So we now know that, unless an Amazon rep is outright fibbing, there will be no new Kindles this year.
Writing for Wired‘s Gadget Lab blog, Charlie Sorrel came out with this wish list for Kindle 2.0 features before they got the memo.
Sorrel’s five Kindle wishes are:
- Sex Appeal (i.e. un-ugliness)
- Touch Screen
- Color (specifically, so that the Kindle could do comic books as well as printed matter)
- Worldwide Availability
- Subscriptions (for books and comic books, not just newspapers)
The funny thing is, there’s already an e-reading device on the market that fits most of these criteria. They call it the iPhone or iPod Touch—and where Amazon may have sold fifty or a hundred thousand Kindles, these little babies have sold in the millions. Granted, not everyone is going to use them for e-book reading—but if even 10% did, that would still be more than even the over-optimistic projection of Kindles sold that the analyst "did not run by [Amazon]."
The iPhone and iTouch may be poised to do the same thing for e-books that the Palm did ten years ago: slip in under the radar of people who think they want them for other things, but discover they make surprisingly good e-book readers. Back in the day, even the Palm’s converts were limited to people willing and able to figure out how to sync to a computer. But the iPhone bypasses all that.
Admittedly, the Kindle does, too, but the Kindle is still going to have the same problem that brought down a lot of the old generation of e-book readers: reluctance to spend All That Money on something that can only display e-books and can’t even slip into a pocket, no matter how nifty it might be. Of course, the Kindle does have advantages those older models lacked.
Sorrel is definitely right that the Kindle has room for improvement. But whether the "iPod of e-books" will be the Kindle or a real iPod is still an open question.
Why would anyone want to simulate a print book on a communication device? The mimic of an older medium seems regressive. Print navigation is tiresome on screen and connectivity is underused.
I tried reading on iPhone. It’s enough for some short reads, but long sessions are not a pleasant experience. No hardware buttons is a big issue. I prefer my Sony Reader much more.
Gary and Igorsk:
1. Oh, heck, the iPhone doesn’t literally simulate a p-book. Common apps use reflowable text, not a PDFish approach. And of course there are the usual advantages of e-books. Even an 8G Touch, which I down, can include a pretty good-sized personal library.
2. Platform depends on the users’ preference. eReader / Fictionwise has already told how it’s moving iPhone books.
3. Many people will read on both platforms. The larger-screened Sony Reader or Kindle might be good for the home or office. But you can’t put either in your pants pocket, etc.
Thanks,
David
David, I’m curious. Why do you think that people will read on both platforms? It would certainly be difficult to read the same book on both platforms; how would you know where you are with different methods of “pagination”? And although a good number of people read multiple books concurrently (not quite the right word but you know what I mean), studies have shown that most people (the vast majority) read one book beginning to end before starting a second book.
I think the more likely scenario is that casual readers — those who read 1-3 books a year or largely read fan fiction, magazines, or newspapers — will be willing to read on the iPhone-type device (largely, I suspect, because they have short attention spans for reading), whereas the serious reader will not be willing to do more than casual reading, if even that, on such devices, preferring instead the dedicated ebook-reading device.
I know that in my case, I have no interest in reading on an iPhone-type device. I can’t imagine reading 4-5 hours a day on it, which is what I currently spend reading on my Sony Reader.
It’s odd that so many people are complaining about reading books on such a small screen as if it were obviously something no one would want to do. The iPhone’s screen is just as wide as and 50% taller than the original Palm’s. It has twice the resolution of the original Palm, and color to boot.
And so many people started e-reading with the original Palm that it caused a sea change in e-book reading—it pretty much single-handedly created the handheld e-book market that launched both eReader (nee Peanut Press) and Fictionwise.
I can’t help thinking it’s just a little too late to be doubtful people will read on screens that tiny. The evidence shows they’ve been doing it for ten years; why would they stop now?
If you started with the e-reader/iphone as your base, you’d have a completely different wish list, as it has other fatal flaws, like battery life, book prices, book selection and screen glare outdoors.
@Aaron: All right, I’ll bite:
Battery Life: The iPhone’s battery life may be a bit short if you don’t take any measures to preserve it, but there are things that can be done to extend it. Turn off wi-fi, BlueTooth…even go into full-on Airplane Mode to shut down the cell-phone side of things. You won’t be able to make or receive calls, but that just means you’ll have some uninterrupted reading time.
As for the iPod Touch, battery tests have shown you can get 9 to 10 hours of reading time out of it on a charge. That’s not too bad.
Book Prices, Selection: I’m not sure how Amazon has that great an advantage here. I gather that their book prices tend to be a bit cheaper than the dead-tree prices, but in about the same range. And you can only buy from Amazon (or else go through a bit of rigamarole to convert stuff bought elsewhere). The iPhone on the other hand can buy from eReader and Fictionwise (via eReader) and Baen Webscriptions (via Bookshelf). eReader and Fictionwise price some books fairly high but other fairly low, and Baen’s prices are a lot cheaper than the dead-tree editons.
Screen Glare: I’ll grant this is an issue, but no reader is perfect. 🙂
Rich asks:
I’m one of those people. My iLiad is my primary e-reader, but I don’t usually carry it with me when I leave the house. I always have my iPod with me, however, since I use it primarily as my daytimer, so I also use it as my “auxiliary” e-reader.
I’m one of those people, too.
I haven’t found this to be much of a problem. Sure, it requires a bit of navigation to find my place when I switch devices, but it typically takes less than a minute to do so. It’s a small price to pay to be able to keep reading when I find myself with some time to kill while I’m away from home.
All you would really have to know is how to use the search function to find some reasonably unique word or phrase you remember reading.