Kindling

19 November 2007

Just breaking last night – and to be the star of a press conference later today – comes the news that Amazon is going to jump in with both feet into the ebook market, with something called Kindle. A fairly extensive write-up can be found on Newsweek, and I’m guessing their aren’t too many more surprises that aren’t in that (really quite interesting) article.

First impressions? Interesting, but ultimately flawed in all sorts of ways.

Obviously, the hardware is the first thing that shouts “I’m going to fall on my ass”; what were they thinking? It looks like what we all thought ebooks would look like in the 90s; all cheap and nasty plastic, and far too large. What you want is something that looks sophisticated and about the size of a paperback, which surely everyone agrees is the right size for carrying around versus the trade-off of readable area. Not only that but it also has an odd, slanted keyboard that surely in everyday use is completely unnecessary. I guess that that couldn’t manage to implement an on-screen touch keyboard on the fancy e-ink screen.

Other then the looks and the failure in interaction design, the hardware brings a couple of interesting things to the table. The aforementioned e-ink screen will certainly help clarity and battery life, although I’m not sure if it’s a technology that is mature enough yet; maybe the screen in this is better then the ones in the Sony ebook reader, which has fairly major issues with refreshing the screen. The most interesting aspect of the device though is the wireless connectivity – it has built in EV-DO (a cellular wireless data standard) which doesn’t require a mobile contract. I guess part of the $399 price goes to one of the mobile operators in the states, and I would also guess that the rest of the world is either not going to see Kindle soon, or won’t get this feature along with it. Nevertheless, it’s a pretty key feature as it allows Kindle to stand alone, without needing a computer to load up new books and content.

Now, content is the other interesting aspect of the device. They’re going to have more then 88,000 books on sale at launch which, to my ears at least, doesn’t sound like a massive amount and also doesn’t give any hint to whether they’re new releases or older, cheaper catalogue. $9.99 seems to be the price they want to publicise, which seems to be ok – maybe a little high but not too bad. Where it gets interesting is the other content they have on offer, including newspaper and blog subscriptions.

Yes. Blog subscriptions. Blog subscriptions at $0.99-$1.99 per month.

I honestly can’t figure out whether this idea is a work of genius or the work of a madman.

Reading that Newsweek article seems to indicate that it does have web access (“In addition, the Kindle can venture out on the Web itself—to look up things in Wikipedia, search via Google or follow links from blogs and other Web pages.”) so why would anyone pay for them instead? The answer is that most probably wouldn’t, but there is always the chance that some will, so why ignore that market? I’m a big believer in the concept that some people – a fairly large amount of people, in fact – are quite happy to pay for something that they could get free for if they tried hard enough. I can imagine that the Kindle experience of subscribing to a blog will be a lot easier for a lot of people then subscribing via RSS (which most people just don’t ‘get’).

Having another look at that Newsweek article – and even the cover they’re running about it – it strikes me slightly odd how much they’re playing up the “iPod for books” angle on this. Jeff Bezos even looks like Steve Jobs – compare and contrast. Quite frankly, as much as they would love Kindle to be the iPod of books I can’t see it happening; they’ve simply got too many things wrong (the hardware being the biggest thing), despite all the things they’ve got right.

What this comparison does immediately expose though is the thought that the iPod for books could actually simply be the iPod.

With the built in iTunes store they’ve already got the distribution method, and the screens on the iPod Touch and iPhone are very high quality – certainly good enough to read decent amounts of text on. I imagine that if Apple don’t do it, as soon as they release the SDK in February someone else (Amazon?) will do it instead. You could see it working really very well – a simple slide of the finger to change pages, for example; the hardware is almost made for it.