Books, Electronic
Amazon announced their new electronic book reader Kindle recently, and although it's flawed, it's interesting. It costs $399, weighs about 300 grams, has a nice E-Ink screen, runs for up to 30 hours on a charge, holds up to 200 books and has free EVDO wireless connectivity. It's also ugly, with its icky white casing, weird navigation wing flaps and clunky panel of calculator buttons. It almost certainly started out as a pretty device, but was systematically mangled by thousands of hours of interface testing and modification. You'd think the designers would choose any other color than white, unless its some kind of misguided retro homage to the original iPod. Anyway, books are $9.99 from the Kindle Store, which can be accessed directly from the unit itself through EVDO, and you can subscribe to magazines like the New York Times or WSJ for around $12 a month. There's also an odd $2 a month subscription option for online blogs like The Onion or BoingBoing, although I doubt I'd pay a monthly fee for content I can get for free. Naturally the content is DRMed up the wazoo to stop digital naughtiness, which makes me wonder if everyone at Amazon was asleep when Steve Jobs posted his Thoughts on Music essay and Apple started selling DRM-free tracks on iTunes. You just know thousands of Danish teenagers with infinite free time are going to spend their holidays cracking the Kindle DRM system, so I hope Amazon is ready.
It's easy to see Amazon's intention with the Kindle, and it's not to cure cancer, revolutionize reading or transform the world. It's to make money, and not just through the brutal initial $399 price tag. It's pretty amazing that the Kindle EVDO is free, but pretty much the only thing you can do with it is spend money with Amazon. While the reader can view TXT files, it can't view DOC, RTF or PDF files, severely cutting down the free content that the Kindle can view. Cha-ching. Does the Kindle do something insanely cool like provide an RSS reader running over EVDO? No, but you can subscribe to these selected blogs for two bucks a month. Cha-ching. Want to convert a document and pop it on your Kindle? That's 10c per document. Cha-ching. None of these items are expensive, but there's the lurking potential to look up after a year of Kindling and realize that you've spent a thousand dollars on content and you can't afford Christmas presents for anyone. Amazon would probably send you a Christmas card, though.
Despite loving paper books, I get the feeling that a really good electronic book reader is off in the future somewhere, waiting. The Kindle feels like a step in the right direction, albeit one restrained by the chains of capitalism. Charles Stross wrote a good essay a while back called Why the commercial ebook market is broken with cool stuff like numbers on just how many people read a dead tree book in its lifetime, and exactly why book pirates really post stuff into alt.binaries.e-books.flood (it isn't for the money). I disagree with his conclusion about not seeing cheap ebook readers anytime soon though, as I think the technology is improving to the point where some wild-eyed boffin might put together an open, stripped-down ebook reader with a nice screen in his garage for a summer project and sell it for $100. Then the game will be, as they say, on like donkey kong. As for the Kindle, there's a quick review on BoingBoing Gadgets and a more indepth article on Newsweek, but I think I'll be saving my money.