I don't get it. My books work fine now... what are they trying to fix?
I can get a new one shipped overnight ($4 with Amazon Prime) if I really want it, or head down the street and get it from B&N now if I really want it. If I hear of a good book, I don't really have a burning desire start reading it instantly. So the value added by instant delivery isn't much.
Having all of the books I own in my back pocket... what's the point? First - value added by having a bookshelf full of books is non-trivial. Bookshelves make for great conversation. A lot of times when friends are over, we just sit by the bookshelf and talk about whatever book catches our interest. I can't imagine the experience being quite the same scrolling through each other's Kindles. Second - I don't need all of the books I own in my back pocket. I just need the one I am reading now, maybe two. A book takes days to read, which is fundamentally different from music. The newGadget:books::iPod:music analogy is flawed - having all of your music in your pocket has a lot of value; books - not so much.
And last (to kick a dead horse) - sharing is essential. Say I'm visiting a friend who is upset. On my way over, I buy her a book to help her feel better. "I got you the rights to download this book" is never going to quite have the oomph that an actual book will. In general, most of the books I buy for people are presents. Same point.
Good points all around especially on the bookshelf - it is a way of showing people what you know (or would like to know) in real life
The only point I disagree with getting the book instantly. There are many times when I want a some tech book right now instead of waiting 2 days for Amazon or doing the hassle of driving.
In the end though I do agree with everyone - Kindle in its current form will fail
I can heft a small box packed full of paperbacks if I grunt and strain, but I can balance thousands of of e-books on my pinky finger. That means I can tote them around and have them all available when I want them. I'm no longer tied to the physical facilities close at hand.
It doesn't have to be an either/or proposition. I would like to have a bookshelf of paper books and electronic copies on a reader. The one for reading in traditional fashion and the other for reading on a plane/ train etc.
Owning two types of cars (or a car and a motorcycle) maybe a more helpful metaphor than horse and buggy vs car. The Pragmatic Programmers release all their books as non drm-ed pdfs and you can buy both the electronic copy and the pdf if you choose. They seem to do well.
But yes, the kindle is very underwhelming, I'll for a better reader without DRM (or at least hackable DRM).
Personally I really don't see much value in paper at all. Beyond romanticizing the medium, what do you gain? Every objection I've heard of (readability, battery life, etc) is just a transient technological phase. DRM is horrid, but it's no more a natural feature of e-books than NDAs are a natural feature of paper.
The whole romance of paper thing reminds me of the romance of film. Didn't slow the digital camera one iota.
For some, it's a status symbol. A full brain usually has a full bookshelf, but the converse isn't necessarily true. People will pretend to have a full brain by showing off a full bookshelf. In fact, The Great Gatsby has a library full of books with uncut pages. It use to be that the printer printed books by folding them like an accordion and just binding one side. Therefore, every pair of pages in the book would be bound together, and you had to cut them apart as you read it for the first time.
You can see some books nowadays emulating this sort of thing with the ragged edges, sometimes.
Gatsby didn't read books--he never cut them. He just had them to show off to Daisy.
Yes, but pro photographers didn't abandon film in the mid-1990s when the 640-by-480 Apple Quicktake Camera came out. They waited for a digital product that didn't suck.
Paper book readers are still waiting. It's been a long wait, and the end is not yet in sight. From what I've read so far, the Quicktake was better at being a camera than the Kindle is at being a book: You had the option to photograph whatever you wanted, you weren't charged by the frame, you didn't need to read an FAQ in order to figure out how to press the shutter release, your pictures weren't invisibly sent to a corporate database to be mined for data, and the cameras presumably continue to work even though the bureaucracy that spawned them has long since lost interest in them.
This is kind of like the difference between walking and driving. Yes, the car/e-book is better in basically every way, but in order for it to be a good general solution, you have to design the entire environment around it. Cars don't work so well in London or NYC, walking doesn't work so well in Atlanta. There are centuries of infrastructure around paper books, and it will take a long time to get e-book infrastructure to the level of convenience and accommodation that cars have now, or the level of mental acceptance that paper books have. An expensive DRM'ed device is a step in the right direction, but it certainly isn't the end of the road. See Seth Godin for a better view of the future:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/11/you-wont-fin...
I've been waiting for an ereader since the late '90s. this kindle thing is a bit underwhelming but i am really looking forward to digital books:
a) all off-copyright books are(should) be free - dickens, jane austin, jack london, jules verne awesome ;-)
b) i love the feel of a book but i'm a voracious reader, my bookshelf literally takes over the rooms of my apartment - i don't really need hard copies of all the things i read
c) i like to parallel read a handful of books at the same time - i switch from technical to fluffy when i get bored
d) having said all that, i don't think i'm gonna be an early adopter of the kindle - i want an open digital standard and the right to move my copies around
Having connected and electronic books gives you possibilities that weren't available when they're in print. They might lose some of the advantages of print (like bragging rights of having a full bookshelf), but the advantages it confers outweighs it in other ways that you can't imagine if you frame it in terms of the old.
As with any new technology, it's hard to think of it in terms of the old technology. The often quoted quip about radio is:
"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to no one in particular?" -- Associates of David Sarnoff responding to the latter's call for investment in the radio in 1921.
What's funny is that later, a radio pioneer says this about television:
"While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially it is an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming." -- Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, 1926
While TV might have killed the radio star, it hasn't completely supplanted it. By the same token, paper books won't go away any time soon, but you'll soon see advantages to having electronic and sharable books. You can search it, annotate it (as a group!), and cross reference it. You can discuss it and you can get it instantly, and licenses pending, we might get a new market of people that slice and dice excerpts from different sources--not just blogs and feeds, but from classics (Caterbury tales, Catch-22, etc)...like reader digest, but a proliferation of it based on different niches and interests.
> You can search it, annotate it (as a group!), and cross reference it.
See, this sounds a lot like the Interweb I keep hearing about.
Funny thing is, writers can write for the interwebs and get paid by the word, by ads, or per-download (I find that latter proposition less often, but it's there). Alls you need to read those things is a laptop or an iPhone.
What does the Kindle bring to the table? It's a neutered computer, a broadcast (output-only) device with a shitty little keyboard that allows people to purchase stuff and mindlessly consume it. Commenting is more difficult than with a computer, as far as I can tell, and the device costs as much as an iPhone, but seems to offer far less.
Really, what's the point? It doesn't seem to offer benefits the way that radio, TV, cell phones, or the Web did (versus preceding technologies). It's an expensive black-and-white device that enables Amazon to more efficiently take your money... what are the upsides?
> you'll soon see advantages to having electronic and sharable books.
I've been seeing those advantages since I first started browsing the physics papers at CERN using Mosaic, thanks.
I thought the comparison was between paper books vs ebooks, not ebooks vs the web. That was what I was responding to anyway.
But you're right about eBooks being a neutered computer. That doesn't mean it won't be well suited for reading, buying, sharing, and talking about books however. If you showed me a mobile phone in the mid 90's and told me people millions of people would communicate via text message on a shitty little keypad, I'd have called you crazy, bet you a kobe beef steak.....and lose.
All I'm saying is that new forms of the same thing allow you to do things you might not been able to do before, and that's advantageous even if it loses some of the good properties of its old medium (like a bookshelf). Sometimes, people treat the same thing with a new form in different ways. Comments are really just topic centered guestbooks of the 90's. And yet bloggers, trading opinions on a guestbook all the time since we call it comments. By the same token, I suspect having digital books on a neutered computer will have its advantages, not immediately apparent, mostly from how we view or interact with the things.
I don't know if Kindle itself will be successful, but I think eBooks might have a chance. Of course, it's just a hunch as I have no proof as to exactly how, and I could lose another kobe beef steak to you. If I knew exactly what, I probably would be doing this as my startup, rather than post this comment to let you know.
> I thought the comparison was between paper books vs ebooks, not ebooks vs the web.
That's the thing, though -- it's as if we're pretending that the Web and eBooks are as different as radio and TV, when in reality, they're about as different as FM and AM radio. I think that one of them offers enough marginal benefit to trounce the other -- and in the case of the Kindle, the ''other'' is more expensive while offering less!
I don't see a divide between the Web and eBooks. I see a divide between digital content and print content. And I think that, just like the Web is reducing the market for newspapers, it's going to reduce the market for print books. It won't eliminate it. But god knows any eBook has all the drawbacks of the web (the transient nature of its contents) and few if any advantages beyond the low power draw and sharp screen. The former can be made irrelevant by better batteries; the latter is being made irrelevant by better screens. So what's the advantage of Kindle?
It's quite mad. Mark Pilgrim does a great job of documenting the misfeatures in his 'Future of Reading' bit.
I read most books on paper. Simply put, the kindle won't change that, and will probably reinforce it.
This could be useful if it were given freely to students and loaded with required reading by the school, but the cost would have to come in significantly below OLPC.
Even then, I feel like Amazon is late to the party, and at the wrong address anyway. The trend is moving away from stovepiped single-purpose devices and towards multi-function mobile devices. I'll wait for the next round of phone-camera-media-browser-dishwasher-espresso-cart-robot-lackey to include an eBook plugin. Speaking of that, which reader of this site is already at work building an eBook reader for Android?
I bought an iphone which is the first pda-sized 'thing' I've ever had. I've found myself reading blogs and even a few chapters of a Python ebook on there (PDF) so whilst I love to sit and read a book I'd be very happy to do so on a device. However, its damn ugly and I'd want it to at least look cool if I'm going to be sitting using it in a cafe!
I love my print books, but having all my books electronic would have saved me lots of money over the years, as I've hauled them back and forth over the Atlantic several times....sigh.
The main reason this will fail is that its pricing model is ridiculous. You'd have to read a lot of books for this to be worth the cost, especially considering that the books they're selling now -- bestsellers and popular stuff -- are already available just about everywhere to begin with.
I think it would sell better if they bundled a contract-term subscription and cut the up-front price, like carriers do with cell phones. If the reader were $129 with a $10/mo subscription, and included a bunch of stuff -- say a free book and up to 20 blogs per month -- I think more people would consider it.
26 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 54.5 ms ] threadI can get a new one shipped overnight ($4 with Amazon Prime) if I really want it, or head down the street and get it from B&N now if I really want it. If I hear of a good book, I don't really have a burning desire start reading it instantly. So the value added by instant delivery isn't much.
Having all of the books I own in my back pocket... what's the point? First - value added by having a bookshelf full of books is non-trivial. Bookshelves make for great conversation. A lot of times when friends are over, we just sit by the bookshelf and talk about whatever book catches our interest. I can't imagine the experience being quite the same scrolling through each other's Kindles. Second - I don't need all of the books I own in my back pocket. I just need the one I am reading now, maybe two. A book takes days to read, which is fundamentally different from music. The newGadget:books::iPod:music analogy is flawed - having all of your music in your pocket has a lot of value; books - not so much.
And last (to kick a dead horse) - sharing is essential. Say I'm visiting a friend who is upset. On my way over, I buy her a book to help her feel better. "I got you the rights to download this book" is never going to quite have the oomph that an actual book will. In general, most of the books I buy for people are presents. Same point.
The only point I disagree with getting the book instantly. There are many times when I want a some tech book right now instead of waiting 2 days for Amazon or doing the hassle of driving.
In the end though I do agree with everyone - Kindle in its current form will fail
I can heft a small box packed full of paperbacks if I grunt and strain, but I can balance thousands of of e-books on my pinky finger. That means I can tote them around and have them all available when I want them. I'm no longer tied to the physical facilities close at hand.
> Bookshelves make for great conversation.
So does a horse and buggy.
Owning two types of cars (or a car and a motorcycle) maybe a more helpful metaphor than horse and buggy vs car. The Pragmatic Programmers release all their books as non drm-ed pdfs and you can buy both the electronic copy and the pdf if you choose. They seem to do well.
But yes, the kindle is very underwhelming, I'll for a better reader without DRM (or at least hackable DRM).
The whole romance of paper thing reminds me of the romance of film. Didn't slow the digital camera one iota.
You can see some books nowadays emulating this sort of thing with the ragged edges, sometimes.
Gatsby didn't read books--he never cut them. He just had them to show off to Daisy.
Paper book readers are still waiting. It's been a long wait, and the end is not yet in sight. From what I've read so far, the Quicktake was better at being a camera than the Kindle is at being a book: You had the option to photograph whatever you wanted, you weren't charged by the frame, you didn't need to read an FAQ in order to figure out how to press the shutter release, your pictures weren't invisibly sent to a corporate database to be mined for data, and the cameras presumably continue to work even though the bureaucracy that spawned them has long since lost interest in them.
There are no technical barriers for the electronic book to overcome. It's all politics. And ass-hats.
Imagine you could grep a whole library...
As with any new technology, it's hard to think of it in terms of the old technology. The often quoted quip about radio is:
"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to no one in particular?" -- Associates of David Sarnoff responding to the latter's call for investment in the radio in 1921.
What's funny is that later, a radio pioneer says this about television:
"While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially it is an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming." -- Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, 1926
While TV might have killed the radio star, it hasn't completely supplanted it. By the same token, paper books won't go away any time soon, but you'll soon see advantages to having electronic and sharable books. You can search it, annotate it (as a group!), and cross reference it. You can discuss it and you can get it instantly, and licenses pending, we might get a new market of people that slice and dice excerpts from different sources--not just blogs and feeds, but from classics (Caterbury tales, Catch-22, etc)...like reader digest, but a proliferation of it based on different niches and interests.
See, this sounds a lot like the Interweb I keep hearing about.
Funny thing is, writers can write for the interwebs and get paid by the word, by ads, or per-download (I find that latter proposition less often, but it's there). Alls you need to read those things is a laptop or an iPhone.
What does the Kindle bring to the table? It's a neutered computer, a broadcast (output-only) device with a shitty little keyboard that allows people to purchase stuff and mindlessly consume it. Commenting is more difficult than with a computer, as far as I can tell, and the device costs as much as an iPhone, but seems to offer far less.
Really, what's the point? It doesn't seem to offer benefits the way that radio, TV, cell phones, or the Web did (versus preceding technologies). It's an expensive black-and-white device that enables Amazon to more efficiently take your money... what are the upsides?
> you'll soon see advantages to having electronic and sharable books.
I've been seeing those advantages since I first started browsing the physics papers at CERN using Mosaic, thanks.
But you're right about eBooks being a neutered computer. That doesn't mean it won't be well suited for reading, buying, sharing, and talking about books however. If you showed me a mobile phone in the mid 90's and told me people millions of people would communicate via text message on a shitty little keypad, I'd have called you crazy, bet you a kobe beef steak.....and lose.
All I'm saying is that new forms of the same thing allow you to do things you might not been able to do before, and that's advantageous even if it loses some of the good properties of its old medium (like a bookshelf). Sometimes, people treat the same thing with a new form in different ways. Comments are really just topic centered guestbooks of the 90's. And yet bloggers, trading opinions on a guestbook all the time since we call it comments. By the same token, I suspect having digital books on a neutered computer will have its advantages, not immediately apparent, mostly from how we view or interact with the things.
I don't know if Kindle itself will be successful, but I think eBooks might have a chance. Of course, it's just a hunch as I have no proof as to exactly how, and I could lose another kobe beef steak to you. If I knew exactly what, I probably would be doing this as my startup, rather than post this comment to let you know.
That's the thing, though -- it's as if we're pretending that the Web and eBooks are as different as radio and TV, when in reality, they're about as different as FM and AM radio. I think that one of them offers enough marginal benefit to trounce the other -- and in the case of the Kindle, the ''other'' is more expensive while offering less!
I don't see a divide between the Web and eBooks. I see a divide between digital content and print content. And I think that, just like the Web is reducing the market for newspapers, it's going to reduce the market for print books. It won't eliminate it. But god knows any eBook has all the drawbacks of the web (the transient nature of its contents) and few if any advantages beyond the low power draw and sharp screen. The former can be made irrelevant by better batteries; the latter is being made irrelevant by better screens. So what's the advantage of Kindle?
It's quite mad. Mark Pilgrim does a great job of documenting the misfeatures in his 'Future of Reading' bit.
This could be useful if it were given freely to students and loaded with required reading by the school, but the cost would have to come in significantly below OLPC.
Even then, I feel like Amazon is late to the party, and at the wrong address anyway. The trend is moving away from stovepiped single-purpose devices and towards multi-function mobile devices. I'll wait for the next round of phone-camera-media-browser-dishwasher-espresso-cart-robot-lackey to include an eBook plugin. Speaking of that, which reader of this site is already at work building an eBook reader for Android?
I think it would sell better if they bundled a contract-term subscription and cut the up-front price, like carriers do with cell phones. If the reader were $129 with a $10/mo subscription, and included a bunch of stuff -- say a free book and up to 20 blogs per month -- I think more people would consider it.