Kindle and ebook reader notes

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Kindle and ebook reader notes

Contents

The basics

  • The Kindle ebook reader is exclusively available from Amazon for US$399.
  • Kindle measures 7.5"x5.3"x0.7" and weighs 10.3 ounces.
  • The E-Ink screen measures 6" diagonal and offers 600x800 pixel resolution, 167 pixels per inch, with four levels of gray. E-Ink (a trademarked brand of "electronic paper") neither requires nor can use backlighting. (The Sony Reader also uses an E-Ink display.) By most accounts (and photos), it's a medium gray background, not paper-white.
  • Kindle has a keyboard (not designed for touch typing) and large page-forward and page-back strips: It does not use a touch-sensitive screen.
  • Kindle supports full-text searching across all texts loaded on the device and comes preloaded with a dictionary.
  • Books can be purchased and downloaded (with the first chapter free) through Amazon's WhisperNet wireless EVDO data network in most parts of the US (excluding Alaska and Montana). There's no direct charge for wireless access--but it's not clear whether there will be charges for using Kindle as a web browser (which is possible). There are charges (ten cents a document) for converting your own documents to Kindle's format and sending them to your Kindle. It's possible to avoid that charge through email conversion and USB loading.
  • Kindle books are heavily laden with Digital Rights (or Restrictions) Management.
  • Most new books (100,000 books are available) are priced at $9.99. You can also purchase newspaper and magazine subscriptions and, oddly, purchase certain blogs.
  • Amazon estimates Kindle's storage capacity at 200 books. It can be expanded with SD flash memory cards.
  • Amazon estimates battery life of two days, a week or more if you disable the always-on wireless connection. (Some other reports disagree.)
  • Kindle may not be suitable for library circulation. When asked directly, Amazon says that libraries lending the Kindle are violating the Terms of Service. But when asked directly by someone else (see comments in the link), Amazon gave a different answer...
Only if empty? - This post notes a Library Journal report that an Amazon spokesperson says "a loan of a Kindle without content is OK but sharing a device loaded with content 'with a wide group of people would not be in line with the terms of use.'" So unless a library is in the expensive-device-lending business, Kindle is not suitable for library circulation. Rochelle Hartman, who began this investigation, concluded that Kindle isn't a good choice for libraries even before the "only if empty" response.

and one opinionated but factual comment:

  • As of mid-December 2007, Amazon lists Kindle as "sold out" and says it sold out 5.5 hours after it was introduced. Notably, Amazon does not offer any sales figures--it's not possible to determine whether 100, 1,000, or 100,000 were sold.
That's consistent with the Sony Reader and, years ago, with the Rocket Ebook and competitors in all generations. It's wholly inconsistent with typical practice for successful and even semi-successful new devices in the retail market, where you normally see sales figures touted at all stages of the game. My own instinct is to assume that, if no figures are available, there's a reason--not a positive one. "Sold out" by itself has no meaning.
Updated April 30, 2008: Amazon now shows Kindle as readily available--and still offers no sales figures, although Amazon customers have posted more than 2,000 reviews of Kindle.
One observer has suggested combined sales for the Kindle and Sony Reader in the six digits, possibly totalling a million by the end of 2008. Amazon flatly refuses to mention even approximate numbers.

--Walt Crawford 13:19, 21 December 2007 (EST), modified 2/13/08, 3/16/08, 4/30/08 and 6/16/08

Leader's Digest

Notes by Leslie Dillon from Leader's Digest issues as noted.

Sony’s new e-book Reader gets mixed reviews

Leader's Digest October 2006

Sony's e-book Reader is supposed to be available this month for $350. BusinessWeek online’s review says the Reader’s “a vast improvement over various other e-book designs rolled out in the past decade” but the book purchasing software is clunky, and Sony's online bookstore is “clueless.” The Reader falls short of real print on paper, but its biggest “problem is that search, the essence of an online bookstore, is broken.” The New York Times technology writer, David Pogue, praises the Reader’s screen, but laments the lack of search. He concludes though that “Sony got the big stuff right.” (I’m not so sure--without good search or a bookstore, how popular will it be?) (The NYT article is free but requires registration.) Want to see the Sony e-book Reader for yourself? Check it out on YouTube!

Amazon's new ebook unveiled

Leader's Digest November 2007

In case you haven’t already read all about it, Amazon has launched its new e-book reader, Kindle. Newsweek’s review raves about the device. Accompanying the online article is a brief video with great pictures of the Kindle at work.

The Kindle weighs 10.3 ounces, less than a typical paperback, and it uses electronic-paper display, which the Sony reader also uses. What sets Kindle apart is its wireless Internet connectivity, using cellphone technology but with no monthly service charges. The Kindle Store offers 90,000 books, magazines, newspapers, and blogs; new books cost $9.99. You can download an item from wherever you are directly to the Kindle reader in less than a minute. The Kindle site has a complete list of features, plus a demo.

Newsweek’s reviewer, Steven Levy, sees Kindle as a milestone in the history of electronic books, and he predicts that we’ll all be reading books this way one day. Those of us willing to pay $399.00 for a Kindle won’t have to wait.

(Steven Levy, “The Future of Reading,” Newsweek, Nov. 26, 2007.)

Epaper, Kindle and Apple’s tablet

Leader's Digest November 2007

Amazon’s Kindle apparently sold out 5.5 hours after it was launched. So even though it may never be a market driver, and in spite of the “ho-hum” reviews, its lack of additional features and no library model (yet), Kindle’s launch lets us know that ebooks aren’t going away and we need to pay attention to what’s happening in this space.

MIT’s Technology Review notes that E Ink, the company that makes e-paper, the display technology used by Kindle and by the Sony Reader, is now able to add filters to its monochrome e-paper displays, transforming them into color displays. As of yet, there aren’t any “commercialization plans” for the color e-paper, but Technology Review says, “Higher reflectivity versions [that make color displays possible] should go into commercial products...in about two years.” The company is also working to make E Ink technology video ready. So these new and forthcoming devices may be able to offer lots of missing features in the not-too-distant future.

Here’s what could be even bigger news: A tablet is reportedly being made for Apple by Asus. Experts at Gadgetell, a blog of "tech news, reviews, and interesting things" believe Apple will likely introduce its tablet with ebook functionality built in...not an ebook-only device.” In addition, Apple has apparently filed a “patent application seemingly destined for a new tablet.”

The techies at Gadgetell say that “Kindles launch shows us one thing: ebooks are not going away. Now all that is needed is a device that wows us. Will Apple be the one to do it again? We think so.”

(”E-paper comes alive,” Technology Review; “eBook’s future isn’t ebooks: the makings of Apple’s tablet,” Gadgetell, Nov. 26, 2007, via ContentBlogger, Nov. 28, 2007.)

Update: E-paper in living color

Leader's Digest February 2008

Advances in the labs at E-Ink, whose tech­nology is used in both the Sony Reader and ­Amazon’s Kindle, “are pushing electronic-paper tech­nology into color and video.”

The company has recently been able to produce “a prototype color display” with red, green and blue colors.

E-Ink is working with partners to develop flexible transistors for use in color displays; eventually, such displays could even roll up. Commercialization is still a few years off, but “you can imagine a USA Today weather chart where clouds are actually moving,” says Russ Wilcox, CEO of E-Ink.”
(David Talbot, "E-paper, in living color", Technology Review, Jan/Feb 2008.)

Other commentaries on ebook readers

notes by Walt Crawford, December 19, 2007, updated February 13, 2008

A sampling of Kindle commentary

  • Peter Brantley posted "Kindling ebooks" at O'Reilly radar before the Kindle actually appeared. Thinking about the supposed ease of migration from packaged music to downloadable music, Brantley sees a difference:
    • "When one considers long form narratives, whether fiction or non-fiction, there is less of an impetus to migrate from print use except for the possible advantage of portability and more extensive support for visually handicapped readers; on the flip side, there exist some non-trivial barriers (drm, format wars, etc.) to electronic access. Exceptions to this equation tend to be concentrated in areas where consumption modes are inherently mass-market, and where volume exists in transactions; Harlequin may well be the single most successful ebook publisher in the market today. Replicating their striking success through niche markets, or across smaller-impact imprints, is likely to prove difficult."
  • Tom Peters posted "Kindling" at the ALA TechSource blog on November 19, 2007. It's an early review (based on marketing materials and press coverage) that raises a number of questions. Peters has been a big ebook supporter for years. He closes with these questions:
    • "Will libraries have any truck with Kindle? Will Kindle knockoffs (with names such as Splinter and Tinder) soon hit the market? After the sizzle of the new begins to wane, will Amazon drop Kindle's price to $199, similar to what Apple did with the iPhone? Time will tell."
  • John DuPuis at Confessions of a science librarian posted "Amazon's new Kindle" on November 20, 2007 (updated November 21 and 22), providing quick links to a range of early commentary and asking a few pointed questions of his own.
  • Simon Chamberlain posted "Latest on e-books: Amazon's Kindle" at his blog. He links to somewhat negative reactions at Techdirt and Metafilter and some other discussions, sees some pros and cons and notes that he's probably not the target audience:
    • "I probably prefer reading off paper anyway (it’s not the resolution, so much as being able to flick from page to page and to have several books open at once). In an ideal world, I’d have paper and e-books, one for actually reading, the other available so I can do full-text searching when needed…"
  • Walter S. Mossberg was less than kind in his November 29, 2007 Wall Street Journal review, "Amazon's Kindle makes buying e-books easy, reading them hard." He loves the ease of buying books from Amazon--but finds the device poorly designed with a clumsy interface, although he did find the screen "good enough to make me forget I wasn't reading the book on paper."
  • Andrew K. Pace has also been a big ebook supporter in the past--which made others wonder why he didn't report on the Kindle as soon as it emerged. He discusses this in a December 3, 2007 Hectic Pace post, "E-book malaise". Briefly, Pace thought that "by now we would have a device that smelled like a paperback, and we still don't have anything that even feels like one." After seeing the early failures in ebook readers, he's discouraged that the "perfect device" still eludes us.
  • One complaint of many commenters is that new books cost $9.95 as Kindle downloads from Amazon--DRM and all. They think that's too high. Tim O'Reilly, who knows something about publishing costs, discusses this issue at O'Reilly radar in a December 5, 2007 post, "Bad math among ebook enthusiasts." It's an interesting read--and don't ignore the lengthy stream of mostly-thoughtful comments, which took the piece to 27 print pages as of December 10, 2007. For years, I've noted in speeches and writing that the "physical costs" of a book being a book--that is, printing, binding, materials and distribution--don't add up to much more than 14% of the book's price (not cost) in most cases; that still appears to be a reasonable estimate--which limits the savings for ebooks.
  • Peter Terzian compares the Kindle, the Sony Reader and print books in this December 19, 2007 Newsday piece. Terzian is less enamored of the e-ink display (both Reader and Kindle) than others, saying the "dim, dishwater-gray screen can be difficult to read except in the best light."
  • Finally (for this cluster--and there are probably hundreds more posts and reviews out there), Jeff Scott discussed a range of ebook readers (and devices capable of displaying ebooks) and some of his own experience in a December 9, 2007 Gather no dust post, "Bricks, Overdrive and the scary thing I found out about myself while using e-books." You'll be seeing some content from Scott at PLN in the near future; in the meantime, I think you'll find this informal discussion worth reading.

More commentary since December 19, 2007

  • Steve Jobs dismissed suggestions that Apple might enter the ebook reader market and also dissed the Kindle with an odd observation, as quoted in a New York Times article and discussed in this ACRLog post (and many others): "It doesn't matter how good the product is, the fact is that people don't read anymore... Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole concept is flawed at the top because people don't read anymore."
  • Paul Courant (University Librarian at the University of Michigan) calls the Kindle "a pretty poor substitute for a book" while noting some purposes for which it's much better than a book, and says ebooks "will really take off" when publishers "admit that on-screen...is not the best medium for serious and sustained reading, and develop and use technical and rights environments that allow cheap and convenient print on demand. It’s wonderful to be able to search and to skim on screen, but when you want to read, there is nothing like a book or a printed article."
  • George Needham (OCLC) offers favorable "first e-Impressions" of Kindle at It's all good. He finds the reading experience more than good enough so that he was "thoroughly enmeshed" in the books, "as thoroughly as if I were reading the paper edition." He wonders what it means for libraries: "Do we have in Kindle an opportunity, a threat, or a parallel course?"
  • Needham also devotes an "I'm Curious George" column to the Kindle, E-ink and ebooks in general...and points to William Lund's review at WebJunction. Briefly--it's a careful review--Lund (Brigham Young University) says "This is the first ebook reader that I have not been able to put down" and the first ebook reader "that I have truly loved."
  • "Short Kindle supply is keeping e-book fans waiting" (ABC News) focuses on the supposed shortage of Kindles--but, once again, offers no clue whatsoever as to how many have actually sold.
  • Thinking about Kindle and Ebooks - A long roundup of commentary from various sources and Walt Crawford's own conclusions (and his 7-year-old nine-part model of the ebook market), more easily readable in the PDF Cites & Insights 8:4, April 2008.

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