[Kingston]

Thanks to PHugger for the link to the Gibson/Laporte podcast. Here's the transcript of the part of that discussion centering on ereaders:



Leo: So I got my Kindle about a week ago, and I traveled with it. You
know, I was gone to New Haven for five days, and it was a really good
time to try it. And my initial reaction is, if you're going to buy an
eBook reader, it's certainly the one to get. There's just - there's no
question. It's easy, it's actually, because of their choice of fonts,
it's much easier to read.

Steve: Yes, the fonts are much better, aren't they.

Leo: Yeah. And you can get the font size bigger, which as a person
over 40 I appreciate. And the wireless, as we've talked about, the
wireless really does make it so much easier to put stuff on it. I
haven't ever hooked it up to a computer. I get a number of newspapers.
And so for that reason alone the hundred dollars differential between
that and the Sony is, I think, well worth it. But I think that there
are also lots of people, a great many people, probably the vast
majority of people who will never buy an eBook reader, at least not
until the eInk technology improves and is crisper and so forth. Those
people aren't going to like it anymore than they'd like the Sony. But
I think it's certainly true, if you're going to choose between a Sony
and the Kindle, that the Kindle is far superior.

Steve: I agree. I think certainly people who own prior generation
eBooks, I mean, if somebody already has a Sony, they'll probably be
inclined to continue purchasing Sony eBook content, even though Sony
has only about a quarter of the...

Leo: Much more limited, much more expensive, and much more difficult
to put on. You need Windows; you need a USB connection. I just, you
know - for instance, I was looking for a book on Egypt. I wanted to do
some reading before we go to Egypt. I went, I searched, found several
hundred volumes on Egypt, available through the Kindle store. You can
search online. And I bought a book. Wasn't cheap. Now, it's funny,
they have very expensive books on Egypt, I guess. And it was 35 bucks,
which was still cheaper than the hardcover.

Steve: The pyramids are those pointy things, Leo.

Leo: Yeah. See, that's the problem, is most of the books -oh, another
thing I want to say that I love that you can't do in the Sony store is
you can get samples. And so instead of buying kind of sight unseen, I
was able to get - I got samples of the top five books I was interested
in, read one, and it was just so bad, I was able to reject it. So I
was able to pick the right one. And that saved me a lot of money right
there. And if you're into the bestsellers, you could before you go on
a trip get samples of all of them, read them on the plane, and pick
the ones you want to finish.

Steve: I think also you are able to have multiple Kindles associated
with the same account.

Leo: Oh, that's interesting.

Steve: Yes. And so you're able to buy a book once and read it on
multiple Kindles.

Leo: Now, why would you do that?

Steve: Well, husband and wife might. I know a lot of couples who,
like, hand books to each other. It's like, okay, I'm done with this,
you want to read it? And so you're unable to do that with the
periodical content. You have to individually associate those with
individual readers because they don't want that to be shared. But book
content you explicitly can share among multiple Kindles.

Leo: That's interesting. And that is one of the complaints, and I
think rightly so, although it's inevitable, that people have is the
copy protection on the Kindle. But there's no way a publisher is -
that's not an Amazon issue, that's a publisher issue.

Steve: Exactly. That's not going to go away. And the point I made in
my review was that I've already got copy-protected content spread
around. I was an early adopter of the Mobipocket format, which of
course Amazon ended up buying as part of their move into eBooks. And
then Palm, and then Sony, and finally now Amazon. And my feeling is,
okay, sure, this feels like the first-generation device. The screen's
going to get better. The UI is going to get better. There will be lots
of things about it that improve over time. I mean, that's been the
history of eBooks, rocky as it's been. But if I'm going to be
investing now in a format, it seems to me Amazon's going to win this.

Leo: Yeah, I agree.

Steve: Already, right out of the gate, this is the best eBook reader
there is.

Leo: You know, the paperback is not going away. And I will still buy
books. So it's going to be more the stuff that I read once and I don't
want to have a copy of it. So I'm not really too worried about whether
I'm going to be transferring stuff over to a new Kindle. I have to say
the cover stinks. They've got to get a better cover.

Steve: Yeah, the cover's not good.

Leo: The Sony cover is, in fact, in general the Sony design is much
more elegant all around.

Steve: I was thinking that I was forgiving the fact that there was a
keyboard there because you end up holding it down...

Leo: You have to.

Steve: ...in the keyboard area.

Leo: There's nowhere else to hold it.

Steve: Exactly, because if you hold it anywhere else it changes pages
on you. But then I'm like, I've never used the keyboard. Well, maybe
once or twice. But it's the most underused aspect of it for...

Leo: I've used it because I've searched for books and purchased books
that way. So you need, you have to have it. Although I guess you could
have some sort of strange selection technique. But I think you have to
have it. And it is where you hold the darn thing.

Steve: We ought to say, though, Leo, that the comment you made early
on, the reason that you made the decision to purchase was the fact
that you subscribe to a bunch of newspapers. And for me, I think the
connectivity is very cool because the content is just there in the
morning when you go off to coffee, and you've got your newspapers and
magazines and things.

Leo: One thing that is really cool that wireless allows. So I'm
reading along in a book, and the guy says, "No more 'mute inglorious
Milton,'" in quotes. And I'm going, boy, I know that quote, "mute
inglorious." Where could that be? You scroll to that part of this
thing, you click the button, you search for it, it says Search on
Wikipedia, Search on Google. I searched on Google, immediately found
Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Graveyard" ["Elegy Written in a
Country Churchyard"], which is - that's the poem it's from. Got the
full text of the poem and was able to read it. And that is a very
interesting addition to a reader. You can look up words. It's got a
built-in dictionary. But you can also go on the 'Net and look it up on
Wikipedia, or even do a general Google search. And that kind of
changes how I read. I mean, I think that's really great. Something you
can't do unless you're at home with your reference library.

Steve: Yeah, it truly is connected.