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Comment by ryanvm | Hacker News Reader

"Imagine" is right - that is quite a fantasy.

First, that Kindle killer isn't even close to existing.

Second, if you think $400 is steep for a device that has a 1 second refresh rate and a gray-scale screen, just wait until you see the price tag on 10" of full-color, touchscreen, iInk.

Third, and the real barrier to entry, Amazon has the bookstore to back it up. You can make the finest e-book reader in the world, but until you have "magic" wireless delivery and a limitless library to back it up, it's considerably more inconvenient to use than the Kindle.

Apple will not crack this space. It will have to be Google or Microsoft.

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The whole point of the Kindle, at least as I perceive it, is to sell more books on the Amazon store. Why wouldn't they let a company like Apple provide yet another interface for their store? If anything, an "iPhone of ebook readers" would increase sales on Amazon.

The Kindle is not an end in itself. The store's the thing. Kind of opposite from the iPhone ecosystem, where the store exists to sell the phone.

Such a device from Apple would have multiple uses. Imagine the 10.1" pad in a magazine-thin form factor on a coffee table, interfaced to your iMac. You could also have an advanced remote control for Front Row, a special multi-touch iPhoto viewer/editor, the same for iMovie, multi-touch oriented apps for Facebook, and a Twitter widget that could float in from the background.

Done right, a device like this could rule the living room!

As the price of eInk drops Amazon can start to make a lot of money by continuing to discount their eInk reader and making it up in book sales. An Apple iReader would add a middle man that would be able to quickly switch to another book store and cut Amazon out of the loop. There is no magic that let's Apple build at lower costs than Amazon so as long as Amazon is willing to take a minor hit they can keep the eReader market. As other company's start to sell laptop's with eInk they can transfort the Kindel into a solid tablet PC.

PS: Amazon does not think of it's self as a book store as much as a large tech company. It's trying to create large margine markets like the kindel not just sell more books. And they have great brand recognision to build off of.

Why do you think they don't? I've been reading books through Kindle For iPhone for a month now. Takes me 30 seconds to buy a book, or download a sample to decide later. Love it.

There is a huge amount of free books already available. I don't care much about the magic wireless as long as I can read my own files.

You represent a very tiny minority of prospective kindle users.

The people using the kindle just want it to work (this is why Bezos worked out the deal with Sprint).

Have you ever tried walking grandma (Who is a memeber of one of the major groups the kindle is aimed at: The elderly) through setting up her ipod? Then transferring songs to it?

Can you imagine walking the same person through the steps required to convert whatever file it is she wants to view on her reader, how to plug the USB cable in, what hole it goes in, what buttons to press, when to press them, what it all means, where the books are, how to find them on her harddisk etc. etc. etc.

The kindle is good because it is simple. If you don't want that, get an old palm pilot or a nokia 770 (which is what I used before I got my kindle...palm back in early 2000 and nokia up until about a year ago).

Apple and Google are pretty fucking buddy-buddy atm, and isn't Google trying to scan/index every book in existence? Apple could execute it perfectly, with iTunes as a frontend to Google's vast library.

The barrier to having a huge ebook catalog isn't the lack of scanned books, it's the lack of publisher cooperation. You think that just because Google has scanned millions of books (to the great consternation of the publishers) that they're going to relent when Google/Apple proposes that they start selling them for cheap in an iTunes market? Please.

There's no reason why iTunes couldn't sell eBooks too.

The technology already exists in the form of the OLPC screen, which, I can assure you, is quite beautiful and amazingly high-resolution with the backlight off. It's not the same as Kindle's eInk, just an LCD with amazingly low dot pitch and an anisotropic color filter which only works in transmissive mode (backlight on).

That kind of thing in consumer-level devices will lead to cheap, very high-res, nearly page-quality devices you can fit in a pocket.

Actually you are wrong about the price tag issue:

--the whole point of these screens, is that they can be made using existing LCD screen manufacturing technology, with some number of tweaks. There have been billions upon billions already spent on LCD screen manufacturing facilities.

The e-ink process on the other hand, does not have that kind of scale and ability to spread costs over a very high number of units.

Apple should crack this space while it still has a lock on cover-flow. That alone could give them a key advantage.

Also, if you don't limit yourself to the primary use-case of the Kindle, you don't need the resources of the Amazon bookstore to back it up. A better form-factor for people to take information that they collate will have a lot of users. I can think of a variety of such uses for myself. I would be able to carry my entire library of sheet music with me for reference. I would be able to have an entire library of programming language manuals with me, whether or not I was online.

There are lots of kinds of books other than paperbacks. Kindle is oriented towards one specific use case.

There is always shortcovers as well. They will probably add support for this.

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