all. That stinks.
• You have to jump through some hoops to read other types of files.
• Access to the web appears to be free, but you can pay to subscribe to blogs (pay for RSS?)
• “Too Expensive”
• “Feels like my first iPod”

On the plus side, the device will have always on wireless internet (based on cell phone technology not WiFi) at no additional cost, i.e. no usage fees or monthly bills. If you can access e-mail and surf the web how you like, it might actually be worth the cost on that basis alone. I suspect that it will ship with very limited internet access. We’ll see.

What it will take to get me into a Kindle:

• No DRM on e-book files. None. Even better, create a Shelfari-style Kindle social networking site accessible from my Kimble where I can loan books off of my shelf to my friends.
• Drop the price about $300
• Complete access to the web. For free.
• Support all document formats
• Let me easily buy books from other vendors
• Set me up in a foundation-funded Institute-type employment situation

Believe me, I’m no Luddite. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on an iPod. The “iPod for books” seems to have a few major obstacles to overcome before I even think about it. Given the recent iPhone price drop fiasco, why would you even want to be the first kid on your block to buy one?

I’m interested to hear what your initial thoughts are. Is anyone actually thinking about buying one of these?

Additional reading on the Kindle:

The Guardian

New York Times

Gizmodo – “Inside the Kindle is the Oxford American Dictionary, but you can only look up words that you run across while reading—you can’t just type them in.”

Wall Street Journal