Kindling

[sleigh]

Amazon has announced the Kindle -- their new e-book reader. I'm not one of the folks they decided to let play-test the product, so anything I have to say is based entirely on reading descriptions of the device, and from the video they've posted on the site. But here's my thoughts:

This is one ugly piece of technology. Just looking at it makes me wince. It's bland, plastic-y, clunky, and looks like something that would have appeared on the original Star Trek series -- a 1970s view of what a 21st Century handheld device would look like. Who did the industrial design for this, and have they ever looked at an iPod or iPhone or some other device that people actually use and love?

This is way too expensive. By at least half if not more. $400 bucks to get a holder for your books? Amazon needs to take a cue from the computer printer manufacturers, who have figured out that if you pretty much give away your product, you lock them into buying your refill cartridges for the life of the device. At $400 bucks, if I drop it and it breaks, I'm going to be mighty pissed. (Yes, I saw the "Drop Test" video. I've also seen "Drop Test" videos of iPhones where they drop onto concrete and survive... but I've also seen iPhone screens cracked by a three-foot fall to a wood floor. If the Kindle falls screen-first onto a rock, you're going to have a cracked screen and a useless device...) If I buy a $7.99 paperback, I can drop it all I want. I can take it in the bathtub with me, too, and if I drop it there, it gets wet but I can let it dry out and probably still read it. Drop the Kindle in the bathtub (or let it get rained on, or spill a coke on it) and you're going to have a $400 paperweight.

$400 is 50 $8 paperbacks...

The Kindle can't read every e-book out there. The Kindle will read Kindle-file books. But it won't read PDFs. WTF? PDFs are the standard for fiction, for academic papers, for lots of stuff out there.

I have to pay for the internet? I can get the NY Times or my favorite blogs on this... but I have to pay a subscription fee for those -- stuff I can get for free, download, bookmark, or print on my laptop. Some of the claims amazon makes are misleading, like "No monthly wireless bills, service plans, or commitments..." Right -- as long as you only want to use the device to buy and download Kindle books. If you want to use it for other stuff, well, there are going to be charges for that.

DRM-locked, bleh... Once more, we have a proprietary device. If I buy a dead tree book and like it, I can hand it to Denise when I'm done and say "Here, you gotta read this..." If I buy a book on my Kindle and like it, I can't give it to Denise at all unless I hand her my Kindle -- which means I can't read anything else stored on the thing until she gives it back. Bleh! Heck, even iTunes allows me to share my purchased songs on up to five computers.

Royalty rates for the writers are too low. They offer writers 35% royalties -- significantly higher than the rate for dead tree books, but why should amazon take 65% of the profits when there's no overhead to this? Yeah, they have some (small) cost in pushing the book down to the Kindle, but they don't have to buy paper or print books or ship them or store them. It seems to me that a 50-50 split would be far more equitable for electronic distribution.

Gee, the amazon customers don't seem to like it... At the moment I'm writing this, the 272 customer reviews rate it at barely more than two stars. Not that I think amazon customer reviews are all that believable or trustworthy -- believe me, I've seen some customer reviews that made me wonder at the sanity of the reviewer -- but the solid negativity is interesting. Almost 40% of those reviewing the device give it one star. Mind you, I don't think many of the 'reviewers' have actually held and used the device, so their 'review' is no more valid than mine. :-) Gee, you'd think amazon would be packing the reviews with five-star raves from their employees...

My current Bottom Line: I find it difficult to get very excited about this. One day someone will come up with the perfect e-book reader. It's inevitable. But (although I reserve final judgment, since maybe, maybe if I actually played with the device I might change my mind) I don't think this is that day. Sorry, Kindle...

Comments

[casaubon.livejournal.com]

I wonder how much Amazon has to pay for the EVDO network connectivity? And how much the Kindle actually costs to build?

It seems to me that the obvious thing to do would be to sell the machine at a big loss and recoup the money on the books and subscription fees. And they ought to do a couple of loss-leader bestsellers every month too.

But I can't believe that Amazon didn't consider that approach.

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

I'd suspect that part of the cost of the device is amazon trying to recoup the cost of the EVDO charges they're going to incur... though you'd think that they'd build that into the cost of each book.

Make the Kindle $50, and I'll buy one even it is one ugly sucker. At $400, I'm not going to be one of their customers.

[casaubon.livejournal.com]

Maybe they priced it at $400 to catch the early adopters who'll pay silly prices. I expect it'll drop to more sensible prices once initial sales slacken off.
I reckon I'd pay £70 for it ($140ish... possibly more by the time I've finished typing this comment!) with the expectation that it'll be hacked to allow non-DRM files in a week or two.
The ugliness doesn't bother me; I'd just put it in a case anyway.

Not that I could use it over here - I don't think we've got EVDO in the UK.

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

"Not that I could use it over here - I don't think we've got EVDO in the UK."

That's my understanding, also. It's possible that amazon is doing what Apple did with the iPhone: price it high for the early adopters, then drop the price in three months. But there was such a howl of protest at Apple's pricing strategy that I'd think amazon would be hesitant to try the same thing. Apple had to quickly offer rebates to the early adopters.

And I'm not sure that many people would buy it at even half the price. IMO, it needs to be below the three-figure mark (in US$)...

[mrbankies.livejournal.com]

I'm sure at some point soon someone like iSuppli will do a tear down and publish the BOM for it. I'm curious to see how much the "ePaper" screen costs. It's a technology that's been in development for a while, and this is the first real commerical use of it that I've seen. It may be a significant cost factor.

As for me, I might use one if somebody gave it to me, but otherwise I could give a damn about it. The tactile interaction with the book is an important part of the reading experience for me. I have no interest in loosing that.

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

I'm not a technophobe at all. While I too enjoy the tactile response of a book (and the fact that I don't need batteries or connectivity or anything but a bit of light to enjoy it), I don't have an objection to an e-book device per se. But it has to offer all/most of the good traits of a dead tree book while also giving me the advantages of digital interaction... and it has to do so in a cost-effective manner. I don't see the Kindle doing that. Not in this incarnation, anyway.

[sethb.livejournal.com]

Compare with OLPC. Kindle loses.

[bluetyson.livejournal.com]

Pdf is certainly not the preferred method for fiction reading for a lot of people.

The USA loves having their own systems though.

Own mobile phone system, own tv system, own measurement system ;-)

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

No, PDF isn't the preferred method, but it is a common method for creating cross-platform readable files, and there's a lot of PDF material out there. I think it's a significant mistake on amazon's part that the Kindle can't read that format.

And yep, we do love having our systems, don't we? Because they're best, of course! (he said, with heavy irony).

[gundo.livejournal.com]

I actually read a *lot* of fiction on my Palm Pilot, and really enjoyed catching up on older works I could get that were public domain that had been in my "must read" list. However, I didn't buy it as an e-reader...I bought it for other reasons and found it worked as a serviceable e-reader. I got quite skilled at moving text, Word, and PDF files over to the Palm format.

$400 *just* to do e-books? in a DRM format? Forget it.

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

I have an iPhone, and I think it would be an excellent 'text reader' if someone would put together the software. The screen's very easy on the eyes and can display enough text at a time -- and the device itself is a lot more portable than the Kindle.

Let me download e-books to my iPhone, and I'd be happy. Otherwise, I'm with you.

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

Just as a point, I doubt Amazon is getting 65% of the take. Surely the dead-tree publishing house is getting their cut, too? None of the big publishers will give a book deal unless it includes ebook rights as well.

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

Yep, I stand corrected -- you're undoubtedly right on that. Still, I don't know that 35% isn't too low...

[dulcinbradbury.livejournal.com]

Standard print royalties are in the 8-10% range. Many authors I know are *thrilled* by the 35% rate.

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

Believe me, I know the standard print royalty rates very well... But: they are based on the reality that the traditional publisher has much higher costs to manufacture, distribute, market, and store the books. It's much different in electronic publication; much of that overhead doesn't exist -- and therefore the royalty rates should be correspondingly higher.

[davidbcoe.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the product review. I've been thinking about technology and books a lot today (as my post shows) so it was interesting to see your post on the Amazon device. I'm sure at some point, way down the road, I'll read books in e-format. But I like my books the way they are. In this way, I'm a traditionalist through and through. Of course, a few years ago I swore that I'd use a film camera for the rest of my days....

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

As I said somewhere upstream, I'm not such a Luddite that I wouldn't read e-books or think that e-publishing isn't viable. But it has to combine the advantages of a book with the advantages of digital format. This doesn't seem to do that, in any way, shape, or form.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

I watched Charlie Rose pimp for interview Jeff Bezos last night. Funny how none of your complaints were part of the interview questions. I'm told he's supposed to be quite a good interviewer, too; doing deep research and asking the hard questions. Bah.

K.

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

I didn't see the interview, but if they're not questioning Brezos about some of the issues above, they're not doing any more than providing free advertising.

[gryphart.livejournal.com]

The thing I find most ridiculous is that the Kindle books cost as much as real books. If I could get ebooks off Amazon cheaply, and they halved the price of the Kindle, I might be interested... but if the books cost exactly as much, I have no incentive to buy it at all.

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

I have to say that if given the choice between an e-book or a printed book at the same price, I'll take the printed book every time: it's by far the better choice. It's not dependent on an (expensive) electronic device to read it, it works without batteries, and I don't have to worry about dropping it or spilling something on it. And if I leave it behind accidentally in the coffee shop, well, I'm out less than $20 bucks, not $400...

[hippoiathanatoi.livejournal.com]

Entering this late, but ... most all bestsellers and significant new releases in the U.S. are priced at $9.99. That's generally less than half of almost all mainstream hardcover publications. The Kindle editions of older books tend to be priced at about $5.50 or so, and that puts them 2-3 dollars under retail paperback prices these days.


Doing some digging around, the traditional overhead and manufacturing costs of books account for perhaps 25-35% of the retail cost. So the discount you get, at least for the new releases, is actually pretty fair. That said, all I've read suggests that the $9.99 pricing is because Amazon is subsidizing them. The publishers would rather charge more. By way of comparison, the recently-released Dreamsongs: Volume 2 by George R.R. Martin is at $9.99 at Amazon, while the e-text at Fictionwise is priced at $20 -- I'd guess Amazon is paying the publishers $5+ dollars on top of the split of the sale price each time they sell a copy.

I've seen a review of the Kindle that notes that, despite the design straight out of 2001, it actually works surprisingly well (at least for that reviewer) because it keeps out of the way and lets you get to the business of reading.

Personally, I think it would have made more sense for Amazon to create the Kindle format and then open up the creation of compatible readers to a number of companies. Let them target different markets (dropping EVDO support, for example, would likely lower the cost and make more sense for selling the device in Europe, where EVDO basically is not used), and competition will probably help lower prices a bit.

I own a Dell PDA that I got secondhand for about $150, and whenever I can I use it in preference to reading from a book. I could certainly see shifting to an e-Ink device, as I really only use the PDA for reading as it is. The main things the device will need to sell me on it, though, is support for the Mobi standard, maybe the ePub standard, text, RTF, HTML, LIT, and (most importantly) PDF. Also, notes and annotations are really, really useful and important -- and if they can be shared out, even better.

The closest device I know of right now is the iRex Iliad, but it is almost $700 -- just too expensive. Jinke's Hanlin v9t will have a touch interface (based, I gather, on the Wacom technology) and may come closer (and cheaper).

[hrimcealde.livejournal.com]

i saw that this morning, looked at the price, and laughed.

i pretty much agree with everything you said. of course, i can't really read large amounts of text on the computer screen--something about the way the text is displayed on the screen makes it incredibly hard for me to follow a line without skipping down a line when i get to the end. I would like an ebook for one reason alone--you can have more than one book with you at once, and you don't have to worry about carrying a sack full of paperbacks. Tired of the whiny emo of such-and-such modern anti-hero? switch to a swashbuckler, or to non-fiction, or to biography. and on and on. It would be nice to even have library service on it. but i wouldn't buy it if the screen was the size of the iphone because i would constantly be scrolling or moving the screen--i read too quickly to read off of a smaller screen, and i don't want to be constantly moving something. But i can see how a lot of people--especially busy people or travelers, would like an ebook reader.

and you're right. this one is hideous.

[hippoiathanatoi.livejournal.com]

The Kindle uses a technology called e-Ink, which is almost exactly like paper in terms of display technology. Computer screens depend on blasting light out at you for their display, and this is what makes reading on them tiring. E-ink is basically electronic paper, using a brief charge from an electrical field to make microscopic capsules turn white or black as needed. Once the page is configured, it's set -- the charge turns off and the letters will stay exactly as they are until you turn to a new page. The "dots per inch" is not _quite_ up there with what you can get on high-quality printed paper, but

I absolutely agree being able to carry multiple novels around in your pocket, essentially, is very useful. I find it especially useful for series of books, in which I can quickly open up an earlier book to refresh my memory on some event that has a bearing on the plot of the current one I'm reading.