I want to upgrade my Kindle. I really do. The Kindle design is clunky, it’s starting to fall apart regularly, and the screen is hard on the eyes. But friends, my next Kindle – and next after that, ad infinitum – will be from Amazon unless Tuetonic company Txtr actually makes and sells the item you see before you. Sadly, I seriously doubt it will.
See, this is supposed to be an e-ink tablet with WiFi, 3G/GPRS, and Bluetooth. It will have a 3D accelerometer and the screen will be a 6-inch 600×800 touchpad. It will also contain a single hair from the mane of a rare zebracorn, a striped unicorn native only to the Black Forest of Germany. You see where I’m going here.
It looks like a great piece of hardware, but they might as well just put a color screen on here and call it a big MP3 player for all the traction they’ll get as an e-reader.
Why is the Kindle so popular – or as popular as a limited audience e-reader can be? It’s connected to Amazon. Unless Amazon opens its ebook store to outside hardware, every text reader is just an e-ink tablet with some reading features. This product will have a web presence called Txtr.com where you can control your downloaded texts. But this assumes there are texts out there to download. While I’m aware of the rich treasure trove of free books out there (The People’s Common Sense Medical Adviser or Iliad, anyone?), unless you’re an scholar of ancient Greek or a anti-medical bore, you’re pretty hard-pressed to find anything you’d read on the beach.
I want things like Txtr and Sony’s e-reader to succeed but these things need books. You can do all sorts of exciting things you can do with a good e-ink reader provided you have content to display on it. E-readers will be marginal hardware, much like tablet PCs, until all publishers everywhere are willing to let their precious text out into the wild, something, given the parlous state of publishing, that won’t happen soon.
So yes, I’ll probably buy another Kindle. It’s the iPod of its media and will stay at the top of the stack (har!) for years until, perhaps, Microsoft or Apple set their sights on the ebook market. Is Txtr the answer? Maybe for some, but not for the mass market.
What’s preventing for example barnes & noble from doing an ebook store that can be connected to third party devices? Is that out of the question?
I suspect it’s publishers that are stalling innovation, a device like that is pretty simple to make.
However, Amazon’s Kindle success might force the publishers to change their views soon…
There’s lots of free popular content around.
Txtr, if you’re reading this:
(1) Sci-Fi novels that you can get your hands on
(2) ALL, I mean, *ALL* the CC-licensed and GFDL licensed content on the fricking web.
(3) Gutenberg
(4) maybe contact the Groklaw community for all the legal text that can be published – most of Groklaw is, AFAIK, reproducible text.
(5) Make wikipedia download bundles.
(6) The legal market is big, lawyers splurge on devices that help them – nothing like an e-reader to read up for a case before going to court.
(7) Identify niches like these and give them cheap content bundles.
(8) This is your chance to make the web work *for* you, as a new print medium, rather than against print.
(9) Print guys seem to be sloooow in their brains. To get them to speed up, you need to show them market share and greenbacks on the stock market. Till that day, maybe a year or so away, you need to live on free content of value – that should be wikipedia type stuff.
I’m sure you’ve thought of this. Or have you?
(10) TTS – good voices (unlike m$ Sam), multiple accents – US, GB, and languages – that’s work and it costs a bit too. But this plan seems to fit Obama’s “we have to work hard and rebuild” line.
Mobipocket has a developing set of stores with books to buy, so anything supporting that format isn’t entirely without support on that score.
Besides, the Kindle is only really available in the US, so that leaves the rest of the world as a viable market where it may take the initial lead.
Kindle is going global soon. I heard Jeff talking about it. I don’t know when but it could be with Kindle 3.0
Mobipocket is also the format for ebooks available through the vendor Overdrive which is the primary ebook service for public libraries. These can then be downloaded to numerous stypes of PDAs.
I believe Amazon has a (controlling?) interest in Mobi so it will be fine and grow to a certain degree. Also, it serves as a barrier against claims of Amz cornering the publishers into one format.
totally agree on that, David. Kindle a success?
I think Kindle should be sold outside of US first, before somebody talks about success. The competition has just begun. And its a great chance to gain back market share against Amazon in Europe. I doubt, though, that the large media companies are fast enough to realize that…
when apple sets their sites on the ebook market?
hmmm…i have an iphone with Stanza installed…perhaps you’ve heard of it?…Downloaded about 20 books so far, without any need to link to Amazon…all of them top-flight fiction novels…
Seems to me that I haven’t needed Amazon at all…
now, of course, it may be that you don’t dig the iphone for book reading…but I have to say, it handles the ebook thing pretty well from where I stand…
just a thought…
The reason why stanza doesn’t work is because your still reading from a screen. Kindles and e-books are great because of the e-ink tech and the serious battery life.
I had the same opinion of Ipod. Why bother paying for a high priced ipod when my mp3 player plays every latest song out there and in fact my mp3 player can record via mic, line in, has a built in speaker, is smaller and has built in fm tuner?
Most music enthusiasts would say they still want the Ipod because it has Itunes which is the best way to get music and the Ipod is very stylish.
Kindle has Amazon and it is quite effortless. Sony reader was out long before Kindle, but it mainly lacked a graceful way to get the books to the device. You needed a pc, usb etc.
Kindle saw that it’s advantage is to allow a person to tap into the superstore of books from anywhere. That makes it compelling to a book enthusiast to bring the device whereever they go.
They don’t have to plan out in advance, which novel they want to bring. They may not realize they are going to be stuck at the airport, hotel, traffic jam etc. Kindle really simplifies this.
Yes, you can get a book on Iphone, just as I can get any song on my mp3 player. I think there’s room for Iphone books and Kindle books. But there’s no question that Kindle (at least at this point) rules the digital book marketplace.
In uk waterstones connects with the sony e-reader, its only when amazon gets into exclusive contracts with publishers that it will be a issue but i would be quite surprised if that happens
it is the public library systems that should be distributing books. of course for free.
Actually, I think the devices like this only need partnerships. And the ability to read PDF files as well as their own proprietery formats as that is the format used by a majority of books being published online.
With a good reader which is able to render PDFs well, and a web browser, the reader will be able to get any book on to their reader. Of course, having a partnership with a retailer like barnes and noble will help to make the interface and buying process smooth for consumers, but that is not the first thing that these guys should be focussing on.
I don’t have a problem with Kindle if they improve it dramatically in the next generation. Let’s not forget that iPod was also clunky but look where it is now after 6 or so generations. I see great potential for Kindle especially if they add color to it and bring down the price a notch.
I’m actually not interested in reading books with this thing but in reading PDFs. Research papers, tutorials, printed tech crunch articles. So it would be quite useful for me.
Yes! Academics read PDF papers all the time! This is why I want one!
I’ll just wait for the video.
Why people insist on spending hundreds of dollars on a new gadget when they can download ebooks for free from the public library onto PDAs many already own for other purposes I’ll never understand.
There are no unicorns in the Black Forrest – believe me, I’ve been there more than once ;-)
To all current or potential eBook manufacturers: I don’t want to surf the web or check email with my eBook reader. I want to read books.
Put all your effort behind slick-looking hardware and straightforward, battery-saving software and I will buy you all day.
I agree with Derek on this. They can hold their own pro priority site but they have to be able to deliver a format adjusted PDF files. I don’t want to surf the web, check e-mail, phone people from a reading device. I want to be able to down load my interest and read them at my leisure, in a park.
And manufactures; keep it simple and keep it affordable. That was the strength of the paperback and you can make it yours. Affordable. This is mostly old technology. Put in our hands
Two problems with your assessment, imho.
1. There are plenty of things I’d want to read at Project Gutenberg. Just because a book is old doesn’t mean it’s dry. I happen to enjoy reading Dickens, Verne, Poe, Wells, Stephenson, Carol, Conrad, Fitzgerald, Maupassant, etc. All of those offered in Plucker, HTML, and text.
2. eBooks.com has 130,000 titles, including a ton of recent releases. Right now on their main page they have a Twilight book, Marley and Me, Revolutionary Road, a Malcolm Gladwell book, and a Nora Roberts book. Those all sound like beach reading type books to me… they offer them Mobipocket, Adobe, and Microsoft Reader formats — so long as the eReader hardware supports one of those, then eBooks.com has a pretty good selection to hook into.
Totally agree with Josh, extremely poor and superficial analysis… and quite arrogant too…
ciao
Luca
Yup… let me chime in too.
Its a bad analysis because its not based on whether the device is vaporware or not but based on the assertion that you NEED an iTunes like library.
As a person who reads a lot of word/adobe documents, as long as I can upload documents easily (wifi/usb) to the device, I’m more than happy to buy it.
It all comes down to copyright protection. If/when publishers believe that they’re not giving away the farm by releasing electronic versions of their books, then they’ll have no reason not to do so. Unfortunately, today, there’s such a thriving pirate culture, and indeed an anti-intellectual-property culture, that it understandably makes publishers nervous.
If you really want to support ebooks, then support efforts to protect them from piracy.
Baen books have shown the way forward on DRM by simply not having any. Last I heard they were making money selling eBooks with no DRM. People respond, by and large, to being trusted by being trustworthy. If someone tries to post a Baen eBook on a Usernet newsgroup, they are generally blasted for it and generally by the same people who are there happily downloading scanned versions of books from publishers who don’t trust their customers to honorable.
Maybe Baen is the exception and if the rest of the publishing industry followed suit and sold books without DRM, that eBook piracy would result in the death of the publishing industry. But I don’t think so. After all, look at the music industry, ground zero of IP piracy. More and more songs are being sold without DRM. If music executives think that the pilfer rate will be acceptably low with music, then I have a feeling the the publishing industry might come around to not assuming that all of their customers are crooks.
Good point. Trust breeds loyalty. Digital downloads are affordable for most of us. Distributors should open the rights and establish a relationship with the reader.
There are some Eink readers already compatible with Mobipocket: Cybook from Bookeen or Iliad from iRex.
EPub format seems also very promising, but it seems to be compatible only with the Sony Reader.
John,
Thanks for your review… It did trigger a whole discussion here about how we could forget the zebracorn in the specs!
We fixed that: http://reader.txtr.com/specifications.html
As you know, Germans love well engineered gear, the txtr reader will be for those who crave a better connected reading experience… anyway, we will keep you posted.
And btw. it’s barely a touch pad, not a touch screen, hm… but…
… let me think about that ;-)
Steini
Hello Andreas – When will it come out and what is the pricing?
An awesome eBook reader coming out (relatively) soon is the Plastic Logic reader. I’ve seen one in person – one of the execs did a demo at Stanford a month ago – and its awesome. With an 8.5 x 11 screen It’s aimed more at reading documents, newspapers and textbooks than leisure books (like the Kindle).
http://www.plasticlogic.com/
I’d love to know when the Plastic Logic Reader will actually be mass produced. Seems it has been long waiting…will it ever come?
I have been keeping an interested eye on this product to. Promising. They need a reality check on how they price them. Well see.
So where is Borders going with the notion of selling Sony eReaders in their stores? Will it help or hurt Borders?
The Kindle is enough to make brick and mortar stores take notice, if it were only done a bit better. But it isn’t the device, it’s the Buy anywhere for a third of the price Business model.
Apple needs to make text eBooks available via iTunes.On an iPhone/iPod however, you are not as likely to do extended reading, but 10 minutes clumps.
B&N and the like need to closely watch this distribution Model and prepare for it, and tie it in to their retail locations however they can (coupon, cheaper price within store or with purchase of dead tree edition) SparkNotes already epublishes more than they make available in paper.
I don’t know about that. I have read over a hundred full length novels, first on my HP Jornada (still probably the best ergonomics of any eReader of any size I have ever used), then my Windows Mobile phone and now my iPhone. Sometimes I did read for 10 minutes at a time, if I only had 10 minutes available. But a lot of the time I read for an hour, two hours, or more. If I ran out of battery, I would just go tethered and read while connected to a wall outlet. After all if I am going to read for more than the 3-4 hours I could get on a full battery, then I am likely do this at home where there is an outlet right next to my reading chair.
So don’t assume just because it is a phone that people won’t read on them or won’t be able to read on them for extended periods of time.
Amazon will fail.
The Kindle is just Amazon’s attempt to create an iTunes-like ecosystem in which you have to buy its overpriced hardware to read its books.
This will only work for a while before pressure from readers and publishers realises this closed ecosystem is limiting the size of the market.
The most profitable model for publishers- and best for readers- is one where the reader is cheap so everyone has one, and books are published in a universal format (like pdf). Then competition will be over who has the best content (books) not who has the most closed ecosystem.
So the txt reader may be ahead of its time, but it is the future. Just like music is standardising on the MP3 format and breaking the iTunes monopoly, e-books will standardise on the pdf format, ebook readers will be cheap and universal, and Amazon will find you can only keep a walled garden closed for so long.
Eventually people will realise its stupid to pay so much for the Kindle. Early adopters beware- you always end up looking stupid for paying so much.
The idea of eBooks is great.
you save space, no dead trees, no inventory costs and risk by the publishers that the book will sell 11 copies and leave them with unsold copies
But…. the loss of ownership of the content is what puts me off. With a book I can keep it. I can give it away. I can lend it to a friend… but most of the solutions out there limit what I can do (while charging me a bundle for the device *and* hitting me up for the hardback price for many of the books)…. and the choice isn’t there. If I glance at my current reading list and look to see what is available for the Kindle maybe 1 in 10 are in ebook format (and I don’t mean trying to read a cumbersome PDF or poorly formatted ASCII dump)
Offer me a device that has a lot of content, quality build and a business model that doesn’t make me feel like a victim and I’d spend money. I have a Zune Pass because of the way MS treat their customers (compared to the iTunes mess it’s amazing) but so far no eBook reader.
http://www.starhotspot.com/
“It will also contain a single hair from the mane of a rare zebracorn, a striped unicorn native only to the Black Forest of Germany.”
WTF??
Look at the special features specification, everybody!!
http://reader.txtr.com/specifications.html
Why not force Google to make all the books that they scan available to download as ebooks by any device as part of the settelment
http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/10/google-settles.html
Also, the place where this needs to take off first is school books. Why pay $50-$150 per book for colorful and heavy books when students can have a reader that’ll handle as many books as they want?
i’m not sure about america, but in singapore. all textbooks are available as a seperate cd. not like a e-book, as each company require their own software, but there are such thing that exists already. all i need to bring to school everyday is a tablet. all textbooks and worksheet are in it.
Dror is absolutely right. Google seems the way to go and university students (and others) are the perfect audience.
Seen that at Chaos Communication Congress last year in Berlin. Could that be an early prototype of the txtr reader? http://www.vimeo.com/2984025
Features I’d really appreciate in a book reader:
- Convenient size;
- Great screen readability both indoors and outdoors;
- Basic typography such as a nice non-extravagant set of fonts, ligatures support, kerning, smart hyphenation, text balancing, widows/orphan controls… If the reader could format the text like TeX does, I’m happy. Don’t tell me it’s not possible, I won’t believe you.
- Great battery life;
- Ability to put content on and off the device easily.
@seppelpeppel: It ineed is, at least German Deutschlandradio claims this to be so:
http://www.breitband-online.de/index.php?id=home&no_cache=1&run_mode=thema&thema_id=552
And its supposed to be an open platform device, Yeah!
I dont worry about formats. In the end all Ebooks will be DRM-free but watermarked PDFs anyway, so nobody cares how much Ebooks Amazon sells at the moment, because in the end every reader will display every Ebook (like today MP3 plays on all PMPs) and it will be the Device’s capabilities and features, not the shop tied/chained to it determining whether I buy it.
I don’t care for Amazon’s ebooks at all. All I want is a affordable e-ink reader I can throw all those PDFs on. I could really stop printing all the papers and book excerpts, articles and so on. The Kindle sucks, as I is ugly, too expensive for its features and is bundled with Amazon’s ebook store. The file formats I need are PDF and plain text.
I have the impression after reading this article: Amazon owns the book market and all rights of all books…
Nope.
One thing all (including Apple) will include one day:
- newspapers
- rss feeds
- social bookmarking
(online content can be read with txtr)
I think most of the content we read nowadays is not from books. However, I like to enjoy a good book 2 a month. Aren’t we looking for something that combines all – iphone? not for me. ink is much easier to read.
strange article. have you really started listening to mp3s when the itunes store opened? does anyone remember napster? as soon as there are a few working and open readers around, the internet will be flooded with books. you don’t really think all those kids in their release groups out there will wait for a market to develop. the whole digital drama that has been affecting the music and film industry will continue with books as soon as the readers become cheap enough. why would anyone still want a drm-crippled kindle then?
don’t get me wrong, i’m a musician myself and i all but like this, but i guess it is the very meaning of what they call the digital age.
and, whats more, talking about e-readers, we’re not even talking bout books. we’re talking about every written text on the net. there will be converters that’ll have your slashdot rss feed articles automatically uploaded to the device every morning, and there you go, sitting on the subway, reading the news. hey, why not call it bookcast *hip* ?
Feedbooks and Stanza show that you can do great ebooks–even beach reading–without Amazon.
when is txtr coming out?
can you buy beta units in Germany?
i want to do testing in production environment in Silicon Valley. High exposure to executive management.
This was written and it shows by an American. There is this small continent called Europe that reads quite a lot, in more than one language that so far aren’t being catered for. Some makers simply aren’t releasing anything and some are trying to fob us off with the previous model. Not to mention the fact that open formats are better. Then there is the DRM issue, just look at what happend to the George Orwell (1984 and Animal Farm) ebooks on some peoples devices.
you said it brett.
in any case you can order it for christmas 2009
reader.txtr.com