The Inquisitr » kindle

The E-Reader’s Future

Kyle Brady — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:24:33 +0000

The latest Internet tech pundits’ obsession has not been related to the ADD-laced “real time web” proclamations that some are so annoyingly fond of, but of a much older format…

Books.

News has been slowly leaking out regarding Barnes & Noble’s “Nook” e-reader device, and the more that surfaces, the more it sounds like a surprising and wonderful device that could prove to be the harbinger of the e-reader’s/e-book’s watershed moment. It’s based on the Android platform, has a substantially better feature set than any of its predecessors, holds comparatively extreme battery life, and implements what appears to be a slick user interface.

And it’s being produced and sold by a book retailer chain.

Until now, e-readers have been something of a pipedream, since Sony’s Reader has been a nonstarter and the Amazon Kindle is inherently flawed – but all of this may quickly change. It’s intriguing that Barnes & Noble managed to understand the market’s needs so well, such as supporting a litany of formats and replicating real world book features like “sharing”, when this is something that Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO) loves to claim as his own. Amazon may have cornered the market in numerous areas by using their leverage to lower prices and make deals, but they failed in the areas of digital reader rights and the all-important digital discount.

If the statistics on wholesale book sales from the International Digital Publishing Forum, which are typically half those of retail, are to be believed, e-book sales have approximately tripled within the last twelve months – the data coincides with Amazon’s entrance into the market, as expected. But with the debut of Barnes & Noble, one of two monolithic North American book retailers, as both a hardware and e-book retailer, these numbers will likely grow at an even faster rate.

Borders, Barnes & Noble’s only true competitor, has been weakly promoting the Sony Reader for years to very little effect – so what happens when one of the book giants has a product that it has invested substantial R&D in, and wants desperately to succeed? It’s highly probable that the Nook will be prominently featured in all of B&N’s locations, with slick salesmen/promoters attached, and will remain a central focus of their website for all of the foreseeable future.

When a brick-and-mortar company puts their substantial sales/promotion weight behind a product, including their $4.5 billion from in-store sales (2008), they almost always have a noticeable effect on the targeted market. Amazon is the king of product sales, but the sad fact is that a modern online powerhouse doesn’t have the marketing clout needed to push an unfamiliar item into the mainstream. However, if B&N’s power is combined with the apparent greatness of the device, a breakthrough to the masses becomes possible.

If they play their cards right, Barnes & Noble may be remembered as the company that produced the first “next generation” e-reader that was close enough to perfect for it to be popular with mainstream consumers – Amazon, Sony, and a few others will have their place as innovators, but there will be a distinction between the two. This innovation/breakthrough dichotomy is not uncommon, and can be easily found in the history of the Internet itself: the companies that were innovators (and faded/failed/went bankrupt) versus those who were able to make mainstream breakthroughs.

All of this, of course, depends on the device being more-or-less as described, not to mention functional and without any major hardware or software bugs – their success is contingent upon getting this right the first time. If they fail, they probably won’t have time for a second chance.

But I have my fingers crossed… And I already want one.

Kyle Brady is a contributing columnist for the Inquisitr, an entrepreneur, and has a future in science fiction. He can be found at his blog, via email, or on Twitter.

Comicbook Publishers’ Untapped Market

Kyle Brady — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 21:59:36 +0000

Imagine, for a moment, that Amazon has announced the next release of their Kindle product: the Kindle DX II (pronounced “dee-ex two”), and while it includes a long list of upgrades and improvements, the single most important development is its ability to display full-color, when necessary, via a dual-mode rendering process.

Continue the imagination process for a moment to understand what new opportunities this would bring: digitized issues of National Geographic, full-color covers for all Kindle edition books, and comicbooks. Wait, what? Comicbooks!?!?

The two largest comicbook enterprises, Marvel (now owned by Disney) and DC, have been experimenting with the digital revolution for their core business, to varied levels of success – Marvel has a “digital comic” subscription, are experimenting with “motion comics”, and even provides some online for free; DC has freely available origin stories for most (all?) of its characters, and provides previews of its upcoming comics (like Blackest Night: Superman #2).

The unsaid assumption throughout all of this, however, is that printed comicbooks will never actually leave this world, because the experience is too unique, and “motion comics” are likely just a supplement or even a novelty. Cue the digital book revolution, stage left.

As e-readers continue to evolve, their core technology will undoubtedly reach a point where they are both feature-rich and cheap enough that it is no longer possible to ignore them – much like the iPod’s entrance a decade ago. Color display options will undoubtedly be a feature of a future release, if only for the added market possibilities and display of illustration, since color eats away at battery life, to to mention unnecessary in black-and-white printed word display.

When e-readers have a color display option, comicbooks will likely become a market that explodes with growth and helps bring the devices to a more visible position in public life – who wouldn’t want their comicbook collection available on the train commute to work, or at school during boring classes? The Kindle’s size and design would lend itself, almost uniquely, to comicbook usage and the actions of comicbook publishers suggest they would embrace the new, untapped market with open arms.

So, Amazon, if you really want to make the Kindle the reading device of the future, you need to target those who will gladly pay to make your dreams happen: nerds.

And nerds love comicbooks.

Kyle Brady is a contributing columnist for the Inquisitr, an entrepreneur, and has a future in science fiction. He can be found at his blog, via email, or on Twitter.

Look out Kindle, ASUS dual screen Eee Reader coming our way

Steven Hodson — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 23:30:00 +0000

E-Readers are slowly becoming a regular part of out collection of tech gadgets with Amazon’s Kindle the current leader of the pack. That could change however as ASUS has plans to push out the cheapest e-book reader on the market, and a dual screen version at that.

From what ASUS president Jerry Shen is reported to have told the guys at engadget the Eee Reader will be the cheapest e-book reader with a possible price of $163.00. There will of course be a higher end model with possible extras like inbuilt 3G, a web browser and expandable storage. The real killer here though could be the dual screen forma factor

The dual screen form factor would enable users to read books as books were intended to be read, or they could use the secondary panel to surf the web, type on a virtual keyboard or whatever else ASUS dreams up.

Source: engadget – ASUS planning dual screen Eee Reader: world’s cheapest e-book reader

Book publishers myopic as they claim e-books will destroy books

Steven Hodson — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:05:00 +0000

We’ve seen the same thing repeated over an over with the music industry, television industry, news industry, and many more just like them. Crying doom and gloom about how their individual wealth creators are being driven into the ground by the Web. Granted the Web might be changing the playing field in favor of the actual content creator and consumers but it isn’t to blame for these businesses failing.

It is their own myopia and unwillingness to find ways to make their business work in the new media world instead of trying to constantly bend it to meet their current business models.

The latest of these is the book publishing world and people Araud Nourry, chief executive of French publishing group Hachette Livre. It is his opinion that the monsters out to destroy the book publishing industry are the usual suspects – Google, Amazon, Barnes & Noble along with other e-book retailers.

His point of contention with these evil people is the aggressive pricing of e-books in the case of the major retailers and the availability of out-of-copyright books courtesy of Google.

“On the one hand, you have millions of books for free where there is no longer an author to pay and, on the other hand, there are very recent books, bestsellers at $9.99, which means that all the rest will have to be sold at between zero and $9.99,” Mr Nourry said.

There was a real and “muscular” debate in the US, he added. Retailers were paying publishers more than $9.99 for each e-book, so were selling them at a loss: “That cannot last . . . Amazon is not in the business of losing money. So, one day, they are going to come to the publishers and say: ‘we are cutting the price we pay’. If that happens, after paying the authors, there will be nothing left for the publishers.”

Source: The Globe and Mail – E-books ‘could spell the end for hardbacks’

Once again we see some-one who doesn’t seem to understand how the economics of the web works. The fact is that beyond the book author actually getting what their book is worth based on real sales the cost of delivering those e-books is next to zero. In contrast for book publishers the costs incurred to create all those individual copies of the original are far from zero. Why should retailers, and the author, have to sell a copy of a book that costs nothing to create for the same price as what book publishers deem it to be worth.

As with the business behind the other entertainment industries book publishers are finding that because of the Web the middle man isn’t the profit center that it once was.

Ease your conscience – the Kindle is greener than books

Steven Hodson — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 00:34:40 +0000

While most people might not think so it turns out, according to the Cleantech Group, that the Amazon Kindle may end up being more environmentally friendly than paper books.

After examining all the existing studies in order to do a lifecycle analysis the group found that carbon emissions from electronic books is far lower than your traditional book publishing. In light of the fact that e-readers aren’t typically marketed as being a sound environmental alternative to books that impact is becoming a topic of conversation.

According to Emma Rich, the person behind the study, when you take into account the manufacturing and mining needed to produce an electronic e-reader like the Kindle it gets a significant edge over the paper version.

"The roughly 168 kg of CO2 produced throughout the Kindle’s lifecycle is a clear winner against the potential savings: 1,074 kg of CO2 if replacing three books a month for four years; and up to 26,098 kg of CO2 when used to the fullest capacity of the Kindle DX. Less-frequent readers attracted by decreasing prices still can break even at 22.5 books over the life of the device," she [Emma Rich] wrote in conclusion.

Source: cnet – Green Tech :: Study paints Kindle e-reader a dark shade of green

While there are some that will argue that the environmental impact needs to take into account the increasing cost of electronic waste as we constantly upgrade to newer gadget. The Cleantech Group suggests that the e-reader industry could help make a significant impact once people become more accustom to using them rather than relying on paper.

As Martin LaMonica notes in his post though it all boils down to how the e-reader is used.

If a person continues to buy books and print periodicals and doesn’t recycle the product, the environmental impact could potentially be negative, according to this study.

Amazon may be planning to expand into Australia with GSM version of the Kindle

Duncan Riley — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 22:00:52 +0000

Giant US etailer Amazon may be finally looking to open an Australian outpost after years (and years) of speculation that they were planning to head across the pacific.

The evidence comes from the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), who reported August 17 that Australia’s second largest newspaper publisher Fairfax had rejected an offer from Amazon to put its papers (including the SMH) on Amazon’s Kindle ereader. The same report also noted that News Ltd (the Australian arm of News Corp, and Australia’s biggest newspaper publisher) was “looking beyond Amazon at other devices,” suggesting that they to had been approached by Amazon.

What’s missed in the article is the details on the distribution side. Amazon doesn’t have a presence locally, and doesn’t ship electronic goods to Australia, citing “export restrictions” as the reason why. It’s not clear whether these restrictions were legal, or imposed by manufacturers; certainly it’s not hard to get items listed on Amazon shipped to Australia from the United States via eBay sellers for example.

Even if there wasn’t any legal restrictions, Amazon then hits import rules in Australia, including customs issues and GST; items under AU$1000 in value can be imported without duty, but this is applied to individuals. Then there’s the issue of wireless internet access: Amazon would require a local partner, and even then they’d need a new version of the Kindle because the current version runs on CDMA, while all mobile networks in Australia are 2G/3G GSM.

The SMH claims that the rejection by the newspaper publishers might stop Amazon selling The Kindle locally, completely ignoring the key fact that newspapers aren’t the main driver of Kindle sales (it is after all an ereader, not a newspaper reader alone.) Indeed, the SMH article borders on outright stupidity, like this quote

The decision by Fairfax paves the way for a two-way contest between Sony and possibly Apple as the dominant reader for the digital generation.

Whether Amazon will balk without newspaper deals in Australia is yet to be seen, but likewise if they’ve already had discussions, their plans to enter the Australian market in one form or another would already be well advanced.

It’s unlikely they’d sell the item from the United States in US dollars to Australia, which leaves three possibilities: they offer the Kindle and other items in Australian dollars from the United States, they set up shop in Australia and sell it locally online, or they sell the Kindle through a third party. The last option is unlikely, but not impossible, the first option isn’t out of the question, but the second option makes the most sense.

As a long suffering Australian who has longed for Amazon to set up shop here for the better part of 15 years, they can’t come quickly enough.

The freeing of e-books, well sort of

Steven Hodson — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 20:25:00 +0000

Right now when people talk about e-books most everyone thinks of Amazon and its Kindle e-book reader. It is a market than a growing number of companies are wanting to get a foothold in and hopefully take away some of Amazon’s business in the process. At the same time companies like Sony and Barnes & Noble are having to deal with a growing dissatisfaction among consumers over the fact that all these e-books are coming with varying degrees of DRM (Digital Rights Management) wrapped around their purchases.

Consumer upset came to a head recently over Amazon’s deletion of two of George Orwell’s books from people’s Kindles without any notification or warning. It doesn’t help that e-books bought at Amazon can only be read on the Kindle or Amazon’s iPhone app. Now while Amazon doesn’t look to be changing its policy about its DRM restrictions Sony, manufacturer of the Reader e-book device, has decided to move away from its own proprietary DRM restrictions and adopt the open e-book standard called ePub.

“There is going to be a proliferation of different reading devices, with different features and capabilities and prices for a different set of consumer requirements,” said Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading unit. “If people are going to this e-book shopping mall, they are going to want to shop at all the stores, and not just be required to shop at one store.”

Source: New York Times :: Sony Plans to Adopt Common Format for E-Books

Now before we all start jumping up and down yelling hallelujah Sony might be dropping it’s own method DRM but it doesn’t mean that they are going to be giving up on using some method of DRMing their e-books. They have decided that going forward that they will be using the more widely supported Adobe Content Server 4.

As Paul Sweeting at GigaOM pointed out this has nothing to do with the consumer; although it does make for good PR, but more to do with control of a platform

[….] Amazon’s e-book ambitions go beyond simply selling a lot of Kindle devices. Taking a page from Apple’s iTunes playbook, its goal is to establish Kindle as the dominant e-book publishing and distribution platform. And as Apple has amply demonstrated, when you control the platform, you control the value chain, which means you reap a disproportionate share of the value that’s exchanged.

And the best way to maintain control over a platform — again, per Apple — is through the use of proprietary DRM. Like Amazon’s Kindle DRM, the copy protection at the heart of the Content Server platform is proprietary, in that Adobe owns it. Unlike Amazon, however, Adobe’s standard is openly licensable by others. While that still leave Adobe in an enviable position — able to collect licensing fees from both ends of the value chain — it’s clearly a more friendly environment for publishers and consumers than Amazon’s walled-garden approach — and may be publishers’ best bet to avoid getting trapped by Amazon the way the record companies were by Apple.

So while Sony maybe congratulated on its willingness to accept an open standard for the e-books themselves let’s not get to carried away because after all they aren’t doing this out of the goodness of t heir hearts.

And they wonder why piracy lives on

Steven Hodson — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 19:46:33 +0000

Today Amazon basically told every single Kindle owner that they don’t really own anything that they buy through the company. As far as Amazon is concerned they have complete say on whether or not you can keep a book you thought you paid for.

Think not?

Well think again because as any Kindle owner who had paid good money for an electronic copy of George Orwell’s 1984 or Animal Farm found out this morning this isn’t the case. This happened because the publisher of the two books decided that they didn’t want to make electronic versions of the books available after all and applied pressure on Amazon to fix the problem.

The fix of course was to delete all downloaded versions of the books from people’s Kindles. Granted their accounts were credited with what the books had cost but that doesn’t change the fact that we’ve just been told we don’t really own anything we buy in digital form – especially when the seller has a direct way to delete that product.

As David Pogue wrote in a post today

This is ugly for all kinds of reasons. Amazon says that this sort of thing is “rare,” but that it can happen at all is unsettling; we’ve been taught to believe that e-books are, you know, just like books, only better. Already, we’ve learned that they’re not really like books, in that once we’re finished reading them, we can’t resell or even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be final.

It is this kind of thing that leads me to believe that the more we move into the cloud the less we will actually ever own anything anymore.

Two men enter, one man leaves: Google promises e-book service by end of 2009

Kim LaCapria — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:11:34 +0000

Today, Google announced plans to launch an e-book service by the end of the year, in direct competition with Amazon’s Kindle.

Speculation over the service is hinging on two key differences. While Kindle titles hover around $9.99 for most titles, Google indicated a more open-ended pricing policy, allowing publishers to charge a higher rate and creating some rumbles about driving up the general price of e-books.

The other very large difference is that Google wants to eliminate the necessity for an expensive, one-function piece of equipment, allowing consumers to access their purchases on any web-enabled device. Netbooks, smartphones, home computers and digital readers will be able to access content, and consumers will be able to- get this- move the books they’ve legally purchased from device to device just because they feel like it! (Kindle purchases are only viewable on the pricey Kindle device, iPhones and the iPod Touch.)

Amazon currently offers around 280,000 titles in the Kindle Store. Google has already digitized about seven million books.

Book ownership a story to tell our grandkids

Steven Hodson — Sun, 17 May 2009 01:29:41 +0000

“Once upon a time people use to be able to walk into something called a bookstore and actually touch the covers of books, flip through the pages of a book and then buy that book if they wanted to. There was a time when we use to have shelves in our homes where we would keep all those real books which we could pick up an read again anytime we wanted.”

That scenario could one day very soon be the type of story that we will be telling our grandchildren. As books slowly join the ranks of music that we play on our portable music players one has to wonder if, as with music if the whole idea of ownership will become a murky gray area. As eBook readers grow in popularity and books are electronically transferred questions are being raised about who really owns that book you just paid ten to twenty bucks for?

If some of the reports coming out about the Kindle and their DRM’ed books it would appear that Amazon does. With a growing number of people finding that their Amazon accounts have been closed for as little as returning too many book we are hearing that the nice $360+ Kindle is now nothing more than a brick. As well, all those books you bought and thought you owned – well think again because you don’t.

When this user’s Amazon account was closed, he also lost access to all the books he had purchased, as well as the ability to shop for new material.

This situation brings the bigger picture of Digital Rights Management (DRM) to the forefront. When you purchase any form of media from a company, do they have the right to deny you access in the future (presuming it was not purchased on a subscription basis)? The above mentioned user ended up with a $360 device that was totally worthless to him. He couldn’t even access books he had already paid for.

Source: Channel Web

Yup all this electronic versions of music and books is sounding better and better every day.

Amazon opens Kindle Blog Publishing Program to all Blogs

Duncan Riley — Thu, 14 May 2009 02:40:37 +0000

Amazon has opened the door to its Kindle Blog Publishing Program to everyone.

The program, previously limited to a small number of blogs, formats and sells subscriptions to blogs to Kindle users. Blogs can’t be offered for free, and Amazon takes 70% of the subscription charge, with the amount charged determined by Amazon based on their perceived value of the content being offered. Prices for blogs currently in the program are around the $1.99/ month level.

Positively, although with some limitations, the program isn’t georetarded, so bloggers worldwide can participate. The only catch is in the payment options, which for non-US bloggers means the single choice of receiving a US dollar check via post. If the monthly payments are high enough, this isn’t going to be a huge issue, but likewise, it makes receiving small payments a waste of time. For example, a US dollar check here in Australia costs between $15-$30 AUD (about $11-$22 USD) to bank, and often takes 45-60 days to clear (depending on the bank.) Notably the Blog Publishing Program isn’t linked to normal Amazon accounts, so there’s no way of transferring that money across to be used on a book or something similar.

An application takes 48-72 hours to hit the Amazon store, although you do get a preview of what your blog will look like on a Kindle, as per the shot of The Inquisitr above. Having only played with a Kindle once before, and a long time ago at that, one thing that was interesting to see was a lack of support for video; that means that at least for The Inquisitr, a number of posts are incomplete.

You can apply for the Amazon Blog Publishing Program here and The Inquisitr will be available on The Kindle by next Monday.

(via Alley Insider)

An interesting Kindle stat

Steven Hodson — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 19:02:51 +0000

Personally I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the Kindle as it is just another of the many US centric products on the market but I ran across a rather interesting stat concerning this e-book reader from Amazon. It would appear that approximately 70% of the people that have forked out the outrageous amount of money Amazon wants for the Kindle are 40 and over.

Granted it is an unscientific poll as the results were derived from someone pulling the numbers out of a comment thread of a previous post by Dave Carnoy at the Crave blog

Back in March, I did a post titled, "What’s the average age of Kindle owners?" I cited a thread in Amazon.com’s forums discussing Kindle owners’ ages.

Well, I have a little follow-up on the whole issue. Apparently, someone went ahead and tabulated 700 of the responses in that Amazon thread (that represents about 75 percent of all the posts) and broke out the numbers. Here they are:

0 – 19: 5%

20 – 29: 10%

30 – 39: 15%

40 – 49: 19.5%

50 – 59: 23%

60 – 69: 19.5%

70 – 79: 6%

80+: 2%

We can’t call this the most scientific poll ever taken, but it’s probably a good indicator of the Kindle’s age demographic. If you add it all up, over half the owners are over 50 and 70 percent are over 40.

His post did raise one point that I hadn’t honestly thought when it came to the popularity of the Kindle among older users. The fact that one can increase the font size and that for someone with arthritis the Kindle is a lot easier to hold for long periods of time than large books. That’s something I’ll have to keep in mind for my wife, who suffers badly from rheumatoid arthritis, if Amazon ever decides to let the rest of the world buy the damn thing.

Kindle Getting Competition From Cosmo Publisher

JR — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:23:23 +0000

Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader will soon see competition from an unlikely place: the publisher of Cosmo.

Hearst Corp. is preparing to launch its own electronic reader, CNN Money reports, with the hope of bringing the magazine market into the palms of people’s hands. CNN cites “industry insiders” as saying Hearst’s reader will be more catered toward newspapers and magazines than books, boasting a “large-format screen” that will meet periodicals’ “reading and advertising requirements.”

As for any official comment, a Hearst exec said only that the company was “keenly interested” in the idea and expected the devices to be a “big part of [its] future.”

Interestingly, Hearst is also said to have invested in E Ink–the Boston-area company that creates the technology behind Amazon’s Kindle product as well as the Sony Reader. The same company produced a moving image on the cover of Esquire–also owned by Hearst–last year.

Amazon Kindle 2: What’s New, When’s it Available, and Everything Else

JR — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 19:48:34 +0000

Amazon has launched its new Kindle 2.0 e-book reader. The updated device will run $359 and will begin shipping February 24. Pre-orders are already being accepted, with priority being given to current Kindle owners.

Amazon Kindle 2.0: Device Changes

The Kindle 2.0 weighs slightly more than the first-generation product, coming in at 10.2 ounces compared to its predecessor’s 10.1 ounce weight. The new reader is far thinner, however, measuring only 0.36 inches thick. The iPhone 3G, for comparison, is 0.48 inches in thickness. (See image below for a side-view illustration.)

Kindle 2.0: New Features

The new Kindle 2.0 boasts a revamped navigation system and an improved display with 600 by 800 pixel resolution. Its memory size is seven times the original device’s, up to 2GB from 180MB — a change Amazon says leads to 20 percent faster page turns. The Kindle’s battery is also said to last 25 percent longer than the first edition’s.

Some “experimental features” being debuted in Kindle 2 include a text-to-voice function that lets you choose to have books read aloud to you, an MP3 player, and a basic Web browser. The new Kindle also has an “instant dictionary look-up” option to help you figure out any unknown words you might encounter.

You can read the full technical specs on Amazon’s official Kindle 2 page here.

Kindle Synchronization

Kindle 2 will support Amazon’s newly announced Whispersync service, which lets you sync up books across numerous devices. With Whispersync, you can view your purchased books on a first-generation Kindle, a new Kindle, or on any number of other compatible mobile devices that may hit the market in the future. Whispersync will even keep track on what page you were on, regardless of which device you’re using.

More Kindle 2 Images

Click on any of the following Kindle 2 images to enlarge to a full-sized view.

Universities Taking Kindly To Kindle

JR — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 21:43:44 +0000

Kindle is getting a solid grade when it comes to academic use. The Amazon-run electronic book reading device has been picked up by Princeton University for use in the fall, according to Inside Higher Ed. The school will give students the option of buying several hundred textbooks in a Kindle edition rather than having to shell out for the heavy hardback.

Yale, Oxford, and the University of California schools are also testing Kindle for class uses. The UC system already has about 40 percent of its texts available for download. Princeton, though, will be the first school to offer a textbook on Kindle before the hard copy is even out: The university will offer a new economics book electronically two weeks prior to the regular edition’s release.

Surprisingly, though, the Kindle editions don’t come much cheaper than the always expensive standard college texts. Most of the electronic offerings run just a few bucks less than their printed counterparts — and, of course, the Kindle itself costs $359, so it’ll take a lot of downloads to pay off financially.

Amazon