The Kindle, she has grown into a beautiful woman.
Yup, Amazon’s industry-destroying device appears to have been quite popular at last week’s book industry soirée, where execs complained that the Kindle is going to ruin their livelihood. That is, what happens when people finally realize that it’s easier to carry one Kindle, with X number of books on it, than to carry a bunch of books? Then what?
Amazon says that its numbers, which it doesn’t release, show that people will often buy a digital copy of a book in addition to a physical one. Of course, book execs claim the exact opposite, saying that people will buy digital copies in lieu of physical ones.
And if Amazon can lower the price of the Kindle to around $200, you’re damn right I’ll stop buying physical books. (I said as much last fall.) I’d much rather read “The Last Campaign” on a Kindle than have to carry around that clunky thud of an object around.
I think those book publishing executives should give it a try… adopt this and see what happens, allow all of your books to be available over the Kindle. Why have 5 textbooks in your room for classes when you can just have a Kindle?
I got my (used) Sony Reader for a little more than a hundred bucks and couldn’t be happier. Using Calibre (a third-party replacement for the library manager) it’s able to download a number of different periodical websites (NY Times, Economist) all for free. I got it to see if I liked the tech enough to buy the Kindle, now I’m not sure that I ever will buy a Kindle…
I absolutely agree. For $199, I will be a convert.
i guess you’ll line your walls with kindles right? or is having a home library no longer something that people do? better yet, might as well tear down the public library, just have kindles for rent.
I think there was a line in Seinfeld where Jerry says to someone, “Why do you have all these books on display? To impress someone?”
-na
I’ve been wondering exactly that. How is the library going to lend me books in Kindle format other than the obvious non-DRM formats the Kindle can take. Perhaps a library would contract with Amazon to download it to the Library’s patron in a form that expires on the “return date”.
I love the idea of books as well periodicals on this thing (newspapers, magazines, etc) but frankly I’m not interested if its not color and more than $250.
I think the big break-through for ebooks, will be when authors realize that they can publish and sell their own works online to buyers at a fraction of the cost of having a publisher print the same book, and then still make more profit at the same time, Authors with a loyal following could sell a book online for a quarter of its hardback cost and still keep a larger profit from each volume sold. I personally buy books to read, not to put them on a shelf to impress others. Currently it is still more expensive to buy ebooks than to buy the same book at a used bookstore, so I am still buying them used in hardback.
The price of a portable ebook reader and the inability to loan the work to others legally, are two drawback that I see with ebooks. I am retired, read several novels per week, and must live on a budget. If I could save enough on ebooks versus print books, I would pay $200 for a portable ebook reader, but only if the content were portable to other readers.
Just as Digital Rights Management (DRM) held back digital music sales, I think it is a major obstacle to ebook sales. If I purchase and download ebooks, I would like to be able to read it either on my laptop computer or on any ebook reader I might purchase. I would not purchase ebooks, which could only be read using a reader from a single reader. (Anybody want a great deal on a HD-DVD player?) For the same reason, I never purchase music from iTunes, because I use Ubuntu on my computer, and Apple does not support Linux or portable music players from other vendors.
When you purchase music, it is best to buy a CD if you want freedom to play that music on the device of your choice. Similarly, if you want freedom and real portability you are still better off with a printed book than an ebook.
For text book publishers, it is a crying shame these books are not available for student as ebooks. High school and college students are so at ease using digital media, offering text books in digital form is a no-brainer. When I see students leaving the high school near my home in the afternoons, it makes my back hurt to see the size of the backpacks they are lugging about full of books. Since having a laptop is almost a requirement for starting college, why not let them put all their textbooks on the same laptop? You would not even have to worry about DRM. Make the cost of the ebook texts for the class part of the tuition they must pay to take a class, and then let them copy the books however they want. Other than students taking a class that uses that book, almost nobody buys these texts, so there are almost no sales to be cut into by illegal copying of the digital text book.
I use a Cybook and love it. I only hope that Amazon get off their ass and introduce this product in Canada.
Trick part is undoubtedly CDMA data cell phone compatibility with the unit in the Kindle and contracts with the cell phone carrier companies in Canada that meets Amazon’s requirements.
I have a Kindle and have purchased a total of 15 e-books, one a week since I’ve had the machine. I have not purchased a novel/paperback in 2 years. I have also just loaded the Stanza reader on my iPhone to read their collection of free classics, thousands of them, for times that I don’t carry my Kidle around. Since my family reads we just borrow from each other. The last book I purchased on line at Amazon has been gone since I finished it. I have no idea who has it now. I can’t lend my new purchases to others now but I know where they are.
For my use, I don’t care about whether the ebook would be copyable to my PC; even though I’m a software developer, reading books is one thing I never want to do on my desktop or laptop PCs.
Having all my books (I often re-read, or am reading multiple titles simultaneously) available all the time would be a great thing to me, as well as instant access to additional titles instead of ordering and waiting (finished the 2nd book in a series faster than expected? no worries, get the 3rd book immediately).
I’m waiting for the Kindle price to drop under $250. Then, I’ll be first in line.
I’m a lifelong bibliophile and collect rare books. My house is packed with books from top to bottom—perhaps 5000 or so. However, I have had a Kindle for about two months and I love it. It is incredibly convenient for an older person like myself because you can change the font size. With a larger size I can read much faster than with most paperback books.
There are two kinds of books I want to have on the Kindle: 1) new books—such as mysteries, political books, etc.—that I will read, but not keep and 2) old or very rare books that are not available even in most libraries and classics such as Dickens, etc. that I like to read now and then, but do not wish to store. Another good use is travel. With an extra storage card, I can take hundreds of books with me in my Kindle, enough variety to suit any mood.
I look forward to the day when I can download a book from my local library over the internet rather than driving there and picking it up. This would be service worth paying for, which would help the library buy more books.
My vision of how the Library service would work wouldn’t have it download over the internet, although it may start that way. I’d see it has having one use online access to one’s library (as one does now where I am) and to check on a book’s availability (something we can do now for paper based books). But when when “selecting” it online, it would be “borrowed” and sent to our Kindle directly via Amazon (who would provide this service for libraries, probably for a fee). The library would then show that the book was “out”, and the DRM for the book in our Kindle would expire when the book was “due”. IOW it gets returned on time “no matter what”. :-) Presumably “renewals” would be available if others weren’t on the waiting list (similar to what’s done now for paper books). Library would have to purchase it’s copies of electronic books from Amazon (with good overall volume) so they may be willing to help develop the computer system applications between their system and leading library software systems (and provide an API for the developers of those systems to use). Seems realistically workable, despite snide remarks I’ve seen elsewhere.