Amazon's Ebook The Future of Reading? 354
theodp writes "With a seven-page cover story on The Future of Reading, Newsweek confirms all those rumors of Amazon's imminent introduction an affordable ebook. Kindle, which is named to evoke the crackling ignition of knowledge, has the dimensions of a paperback, weighs 10.3 oz., and uses E Ink technology on a 6-inch screen powered by a battery that gets up to 30 hours from a 2-hour charge. Kindle's real breakthrough is its EVDO-like wireless connectivity, which allows it to work anywhere, not just at Wi-Fi hotspots. More than 88,000 titles will be on sale at the Kindle store at launch, with NYT best sellers priced at $9.99."
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Informative)
Basically zero. They generally don't change reflectivity/brightness very fast, on purpose. A static electrical charge will keep them in a particular display state, at least the ones I've read about. Saves energy. A good thing for these designs.
However, at $400 a pop, I think this is another "Segway" of e-books. Sell the reader for $9.99 and make up the cost on the media, then you've got something. $400? Heck, I could drop $400 on one just because I wanted to, but I won't. Doesn't feel like I'm doing anything to do with books at $400. I like books, anyway. They're tough, you own them, you can do the usual things as compared to any physical possession, and they have a delightful physicality to them.
The experience of an e-book is no foreign thing, either; I've got numerous volumes in PDF on my laptop, full color illustrations, etc... just isn't the same.
I will own up to being a book freak [flickr.com], though. The next generation may completely lack my preference for the real thing. We'll see.
Re:No picture? (Score:5, Informative)
Some (alledged) pics here:
http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/11/amazon-kindle-meet-amazons-e-book-reader/ [engadget.com]
Easy to read edition (Score:2, Informative)
Re:More info... (Score:5, Informative)
From a year and 2 months ago. Knowing that, can we really rely on that picture?
Re:How does it beat just using a PSP or Gameboy DS (Score:4, Informative)
The large screen is a must. The DS's screen doesn't get enough text on it at once, even using both screens, to read at a good clip.
The touch screen is -really- useful. I can tap a corner of the 'page' with my thumb and it'll go forward or backward in the text.
You don't have to hack or buy a questionably-legal cartridge to use the n800 for reading.
I can guess the Kindle would also add: 30 hours of battery life, and paper-like screen which could be easier on the eyes.
I bought the n800 mainly for ebook reading. I use it for other things as well now, but it really was just another $400 ebook reader when I bought it. But it -could- do other things, which this Kindle cannot. No Skype phone, web browsing, organizer, etc, etc.
One last unrelated thing: I see everyone talking about DRM'd ebooks. I have never bought a DRM'd ebook in my life and never will. I buy my books from baen.com (ALL completely DRM free and in several formats) which has -years- of good books that I don't have yet, and they release more each month than I can read in a month. In addition, Project Gutenburg has the classics.
Re:Yes!! (Score:5, Informative)
1. Great to have hundreds of books at the press of a button.
2. Easily navigatable.
3. The 6 inch screen is a bit too small for reading technical pdfs (long equations, detailed graphs etc) even in landscape, if you really have to have that you want an Irex Iliad $650 (£468 in the UK)
4. Can be read in direct sunlight, great for beach reading.
5. Contrast is not fantastic, reading black on light grey not white, there is a tool on MobileRead called RasterFarian [mobileread.com] that helps with pdfs, but I've found the best solution to copy the text of pdfs out of Adobe Reader into Open Office Reader, reformat the page to 9cm x 12 cm and change the font to Arial Black 11 or 12, the formating might be a bit messy but I can read it low light conditions easily and it only takes about a minute to convert a whole book.
6. Overall I'm glad I got the Reader, if the Iliad was cheaper or I could have expensed one I would have prefered it for technical pdfs.
Link to Under-Construction Kindle Store at Amazon (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How does it beat just using a PSP or Gameboy DS (Score:4, Informative)
Amazing screen, open, FBreader has amazing format support, pretty good user interface (I like zoom buttons for page browsing, in addition to the thumb press). And while they might not get quite 30 hours of battery life, if you're just reading without using wifi/bt or anything cpu intensive, my 770 gets at least twelve hours. While the paper-like screen could, in theory, be better for your eyes, much of the eye-relief of paper comes from huge resolution, and e-ink just doesn't have that yet - the Tablets actually have quite a bit better resolution (~225DPI) than the amazon gadget (167 DPI), so it just might be that they're actually better to read on, to boot.
And of course, as you say, while they're good book readers, they can do a whole lot more for almost half the price (n800 is going for just over 200 now that n810 is out).
Re:How does it beat just using a PSP or Gameboy DS (Score:4, Informative)
Amen to Baen! Darned near all of their catalog is available electronically [webscription.net] (certainly everything printed in the past decade), they have a huge library of free books [baen.com], and everything is available in plain ol' HTML as well as other forms (Rocketreader, Palm Mobipocket, Microsoft Reader, and RTF). Individual books are priced about the same as a paperback, cheaper if you buy the bundle-of-the-month.
They also publish a monthly SF magazine [baens-universe.com] in a purely electronic format, if that sort of thing floats your boat.
Baen has a serious corporate allergy to DRM. Jim Baen hated it, and his successors hate it. This is what commercial electronic media should be. (I'm talking to you, RIAA!)
Baen Books _are_ DRM free (Score:4, Informative)
* a good start would be one that does detective stories - that itself might be sufficient to bootstrap ebooks to a larger audience.
Amazon Kindle PHOTO (Score:3, Informative)
Re:$9.99 for a book? (Score:3, Informative)
Examples:
You: Staying Young: The Owner's Manual for Extending Your Warranty
Cover price: $26.00
Amazon print Price: $15.60
Kindle price: $9.99
http://www.amazon.com/You-Staying-Owners-Extending-Warranty/dp/B000UZNS36/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=digital-text&qid=1195508317&sr=1-1 [amazon.com]
Stephen Colbert's I Am America (And So Can You!)
Cover price: $26.99
Amazon print price: $16.19
Kindle price: $9.99
http://www.amazon.com/Am-America-So-Can-You/dp/B000UZJR9U/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=digital-text&qid=1195508317&sr=1-4 [amazon.com]
Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
Cover price: $18.00
Amazon print price: $12.24
Kindle price: $11.02
http://www.amazon.com/Singularity-Near-Humans-Transcend-Biology/dp/B000QCSA7C/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=digital-text&qid=1195508465&sr=1-1 [amazon.com]
No, I don't work for Amazon, and I don't work in the publishing industry. It just irritates me when people scream about greed when the actual data doesn't bear out their assertion. There are plenty of cases of actual naked greed out there, why pick on things that don't bear that out.