The Kindle problem
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
But honeslty, if you are judging a person by what they are reading, then you are are bit superficial (you can have smart people, splurging on silly books once and a while). I think having a kindle right now means a lot more: You either:
1. Are an avid book reader, so a Kindle is a huge convenience for you (worth the price)
2. Have good money, (or generous parents).
I think the Kindle is expensive, b/c the technology itself is expensive, and it will get cheaper by time. Remember, the first hard drive based MP3 players were even more expensive at the beginning. And the Kindle is a wireless device. (works everywhere). Most people it are used to get 99$ or free cellphones, but they forget they are buying a heavy subsidized device which will cost a lot more money down the road with their $60-$90/month service rates.
Judging a person by the... cover of the book they're reading?
I think it's countless times better to judge a person by which books they read than it is to judge them by the clothes they wear or how they style their hair or how big their muscles or boobs are.
Judging isn't good, but books are something close to the heart.
It's easy to be dismissive of these kinds of social indicators, but they have power and influence, and taking them seriously can help you to understand how to improve the product in question.
Perhaps being judgmental about books is on the way out. It's happened before. Perhaps there'll be even more emphasis on clothing judgmentalism.
If I'm going to spend more than $100 on something like this, I really don't want to have to continue to pay to keep it useful. On the other hand, to subsidize the Kindle to the point where they could afford to sell it for $100, they'd have to sell books for a lot more than $10, and (ignoring libraries and used books) a paper back doesn't often cost too much more than $10.
Technically, you can buy a kindle, and use it only for pdfs and never buy a book, and that's still ok.
Until the Kindle adds the ability to get a temporary copy of book from a library (or other free service) and make it easy to transfer ownership of books (either for free or for payment) I won't even consider buying one.
I read a lot of objections to the Kindle stating that you don't own the books. Personally I read a book once and I'm done with it (unless its a programming/reference book). I assume most people are the same way. So why hoard books if you're not going to read them?
The other thing is that "buying" a book for the Kindle is more akin to "renting" the book. You don't own it, Amazon does. You don't own a DVD you're renting from Blockbuster, or Netflix, but I don't hear people complaining about wasting that money.
I also think that if I'm going to read a book more than once, I'm going to buy a hardback version of it and keep it on my bookshelf. If not, then I'll buy/check-out a paperback book and donate/return it when I'm done reading it.
I think there are really two distinct kinds of books, and critics often confuse the two.
(I don't own a Kindle, but have given some thought to it and read up on people's objections)
Not in the least. I may not want to read them again but still consider them worth passing on.
"..."buying" a book for the Kindle is more akin to "renting" the book"
This is exactly why I love libraries. I specifically want to own (outright, no string attached) books that I will want to read again or have some other retaining value. The Kindle gives me all the negatives of the library system (no ownership) with all the negatives of the commercial system (expensive, wasted money).
I wish the Kindle were more of a utility. Everyone buys one and it can be used to buy, loan, and trade books. Amazon would make money because the Kindle would be the TRUE iPod of the book world. However I'm not holding by breath for this to happen (at least with the Kindle); but I am hoping that someone else sees this opportunity and beats the Kindle into the ground.
I think that's a weird assumption. I read a book, maybe read it again in a year, maybe look at it sometime to remember some passage or some quote or some line of argument, and if it's any good, I'll almost always end up lending it to one or more friends. Many other people I know treat books similarly. I get equal or greater pleasure out of sharing good books as I do reading them myself, so not being able to do that really cuts down on the value of the book to me.
I'm also not sure it's a good profit model. I frequently buy multiple copies -- 2 or 3 -- of good books to give them to friends who I know will appreciate them but probably wouldn't have the money or inclination to track down a copy on their own, and presumably, those friends might be more inclined to investigate those authors in the future.
I'm not sure that Amazon wants us to think about the Kindle as "renting" books, because in America we have a huge, public-funded infrastructure of libraries dedicated to renting books for absolutely free; it's hard for the Kindle to compete with that. They usually (for most categories of books) have a better selection than the Kindle, too.
Get a family account and login with the kindles on that, so your kids will enjoy your books too. As for more advanced features, it is still a very early market, and features are coming one by one. Give it time.
And there's no way to tell before you buy the book.
In fact, the two books I have bought for my kindle app I've ended up not reading at all.
Even if the kindle dropped to the sweet spot price point, I probably wouldn't get one. And I'm probably not the only one. Wasn't there an episode of Star Trek where books were portrayed as an oddity: collectors items, status symbols?
Once e-readers and books are inexpensive enough, it will be more expensive to purchase a hard copy. And thus, they will turn into status symbols - I doubt the market for them will disappear, just change. Sort of like how owning a horse now is (somewhat) considered a status symbol.
Later the author states that he believes price to be a factor of convenience (which I would agree with), but that needs to be stated in the intro because I was put off before even getting to the meat of the story.
The very first sentence is the problem:
"Life, it turns out, is a series of tradeoffs between great experience and high convenience."
No, it isn't. By pretending this is a hard and fast rule to all things in life, the author has taken the mistaken position that no product can ever be a great experience and be convenient at the same time. We know from experience - the iPod/iTMS, the Wii, etc, that this is just clearly false.
The author then further fails to use even the most rudimentary logic:
"the entire e-reader market consisted of just 1 million units in all of 2008, and Amazon nabbed only a slice of it. By contrast, Microsoft sold about 1 million Zune music players..."
Using this flawless logic, we can also surmise that the iPhone is a terrible failure - just think about how many non-smartphones Nokia sold last year! The iPhone only sold a fraction of those last year! Not all markets are built the same. There's no reason to believe that the Kindle wasn't a huge success in its market. The problem with the Zune is that it failed to capture even a tiny portion of its* target market - this comparison is completely invalid.
The Kindle is just a book reader. It can show you any book you want, but it's expensive and doesn't do much more than allow you to buy and read books. I guess it can read book to you, too. But that's about it. It doesn't let you browse the web (now /that/ would be pretty awesome). It doesn't let you play games. There's no developer ecosystem that I know of for it. It's a one-function thing that's very expensive.
Compare:
20 hardcover books, $20 each: $400. Kindle 2 and 4 books: $400.
It only becomes cost-effective once you've spent $720 on your kindle book reading system: your Kindle, and 36 books @ $9.99 each.
I actually think the price of the Kindle is very reasonable, when you figure in that you don't have to pay a monthly fee for the cellular service. That was a conscious decision made up front to not subsidize the device with a monthly payment plan.
There have been many reports to indicate that the Kindle is doing just fine including one recently that the NY Times Best Seller list is going to include Kindle sales because of the large number of purchases.
One of the most convenient things about a book is that it is rugged. I can take it with me, read it anywhere, throw it down, and it doesn't break. And even if it does "break", I'm only loosing a few dollars on it (by the time it comes apart, it's old).
So, if I'd be on the Kindle design team, I'd make it ridiculously rugged. You should be able to handle it like a book. Also, the outside appearance should be such that people automatically are handling it like one (eg. throwing it around) instead of doing everything to keep it nice and scratch-free (like an iPhone or Macbook). I'd put it in textile or hardpaper book-like covers that you can grab and tear and then replace. Also, it must not get hot (or even warm).
At $300, I can't convince myself to take the plunge. $200 I could probably convince myself, and at <$150 I'd have the Kindle already.
This exactly what I suspected, and got into a bit of pointless internet arguing right here on HN over it, good times.
This is a classic case of a solution looking for a problem. I imagine that a Kindle would be a great companion on a plane, a train, or in a backpack, but other than that...
I can't imagine using one of these things at work or at home, where I do 90% of my reading. I love books. I have shevles full of them in my home and office. I love the feel and smell and the little notes I have written in them over the years. I love to see all of them on my shelves or just a few spread out on the bed or table. I love the manual process of leafing through them to scan, to retrieve, or for no reason at all. They are my friends, old and new.
If the purpose of the Kindle was to augment personal reading for travel, then great. But to be "better" than books, never.
Even for travel I don't see the worth. I tend to avoid taking expensive things on trips and even then, travel is an opportunity to see what there is to read and learn about the location I arrive at rather than what I can take with me.
The Kindle surely has applications, but for me they are severely limited.
Today I'm buying the new Dan Brown book because it's so convenient to purchase via Kindle. I'd never buy Dan Brown books physically. They're not worth that. But they're incredible thrillers.