So unless you’ve been under a rock the last week or so, you’re aware that Amazon is releasing a new version of their Kindle ebook reader, cleverly monnikered the Kindle 2. Is it worth it? ADHERER
There are alternatives to the Kindle, obviously, and I’ll get into some of them a bit later. And for geeks like us, well, I don’t think the Kindle is worth it yet. First of all, it’s $349…
Whoa! A netbook costs that much, has way more storage, can display an unlimited number of ebook formats, has a color screen, and is just about as portable. I am personally eying the Asus Eee PC. But Acer, Dell, Sony, all make very portable netbooks these days for around $300-400.
As well, I personally feel that Amazon should be largely giving the Kindle away and making up the cost in the sales of ebooks. After all, the prices of the electronic versions of these books is not appreciably less than the print versions. Does that seem right?
But here’s the crux of this, to me. Most of the books that I read aren’t in Kindle format. At least not yet. As a geek, I don’t read best sellers or crime novels. I read books on Perl and C# and database theory and CGI. So my advice is, peruse the Amazon marketplace and see if the books you might want to buy are in Kindle format. I took a quick look yesterday and all of the more recent books on things I am interested in are not in Kindle format. Amazon has graciously placed a little link on these pages, though, that lets us, the consumers, “tell” the publisher that we would like that book to be in Kindle format.
So in the end, I think the proof, as they say, is in the pudding. If you don’t mind the $349 barrier to entry, and if you find most or all of your desired books in Kindle format, I say it’s a great thing to have.
As for me, I am waiting for the Kindle iPhone app. We’ll see how good that is. I doubt it will be a hugely rewarding process reading books on the small iPhone screen. But if it saves me $350, then I am down with that.
Speaking of the iPhone and ebooks, Google recently made their Project Gutenberg site iPhone (and Android) friendly. Check out http://books.google.com/m to see the glory. Of course, as you may well know, Project Gutenberg is about the digitization of common-domain (i.e. not under copyright) works. Don’t poo-poo it too fast, there are some great books out there. I recommend Flatland. But as my girlfriend, the PhD English professor, told me, “their definition of classic and mine are not one and the same.” Fair enough, and to be sure, you won’t find any books on Perl or AppleScript out there, but if you like to read, it’s a great place to get free mobile content.
Then there’s my favorite (as well as least favorite) channel for geek books, O’Reilly (http://safari.oreilly.com/mysafari). All of the O’Reilly books are out there. You know the ones. They have pictures of animals on the covers? Yeah, and a LOT more as well. For a monthly subscription you can read any book in their inventory. But there are a few tricks to it. Depending on your level of subscription, you can only have so many books in your “bookshelf” at any one time. And there is almost no offline reading. For instance, I pay $19.99 a month and that gives me 10 bookshelf slots. Most books take up a single slot, but some take up two. So in essence, I can only have 10 books readable online at any one time. And once you place a book in your shelf, it must remain there for a time, so you can’t go trading them out willy-nilly. They do give a certain number of download tokens per month, however, but I find these to be next to useless. I get 5 per month, they roll off after 3 months, so I have a maximum of 15 tokens at any one time. And each token allows me to download a PDF version of a chapter. That’s right, a single chapter… sometimes only a section of a chapter. So if I want to download an entire book, it might cost me 10-20 tokens! However, I guess the good thing is I don’t have to spend tokens on downloading chapters I don’t need or want.
O’Reilly recently came out with an iPhone reader. I was excited until I found out what it was. It’s basically a PDF downloader and viewer. So to read something online on my iPhone, I have to log into the site, declare the chapters (redeeming tokens to do so) I want to see in PDF form, and then in the reader app I can download those PDFs and view them. All in all, I could have done that without the use of a dedicated app. But it does remember where you left off reading, which is nice. Except that if you then continue reading online on your laptop or desktop, there’s no sync between the two.
Ah well, so ebook reading is still far from perfect. It will get better. But we as consumers have to show them that it’s worth it. And as geeks, we have to be first-adopters. So I say if you have any interest in the Kindle, go get it. Or the Sony eBook Reader. Or the myriad other readers that are out there. Subscribe to O’Reilly’s site. As they see that there is money to be had, the competition will begin to take over and we’ll see better and better experiences in this space.
So how about it? Do you want a Kindle 2? Do you read books online or offline in an electronic format? Let me know in the comments below.
Some people just don’t understand the E-Book concept. It’s for READING, not for making phone calls or playing video games! You can also listen to music and browse textcentric websites such as Google, Wikipedia without having to pay a monthly fee.
1. A notebook can’t be read in bright sunlight.
2. A notebook battery only lasts a few hours vs
Kindle’s couple of weeks.
3. E-ink is much easier on the eyes than a computer screen.
4. You dont have to be in a WI-FI spot in order to download your books from Amazon.
5. There are no monthly wireless fees for Kindle.
6. There is no way I could read more than a dozen pages on a dinky cell phone screen.
7. You can shop from the comfort of your reading chair or your beach beach and get a free chapter along with numerous reviews before buying an e-book.
8. Save millions of Trees and leave a much smaller carbon footprint than the traditional book
distribution, storage, printing system.
9. Huge benefit for students as college textbooks become available on the Kindle. Not only far less weight but textbooks will become way less expensive and will also become much easier to update constantly changing information. My daughter easily spends $500 per semester for her textbooks so the price of a $350 Kindle sounds pretty good. Having a built in dictionary and Wikipedia will also benefit students.
10. The price will eventually come down as all technology does. I don’t think $350 is all that much.
11. I heard the same complaints from many of my photographer friends when digital photography first came out. I can’t even give away the film cameras that I paid thousands of dollars for just 8 years ago.
12. Mark my words, free newspaper and magazine content will eventually be removed from the internet. Companies like the NY Times and most other newspapers that are on the verge of bankruptcy simply can not afford to give away their information any longer. The Kindle is a great, inexpensive way to get your news and it will only get better as more photos especially color is added to the content.
13. I see no problem with Amazon using a propieatory program to purchase books on the Kindle. How are they supposed to make any money if you can purchase the books from any vendor that you wish?
14.Stimulate the economy and your brain at the same time, go out and buy a Kindle and join the 21st Century.
15. Fortunately, traditional books will be around forever but the E-reader is a fantastic and convienent device and will only improve over time.
Point by point… and I’m assuming your critiques are of my post, not just points in general…
1. Granted. But a Kindle can’t be read in the dark without a light source. Each person should judge how THEY want to read electronic media.
2. Granted. But again, each person should judge the usefulness for themselves. If they will always read at home near a power source, then that might be their preference.
3. Debatable.
4. If you have an iPhone, you should be able to do it over EDGE or 3G. And if your laptop has similar capabilities, then you can use that. In the end, again, each person should judge. Do you NEED to download books when away from wi-fi? If so, then the Kindle might be a good answer. If not, then not. As well, wi-fi is becoming more and more ubiquitous.
5. Debatable, depending on your point of view. The connectivity fees are built into the cost of the hardware, so one could make the point that you’re still paying the monthly fees.
6. That much is very true. But if it will save me $350 and I don’t plan on doing much more than looking stuff up every now and then, I’ll choose to save the cash.
7. I would wager this is true with pretty much any format you come up with, as long as you have connectivity. For far less than $350, one can set up a WAP in their home and not only buy books, but also surf the web, play games, email friends and family, Twitter, peruse Facebook, write code, watch movies, listen to music, Skype, chat, all from the comfort of the same reading chair.
8. You seem to have stepped away from the Kindle-vs-Netbook argument here. Both would save trees. Carbon footprint is of dubious benefit (see my previous posts on global warming). As well, one could put that $350 toward planting new trees and help out on all fronts.
9. Here’s where the problem is. Those $500 in books… well, with a Kindle, they’ll be about $475 in books PLUS the $350 for the Kindle. Buying a Kindle doesn’t make the books free. It doesn’t even reduce the price very much, IMO, considering the difference in material, shipping, handling, delivery medium, etc.
10. Did the Kindle 1′s price drop? Nope, not until the Kindle 2 appeared. And the price of the hardware is mainly the price of the wireless service, and those don’t show any sign of being appreciably reduced.
11. True. Except I think the price point here won’t drop near as much as digital camera prices have. And how much better can the quality get? Digital cameras are adding megapixels and features all the time, but what would be the improvement to ebook readers? The 2GB storage on the Kindle 2 is already being touted as WAY more than a person needs.
12. You have a point here. But electronic distribution is far cheaper than print, so I think we’ll see them go the PC Magazine route before they just decide to close up their websites. And it’s already been proven that free stuff on the web can be very lucrative if you drive a lot of traffic. Add a monetary subscription, and people will say goodbye.
13. By having the best selection and the easiest method of purchasing. This is the iTunes mentality. I have no issues with the Kindle and Amazon’s method of distribution. My complaint was about O’Reilly’s system for offline reading. Re-read the post, please, and pay attention this time.
14. In financially tough times, plunking down $350 for something that is unnecessary is fiscally irresponsible. Right now, everyone is taking care of their needs and taking less care of their wants. Kindle is a nice-to-have for most and a gotta-have for very few. I don’t say DON’T get a Kindle — I would love one. I’m just saying that in these financially tough times, I can get way more bang for my buck in other ways.
15. As long as humans have hands, paper-based print will be around. It sure would be nice, though, if we could move toward an all-electronic print world. Things would be so much easier, cheaper, and cleaner.
-Mike
My critiques were points in general and not in response to your points. I am also comparing ebooks to paper books as well as notebooks.
I should have started out by saying if you don’t read at least 2-4 books a month then an ebook is probably not for you. I should also have mentioned that there are thousands of free books and many great books in the $2.00 to $4.00 range available for the Kindle
1. Agreed, but you can’t read a paper book in the dark either. The Sony reader has a built in light and I’m sure that the Kindle will eventually have one as well. This feature will eat up battery life
substantially.
6. Agreed, If you don’t read books and only want to look stuff up every now and then. Save the $350
7. Agreed, if you only read at home then save the $350
8. I’m not only arguing Kindle vs notebook, I’m arguing Kindle vs. paperbook. To say you should donate the money instead to plant trees is a bit weird.
9.Disagree, the cost to produce, ship and warehouse these very durable, heavy, high quality books is very expensive. As ebooks become more
mainstream the price and weight will come down considerably. How many school textbooks have you seen that have been around since the 1970′s because it is too expensive to update the material every few years.
10.Of course the cost of the Kindle and other ebooks will come down in the future. The same digital camera that I paid $6,000 for just 6 years ago can be purchased today for $1,000 and it is a far superior camera than the $6,000 version.
11. I have no problem with people who wish to stay with traditional paper books I just get annoyed when people slam anyone who thinks that ebooks are simply a fad and will never catch on.
Already 10% of Amazon’s book sales are attribiuted to Ebook sales.
12. None of the major newspapers are making any money with their webpapers. Who will be willing write any quality journalism if no one is making any money. As soon as all the major news publications and wire services band together and say that they can’t afford to write articles for free you will see na end to free internet publications. Of course there will always be blogs and hack journalism on the web but you wont see Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NY Times etc giving stuff away for free. I like free but I am also willing to pay for quality journalism if I have to.
It is fiscally irresponsible if you have moneyand not spend it(responsibly of course) I have a fairly secure job and have not changed my modest spending habits too drastically since the financial meltdown. The only way out of this mess is for people that can afford to spend some money actually go out and spend it. If we have another depression all of your hoarded cash will be worthless anyway. So go out and spend it if you can.
The paper book is going to be around forever and has a place in the literary world. Ebooks also have a place in the literary world so why don’t
we all just get along and be happy with what we read and not how we read it.
My apologies. Sometimes people rail on me without really understanding my post in the first place. I can get a bit defensive
It sounds like you have a Kindle and love it. I’m sure I would too. I just want to wait and see if the iPhone app is any good first.
8. I agree my point is weird on the surface. I was just saying that if you’re running out and dropping $350 because you think you’re saving trees and the like, there are better ways to use that $350 toward that end. But I agree that saving trees etc. is a side benefit and not a primary reason for purchasing an ebook reader.
9. My point here has to do with looking at the Amazon store. The Kindle versions of books do not appear to be appreciably lower in price than the print versions… perhaps 15-20% or so. I think this is pretty bad, since Amazon pays almost nothing to distribute an electronic version of a book. Nearly all of the cost has to be going straight to the publishers and authors. But when you consider that no physical product is being sold, shouldn’t the price drop by however much THAT is?
Here’s some random numbers that I am making up, but they illustrate my point. Let’s say a book costs $50 (many of the tech books I buy do cost that much). Okay, so if half of that, or $25, goes to the publisher, that means that the other $25 goes for manufacturing the physical book and for Amazon’s handling (which includes warehousing, packaging, etc.). If creating the physical entity costs $15, then Amazon takes the remaining $10. Let’s say that $5 goes toward their handling and the remaining $5 is Amazon’s profit.
Well, an ebook doesn’t need the manufacturing, so that should drop the price by $15. And since Amazon only needs to store the bits, back them up, and have infrastructure to transmit the bits, that would cost a LOT less than the $5 it costs for a print book. Say, it’s $1 (it would actually decrease the more ebooks are sold). So now, the price of the book shouldn’t be more than $31. But it seems like the price is $45! Why so much overhead?
In any case, this has been a contentious point with me in deciding to get a Kindle… the hardware is $350 and then I don’t really save much on the books. I would hope that they would do a razor-n-blades thing where they practically give the hardware away and make up for it in the price of the ebooks. But apparently, they are making a killing on every phase of it.
Or, if on the other hand they charged me $350 for the Kindle but it came with 5 free books of my choosing and then books were around half what their print versions cost, then the economics of it make a lot of sense. I could recoup the $350 by buying a lot of books.
10. I disagree. With digital cameras, the technology is advancing by leaps and bounds, and there is plenty to make better. Cameras are gaining all sorts of features: video, stabilization, digital filters, increased storage (which is desperately needed), better lenses, better CCDs, and the list goes on and on. Every leap in technology makes the previous generation seem like sticks and stones by comparison.
However, with an ebook reader, there isn’t that much they can do to make everyone want to upgrade. Does it show your book? Does it allow page turns? Does it have adequate battery life? Does it have adequate storage? I would submit that the Kindle has already triumphed in all of these categories. So what features would you add to an ebook reader that would make everyone drool and “have” to upgrade?
So if the technology doesn’t NEED to advance, it probably won’t go much further. About the only advance will be smaller electronics, so the reader can get smaller/thinner. But it can’t get much thinner than it already is. Would you pay another $350 just to get the Kindle 3 only because it’s a millimeter thinner? I would bet most people wouldn’t bother with that.
As well, I am betting that $300 of that $350 is going to Sprint to subsidize the wireless connectivity (after all, there really isn’t anything incredibly high-tech in the Kindle). So, if Sprint doesn’t drop their price, then all Amazon has to work with is that other $50. So a $300 Kindle would garner $0 profit, $0 handling, $0 manufacturing, $0 shipping. Amazon wouldn’t go for that, would they? And that’s still a $300 Kindle! Not much of a price drop, IMO.
Now, a color e-ink screen… that would be something!
11. Well, to each their own, I guess. As a programmer who has dozens of manuals, I would love to have them all with me all the time, fully searchable. Unfortunately, however, few of the manuals I have are in the Kindle Store, so it wouldn’t make much sense for me to go that route. OTOH, I could spend that $350 on a Netbook and see about getting electronic copies of all of my manuals from some other source, even if it’s multiple sources, and I could then keep them with me at all times, and pretty portable. I would jump at that.
12. I think the fault lies with the newspapers themselves. If they aren’t getting across the added value that their reporters bring to the general public, then they deserve to die off. It’s a pity, yes, but we have seen time and again that even fluff news can survive on the web, ad-subsidized. As well, serious tech news survives free on the web, again subsidized with ads, and they do very well.
The print newspapers need to evolve, lest they perish. It’s a new world out there in cyberspace.
On finances, I am not the one to ask since I am not all that responsible myself. But if I had a $350 Kindle and $1000 worth of books on it, and then if I lost my job and couldn’t feed my family, I’d feel pretty stupid about having bought that Kindle. Wouldn’t you?
I take it you’ve never been laid off. Count yourself lucky. But it changes your outlook on life, believe me. As I am aging, I am desperately trying to get away from living paycheck-to-paycheck. I have enough stress with my BP and cholesterol and deadlines and the economy and terrorism and yadda yadda, I don’t need to heap more stress onto myself.
So, yeah, if you can afford it go and get it. I agree. But I think you can bet your last dollar that there are a LOT of people holding off simply because of the unsure economy.
-Mike
It sounds like we are close to being on the same page. I do not have a Kindle yet but I have ordered one and can’t wait to get it! As I said, I have a fairly secure job at this time and don’t have the same stress as many people across the globe who are worried about becoming unemployed.
As more manufactures get into EBooks the price will definetly come down regardless of the need for improving the product. Bezos said that the cost to manufaxcture the Kindle is way too expensive at this time to drop the price. I agree that the cost of the Kindle and the Ebooks should come down and I think they will eventually.
If you are in jeopardy of losing your job I would not go out and buy a Kindle either.
I’ll get back to you as soon as I try out my new Kindle.
Good luck
Matt
Okay, if Bezos is saying that the manufacturing cost is high, then perhaps I have overstated the Sprint part in that. So yeah, you could be (hopefully) correct… maybe we will see a significant price drop in the future. But it’s up to us geeks as first-adopters to get on-board with the product, which will help drive the price down.
Yes, definitely come back when you get yours (hopefully you won’t have to wait too long) and give us a full review. I am anxious to hear.
-Mike