Kindle News

I am still laughing about all those comments from computer geeks when the Kindle e-reader first came out insisting that it was a dumb machine that only did one thing and nobody would buy it. And indeed, no one bought it who thought just like them.

But the geeks kept deriding it, even as some pointed out that Amazon was selling every single one they could manufacture. Somehow, in geekdom, this did not amount to a success, because people who thought just like them would never buy one. It was still a dumb machine that only did one thing: read books. And how many people could there be out there who only wanted a machine that could read books?

Plenty. Amazon now says they sell more Kindle books than hardcover books. That's a lot of books. And the price, as friend Curtis my favorite computer geek warned me, has dropped, now to a mere $189. At this rate they will soon be like the old camera companies - they could practically give their cameras away since it locked you into to buying their film forever.

Meanwhile, I am getting closer and closer to buying one.

and for the record, analysts think that Amazon will sell 3.7 million Kindles this year.

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Ominous turn of phrase (and pop quiz)

In an article touting the new Kindle while reading St Augustine of all things, B. G. ends with this sentence regarding a copy of a book he 'liberated' by leaving it on a park bench.

(Miami reader of my liberated copy of "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle": did you enjoy it? I'm pretty sure I didn't understand it. Do you? I recommend from experience that you not read it on your honeymoon.)

Doesn't exactly make me want to go out and buy either a Kindle or "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" but I am interested in the back story of this sentence.

This comes from a column in The Economist called 'Babbage.' Here's a pop quiz (no points given for checking the web for the answer): What does the title 'Babbage' refer to?

and furthermore, what about Lady Ada Lovelace?

quadruple points if you get that last remark and can explain its significance

E-Reader Wars kindled

(I know - bad pun. What can I say? It's genetic)


Here is the WaPo's comparison between the new Nook from Barnes and Nobles and the old Kindle from Amazon. I put it up because I am fascinated by e-books, but also the first sentence of it is, how shall I put this, misleading.

Amazon.com's Kindle is no longer the only e-book story out there.

It never was. There were several e-books out there, including a very nice Sony reader that was sold at Borders. But, that is what passes for journalism. It's not really untrue, but it is an intellectually lazy and distorting way to present the frame of your article. It has to be a contest, a struggle. Pledge your support here.

I know because this is the way I write my lectures.

Carmen is scandalized: "You just make things up!"

And another thing about the Kindle...

I just noticed that a reader of the article I linked to in the last post left some interesting comments about the unique advantage of a Kindle. I used one once borrowed from a friend and pretty much agree.

The beauty of Kindle is that we are finally getting traction on a mobile, updatable device that is a good environment for serious readers and therefore a good environment for newspapers, whose customers have always been serious readers.

The attention-deficit-disorder environment of a Web site (and the iPhone) is not a good environment for serious readers and text-heavy newspaper content. (See Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic magazine cover for July/August.)*

That’s the reason, I suspect, people don’t spend as much time on newspaper Web sites as they do with the print product. Heavy reading in that environment is just not as enjoyable as it is in print.

I wouldn't mind getting one for Christmas ...

but it's too expensive for me to ask anyone for this season. And I am too cheap to keep paying for the books!

* but don't most people skim through mags and rags anyway?

The Kindle again

We've discussed the Kindle e-book reader from Amazon before on Sententiae. Some readers won't use an e-book for any reason but I think there is a place for them - especially for extended travel. It may be other features of the Kindle that will turn out to be important , however, like being able to buy books on the fly and above all to subscribe to newspapers.

Here, via Andrew Sullivan, is a discussion of the possibility that the Kindle, with its paid subscriptions, might be the salvation of old fashioned print media. The New York Times, e.g. has 10,000 paid subscriptions from Kindle accounts. Keep in mind that there are virtually no production costs involved.

Given that the electronic Times costs $13.99 a month, that would mean the NYT Kindle edition is generating in the neighborhood of $1.68 million a year. How much of that goes to NYT Co. and how much stays with Amazon is unclear.

The author of the article seems to doubt that this is really going to work.

I’m not yet sold on that vision. I think for the Kindle to reach mainstream success, it’ll have to shift its focus from being an ebook reader with a junky mobile web browser to being a great mobile web browser with an ebook reader attached. It’ll have to become something more like the iPhone with a bigger screen and better battery life. (There are signs the iPhone might already have the ebook-reader lead over the Kindle, although without the business model attached.)

And when that shift happens, it’ll become trivially easy to read newspapers’ (free) web sites on the device — which I suspect will undercut Kindle newspaper subscriptions just as it undercuts print newspaper subscriptions.

I still haven't ordered one yet myself and may never. Amazon will not release its sales figures but there seems to be a permanent backlog of orders for it. Don't know how you measure success for a product like this but if you are selling every single one you can manufacture you've got all the success you can handle.

And why wouldn newspapers with a paid subscription base keep providing free editions on the web? Just because they are there now doesn't mean they can't go away.

A new Kindle reader?

Young Clovis the computer whiz told me to hold on to my money until Amazon came out with a version II of their Kindle e-book reader. It appears that Amazon has done just that. Now if the price comes down just a bit more.

Amazon Kindle update

Still haven't bought one, though the price has gone down a bit. I am still interested but think I can wait a bit to see if the technology/price improves. Nevertheless, despite legions of cynics and naysayers, the Kindle e-book reader looks like it is a great success. [thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the link]

And if you are into self-publishing, you can publish yourself in the Kindle format and your effort is sold like any other Amazon product.

The Kindle - electronic readers again

A friend showed me her new Kindle a few weeks ago. I am still tempted to get one, but Clovis, my computer adviser, told me to wait until the second version of it with a lower price comes out. Sounds good. My chief hesitation is that it would encourage me to buy and read books because they are available rather than because I really wanted to read them. If I spend 8 hours a day, 7 days a week, reading this summer I will barely make a dent in the books I want, need, or in some cases, have to read.

So what about the Kindle? It may not replace books, but there are all kinds of things that could be exploited that neither books nor newspapers can do. Here's Ezra Klien in the Columbia Journalism Review explaining.

Since I blew my $300 economic stimulus package on two cases of local wine, I'll have to come up with the $399 for the Kindle some other way.

Reading and e-books

I haven't made up my mind to actually spend money on one, but I am fascinated by e-book readers like the one from Sony. Just throw it in my backpack and - 160 books on tap. Of course, I don't go backpacking, but you get the idea.

Today the Wall Street Journal has a rather snide, though interesting, article by Daniel Henninger about the new Amazon Kindle. He seems to find this ironic:

It was hard not to notice that Kindle was born unto us about the same moment the National Endowment for the Arts released a report on reading's sad lot in our time. Amid much other horrifying data, it revealed that the average 15- to 24-year-old spends seven minutes daily on "voluntary" reading. Cheerfully, this number rises to 10 minutes on weekends.

He professes to be alarmed:

The NEA authors posit "greater academic, professional and civic benefits" with high levels of leisure reading. In other words, readers profit, at least in their souls, from time spent with works of the imagination or with books that explain the past. I agree.

Though he seems to be a bit ironic about this. After a tough day trying to discuss a book I assigned to class on Genghis Khan, I take the report at face value. We are in effect watching the demise of a literate culture based on a common data base encoded in literature and history. His following observation I do not find encouraging.

One criticism of the NEA studies is that they don't capture the "new" ways people read away from work. This means the Endowment doesn't validate new pastimes, such as reading text messages on cell-phone screens. Add the input-output of text messaging to the data base of readers and the daily voluntary reading time likely rises from seven minutes to six or seven hours.

Anybody want to read 900 pages of, say, War and Peace, as written in text message English?