The "Kindle" iPod of reading - Newsweek scoops

[ymabh]

My Sony Portable Reader (PRS 505) is a great travel companion. It does not replace old fashioned books. It will be interesting to see how the Kindle develops and how many of its features will be available when traveling outside the US.

[Lemurion]

I'm hoping to get a PRS 505-- had been considering the Kindle but it doesn't seem to have anything that will really make it worth an extra $100 over the Sony. $199 would have been a much better price.

(I think Bookeen and Amazon both have something to learn about taking over the market. You don't try to displace an existing market leader (Sony) by only offering more expensive products. Somebody should try to come in at $199 or $250 rather than $350-400.)

[silvania]

Originally Posted by HarryT

They paid a LOT of money for MobiPocket; they must have had a good reason to spend all that money.

Haha, you must not have worked for a big company before

In the 1980's AT&T shut down their wireless division because they saw no money in cell phones. Of course 10 years later everybody was buying cell phones, so they spent billions to buy a company to get back into the cell market, when AT&T themselves had developed a huge chunk of the underlying technology.

Amazon is no AT&T and I do expect this to run some kind of version of Mobi. It will be to Amazon's credit if it is the standard version of mobi that can read content from any mobi retailer.

If it is a "fixed" version that requires the book be sold by Amazon, then I think they are going down the same road that Gemstar (and now Sony) went down. Gemstar was a disaster. Sony is already leaking that they are very dissappointed in their ereader sales so I believe they will dump their reader within 12 to 18 months.

Amazon may face the same fate a couple of years from now if they make the same mistake of closing off their system to other retailers.

The only thing that gives me hope is that Amazon did not stop other retailers from selling mobi when they acquired mobi. Also, Amazon does allow many other merchants to sell off the amazon store, so they may be open minded about this.

We should know in a few hours.

[JSWolf]

The Kindle is real. I just saw it on Good Morning America on ABC network. They said it is going on sale today.

[igorsk]

Originally Posted by silvania

Sony is already leaking that they are very dissappointed in their ereader sales so I believe they will dump their reader within 12 to 18 months.

I don't remember reading this. Do you have a source?

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by silvania

Sony is already leaking that they are very dissappointed in their ereader sales so I believe they will dump their reader within 12 to 18 months.

First I've heard of it. Everything I've seen officially is that they are quite happy with how it has done so far.

[kezza]

Originally Posted by petermillard

as an aside, are e-ink refresh rates good enough for the Kindle to be used as an mobile email reader? I was just thinking that if you had 20-odd emails to plough through, the delay between page turns could get to be a pain in the neck - as well as a drain on battery life.

Well put. I was thinking the same thing - I can't fathom trying to scroll through emails or surf the web on something that takes nearly 2 seconds to refresh the screen. Ooof.

[yvanleterrible]

Originally Posted by vivaldirules

I don't get all this worry about how it looks. Is it really important? Surely most of you would agree that functionality and cost are critical, yes? If so, then everything else is minutia, yes? If it had to look like an Etch-a-Sketch to have all the functionality you wanted, wouldn't you rather it did so?

Okay, I chose cars to display a visual sense of design because I thought a 'universal' symbol would reach you. I was wrong. Lets say I chose something closer to you. Lets say a comparison between Vivaldi's and Britney Spears' music, wouldn't you say a minimal decorum of esthetism is important? Wouldn't you want to carve out your ears if you were subjected to hours of confrontation with that kind of discrepancy in tastes? Being mostly visual, a bad composition turns me off in a big way, did you get a little feel of what I mean.
The design of the Kindle is purely 'functional' meant to simplify the job for the guy who built the molds, period. As a furniture builder and designer, my job has me purposefully looking for the grace of a sweeping curve, a soft shape, shade, a unity with environment. This constant search can not be turned off, it touches every thing I see.
Oh! I've got it! One who reads and craves only the best of poetry and happens to write it too, would he like the way I just wrote?

[yvanleterrible]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The Kindle is real. I just saw it on Good Morning America on ABC network. They said it is going on sale today.

Now Jon, you have to be more precise than that! Pfew! Got my breathing back...

[Alisa]

Originally Posted by kezza

Well put. I was thinking the same thing - I can't fathom trying to scroll through emails or surf the web on something that takes nearly 2 seconds to refresh the screen. Ooof.

I don't think this is necessarily intended to be an email reader as most of us use them. It has it's own email account so you can send documents to it. I don't think you can set it up to check other email accounts. I suppose you could try using the Kindle email as your personal mail but I doubt you can set up other mail clients to pick up mail from the Kindle account so it probably wouldn't be a choice many folks would make.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by yvanleterrible

Now Jon, you have to be more precise than that! Pfew! Got my breathing back...

The best thing Good Morning America did was have on their coffee table a pile of random (looked random to me) books. And saying that you can fit them all onto the Kindle was a good idea. Not just a few hardcovers (like Sony shows) and then saying they all fit.

[yvanleterrible]

Originally Posted by Alisa

I don't think this is necessarily intended to be an email reader as most of us use them. It has it's own email account so you can send documents to it. I don't think you can set it up to check other email accounts. I suppose you could try using the Kindle email as your personal mail but I doubt you can set up other mail clients to pick up mail from the Kindle account so it probably wouldn't be a choice many folks would make.

Good intuition. Maybe the Kindle is so slow that it would clog up the servers if books were directly downloaded. Instead they just mail books you bought to your address on a bigger server where there are no slow hackable transactions.

[da_jane]

Do you think that Levy got the Penguin guy's name wrong. The CEO of Penguin is David Shanks, not Peter Shanks.

[Nyago123]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

Reading the Newsweek article & the quote from the Penguin guy Amazon isn't getting any special discount from them & is likely offering the $9.99 price as a loss leader.

If that's true, IMO Amazon has made a mistake. They should sell the Kindle as a loss leader, and make money on the content. It's not something that's "cool" like an iPod, and Amazon is already set up better on the content distribution side than Apple ever was (and I still resist polluting my PC with iTunes to this day).

Aside from that (and assuming no one actually pirates eBooks from torrents or Usenet ) I think the Kindle is a smart concept because it focuses more on content... so it'd be worth $399 to me if only the eBooks were cheaper... maybe $9.99 for new releases is not too bad, but for anything I would otherwise read in paperback, gotta be less than $5. Additionally, I'd want to feel that I'd be able to get the eBooks I want for the foreseeable future.

In that case, I don't mind DRM (though not a fan of it at all), though I wouldn't want not to be able to read my own PDF files as well.

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by silvania

Sony is already leaking that they are very dissappointed in their ereader sales so I believe they will dump their reader within 12 to 18 months.

I suppose that's why they just brought out a new model.

Seriously, though, if you've got a source for this I'd love to see it, as everything I've seen is pretty firmly contrary to that statement.