Amazon Announces Kindle, eBook Reader
So, Sony and a few others have had eBook readers for awhile…what’s the big deal about this one? Two things, apparently.
1) Amazon is behind it, meaning they’ll probably have more content. All NYT bestsellers and new books are $10. Presumably older books will be cheaper.
2) It uses frickin’ cell phone technology. That’s surprising, to say the least. No subscription fees (that’s why the thing costs $400) and you can shop for books anywhere you can get a cell phone signal.
It’s definitely not the hit out of the park that Amazon’s mp3 store is, but it’s not bad. Still too pricey, and…hello, fugly. I don’t want a keyboard on my book to remind me that I’m not really reading a book. I imagine that making the eInk screen look as good as it does and be touchscreen is out of the realm of possibility now, but if anything begs to have an onscreen keyboard, it’s this. You basically only want to be able to search for books to download. And maybe to search for the dirty parts in Forever…
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Let me preface this with a disclaimer: I know I’m in the stone age. I don’t have cable of any kind, I have caller ID solely so that I don’t have to answer the home phone, and I finally got hi-speed internet just this summer.
I don’t want to read e-books. It goes beyond the issues of making sure the batteries are charged and my account with amazon is still valid. It’s just not the same. I’ve had a palm pilot for ages, and have downloaded books from public-domain sources, and yet I always gravitate back to the shelf.
Since I’ve laid myself out as a technological philistine, let me point out that I’ve spent the past 7 years developing digital manuals for my airline. It’s great for searching, and awesome for maintaining regulatory compliance. Even so, every time a pilot wants to study, s/he asks me, “how can I get a print copy?” I have yet to pinpoint what it is that makes the experience different, but I can tell you that it is significant.
Personally, I think it comes down to a few issues:
1. Physically (or maybe psychologically), there’s something more tiring about reading a never-ending stream of text.
2. I keep books all over the place. I’ve got hundreds in my apartment, several in my office, 2-3 in my car, and 1-2 in my laptop bag/purse. If I’m inadvertently placed in a situation where I would like something to read, I’m set without planning. If I’ve only got an hour left on my e-book, I’m going to have a suck-ass time waiting for my mechanic to finish a 2 hour job.
3. There is a sensual aspect to literature that cannot be replaced by a device. I may not judge a book by its cover, but I often love that cover nonetheless. I like the feel of a book as well as the smell of the paper. I love bookshelves, bookstores, libraries, coffee tables, reading lights and all the other paraphernalia of the reader. I feel some contradiction in that I’ve largely given up on record stores, but the fact is that I’ve only given up on being able to find what I want in person. I still buy CDs, and would do so locally if I didn’t have to search online for what I really want.
I notice that the pictures emphasize news reading. It’s hard to argue that news is better in print considering that TV and print news have gone sensational in the past decade. NYT might be a relative exception, but come on…. most of the time, you’ll hear about it online first, and TV/print won’t add anything to the story.
You’ve summed up my feelings quite nicely, Diane. The sensory experience of reading a printed book is too important for me to even consider an e-book.
I’ve played briefly with the Sony Reader. E-ink is much more like a printed page than it is any monitor. It also only takes power when you “turn” a page. The Reader measures battery life in page turns, rather than hours. I assume Kindle measures in hours because of the cellular network component or something. That’s kind of lame.
The Reader certainly isn’t perfect. It doesn’t put enough text on one page, and it takes a couple seconds to “turn” the page; between those, I can’t use it yet. But if the Kindle doesn’t solve these problems, the next generation will. And then paperbacks will join landlines and CDs as technology for old people.
It’s a fascinating gadget, I’ll grant it that. If it had PDF support, I might consider begging to get one for work purposes. I can see it being handy for news, magazines and blogs, but it’s still too expensive to be used as a replacement for those.
As for books? I have to disagree that they will be relegated to the land of old technology. If I drop a book in the bath, over the side of the boat, or get it full of beach sand, it doesn’t compromise my whole collection. We’ve all grown up with the idea of ever-changing media, but there have been benefits to those changes that made them palatable. A huge record collection would take up my physical space, limit me to listening at home, and require careful use to avoid damaging the discs.
Going to CDs and then high-quality mp3s have allowed greater portability and flexibility of use. I agree that CDs aren’t long for the world, but I think that poor artist development and production are contributing to that death as much as the convenience of portable mp3 players. $20 for an album with 3 good songs on it is a crime…..and increasingly common. There are plenty of cohesive works that aren’t the same on shuffle though, which has probably extended its life to a certain extent.
An e-book reader conquers the space issue, but it’s far less flexible. Portability is a wash - it’s smaller and lighter than a pile of books, but there are more limits on where you can use it without risking damage.
There’s also something picking at me with regard to the content. I think that when we look back at certain eras in our past, there’s a lot of filtering that goes into the process. Selective memory, I guess. When someone comes across printed matter from that time, it tends to cut through the bullshit. I think that JCPenney catalog meme is a good example. It’s funny because in the time since the 70’s ended, there have been retro phases, 70’s-inspired entertainment and fashion, etc, etc. It takes a bit of the JCPenney catalog (and probably a lot of old family photos) to remind everyone what the era really looked like.
In using digital means of reporting and recording, there’s a lot of room for revision after the fact. It’s already noticeable with regard to 9/11 coverage, and sadly more subtle with regard to the way the Iraq conflict came about. WMD? Who was worried about WMD? It was about regime change. Assuming that e-books were readily adopted, I wonder how long it would be until historical works were edited to fit our ever-changing ideas about propriety?
Price will drop. And there’s no reason an ebook can’t be made waterproof and shock-resistant. They’re even working on flexible e-ink screens — that’s probably still a long way out of consumer devices, but give it a decade.
There’s nothing magical about printed historical media verses electronically archived historical media. If anything, the electronic media will make history more available than ever before. Ten years ago, if you wanted to find video of Bush talking about WMDs, you had a hard time. Now, the newscasts, and the NYTimes, of those events are on the internet.
Paper and electronica alike can be retroactively altered. There are techniques for detecting that sort of alteration in electronic media, although I don’t think they’re widely deployed anywhere.
And Lord knows (har har) we already diddle each iteration of the science books to fit with local notions of propriety and religiousity.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the form factor of paper books. But they’ll be relegated to hobbyists and collectors, along with paper letters and film photographs.
> Ten years ago, if you wanted to find video of Bush talking about
> WMDs, you had a hard time.
And I didn’t just mean because he hadn’t talked about it yet
> I love the form factor of paper books. But they’ll be relegated > to hobbyists and collectors, along with paper letters and film
> photographs.
I doubt this will be true in our lifetimes, barring some brilliant new technology we haven’t seen a hint of yet. The spatial/tactile experience is way too important, and paper is too bombproof. I’m not willing to wait half a second for the thing to boot, I will not change its batteries or plug it in, not once a day, not once a month, not annually not ever. And when I pick it up, I want to be able to flip through and find the quote that is about 1/3 of the way through the book (”I just know it was around the top of the left page”), put a finger there, flip through to the section with something about something related (”that paraghaph that spanned 5 pages”) and put another finger there, and cross-reference that against the epilogue, flipping randomly amongst the three–or ten–pages, and I’m not willing to wait 0.5 seconds for paging, rendering or anything else. These qualities are way too important to right-brained people. Having a searchable companion to a paperback would be a nice supplement, but that’s all it would be.
Here’s the future. This is a 15-year view, more or less.
E-ink pages get much faster, higher-resolution, color, slightly flexible, water-resistant, touch-sensitive, and thinner than an iPhone.
Once a “page” is that thin, you make clamshell ebook-readers, so you can open them for book-level reading-real-estate.
There are about 4 sizes of reader: “paperback”, “hardback”, “textbook”, and “atlas.” Most people will own one “paperback”, one “atlas”, and a few hardbacks and textbooks so that you can lay them on a desk next to each other for extra real-estate.
Apple’s coverflow already shows you what it’s going to be like to ‘flip’ through an ebook using a touch-sensitive page. That part’s so close to done already as to make no difference.
But now things get fun: you’ll have a etextbook. With 3 clamshell-textbook-readers, you can have 6 pages of that etextbook up at once. There will be simple gestures for “grabbing” a page on one book, and “opening it” on another book. Local wireless — Bluetooth or its sequel — will handle confederating nearby textooks. It’ll also all the licensing headaches of making sure no virtual page is displayed on two actual pages at once
For publishers, book layout will be a lot more like web page design than classical book layout — you’ll want to make sure your book looks good on a paperback, an atlas, and everything in between. Of course, if you’re just making a pulp paperback, you may not bother to test on an atlas. Long web pages will be much more readable in this format than they are on an LCD today for all the obvious reasons.
To charge the readers, you’ll drop them on a desk where there’s a charging pad. No connectors, just a pad and inductive coupling. A few years later, ebooks will be self-charging from motion, the way some wristwatches are self-winding today. This may not help the atlas, but it’ll solve the problem for the rest of them.
At this point — and probably well before it — the under-30 set will look at paper books the way they already look at paper conference proceedings: as a big waste of time.
By the way, Kindle sold out in 5.5 hours.
And, notes from a converted book lover.
> Overall the gadget has won a rating of 2.5 stars out of
> five from those who have spent time with it.
The web browser, searchability and being able to buy a book anywhere are nice features. When the price drops from $400 to about $75 (or $350 with a full Palm OS), and books cost $3 instead of $10 and you can share them, and it supports pdf and there’s no surcharge to view files you already own and they replace the keyboard with graffiti I might buy one as a paperbackup.
I’m afraid of ebooks, not just because I am totally with Diane on this, but because it means access to still more information at our instantly gratified fingertips. It’s already overwhelming trying to keep up, and I’m starting to feel more than just a little nuts by all the information pounding into my brain.
Is this a side effect of the future that any Sci-fi authors explore? Maybe it’s what made Philip K. Dick go bonkers. Turning my stack of 15 bedside need-to-reads into 50 newly downloaded ebooks is going to make me lose my mind completely.
Not to mention wipe my bank accounts of all their virtual currency.
Holy crap, is anything going to be “real” in ten years time?
One other important thing that books don’t do is make your eyes go ga-ga with electronic flicker. And that’s while I’ll never convert. I can barely handle the pain of staring at my computer and phone all day. Books are my last chance to relax my eyes a bit.
Interesting to note in all this…as we get more into the computer age, book and magazine sales are skyrocketing. I think it is in part that we are more used to reading nowadays, but I do think there is also a desire to possess these items. That is one thing electronic media doesn’t offer. (but in terms of music and CD sales, well, we so obviously don’t give a shit about possession there, do we? But it’s about curating and selection much more than books would ever be. I am more than happy to nab a couple of tracks of music and toss the rest of an album aside, but I could never pick up a few chapters and ignore the rest of an entire novel)
“books don’t do is make your eyes go ga-ga with electronic flicker” — e-ink doesn’t flicker. It’s basically paper. You’ve got to see it to believe it. But don’t worry: you’ll see it everywhere in a few years, so no rush.
PS I own no stock. I’m just convinced, convinced, convinced that this is the way of the future.
I’ll finally wade in. I still haven’t seen an eInk display, but I’m willing to bet, based on what people have said, that it’s probably 80-90% of the way to where it needs to be…if it’s not perfect already. It’s just all this stupid cruft that screws up the kindle, and the sony book.
I’ll tell you what would sell it for me…and I have no doubt that they’ll get here, it’s just still years away:
1. trade paperback, or perhaps even paperback sized.
2. water resistant/proof and rugged
3. No fucking buttons. Ok, that’s not realistic. One button.
4. touch screen. don’t think any eInk does that yet, but I’m sure it will. This eliminates the need for the keyboard, all the other buttons, and probably a lot of the navigation items as well.
5. I don’t think touchpads are sensitive enough now, but I’d like basically a mini-touchpad on the right side of the device, which would flip through pages as you move your thumb over it. Mimicking flipping the pages of a book. Obviously, if you bookmarked where you left off, that’ll get you there exactly, but the flipping would help you find something a little more intuitively.
I think they’d do well to take a cue from the iPhone, and just have the thing be a display, and nothing else.
I was reading this and just kept getting annoyed for the reviewer.
So, yeah, I think it’ll get there, but I think it’s a ways off.