[Web4lib] Amazon's Kindle e-book reader

[Kyle Felker]

I did a few hours worth of digging and reading on the Kindle...if
anyone is interested, here is my own analysis of what I see.  In short,
I don't see that this does anything substantial to make ebooks a
practical, affordable alternative to paper for the average consumer. 
Read on if you want to know why.
 
I saw the announcement about the product when I went to check on the
status of an order at Amazon, and was initially excited.  However, my
enthusiasm abruptly caught cold and died when I read some of the
technical information (and saw the price tag!).  Kindle uses a
proprietary e-book format (.azw files), which makes the kindle store and
the kindle ebook reader inextricably coupled.  It can read files in a
few other formats (text and Mobi), but anything you buy from Amazon will
only be readable on the kindle.  There are a great many vendors selling
consumer ebooks, but they are doing so using an alphabet soup of
formats, many of which are entirely proprietary, and/or ruthlessly
"protected" by DRM.  What the consumer ebook market needs is an ebook
version of the MP3 file format: something that's supported by the
majority of the ebook reader hardware, and in which most content can be
obtained or easily converted to.  Until we have this, ebook usage is too
tied to a particular vendor and service model and too limited in what
you can do with it to be appealing.
 
Put another way:  vendors and publishers are going to have a hard time
selling a lot of ebooks until they stop strangling the market with
proprietary file formats and draconian DRM restrictions.  Until this
happens, ANY ebook platform is going to have a hard time succeeding.
 
One of the reasons I like buying electronic music is because the
selection is better than in any physical store.  Ebooks, however, have a
long way to go in that regard.  The Kindle store has better selection
than any online ebook store I've been to yet, but there are still titles
I can't get in electronic format.  So even if I had the money to convert
my seven plus bookcases worth of physical books to ebooks, it would be
impossible to do so completely.  And even if I could find all the books
from different e-book vendors, again, they are in so many different
formats, many "protected" by draconian DRM, that I'd have to buy
multiple expensive devices just to access them, or spend time working
with format converters.  
  
The Kindles other features sounded cool until I really examined them. 
Sure, it sounds great to get newspapers delivered wirelessly to your
kindle...until I remembered that a lot of that stuff is free on the web,
and I can already access it on my handheld.  And why, oh why would I pay
to read blogs when I can get the content for free via RSS?  That leaves
magazine subscriptions...and I don't read popular magazines.  Even if I
did, a $400 magazine reader is...pretty hard for me to justify to
myself.
 
It doesn't help that the devices are so expensive.  The sony Reader is
$300, and the kindle is $400.  I can buy a lot of paper books for $400. 
Add to that the fact that if I really wanted to convert my physical
library to ebooks, I'd have to repurchase all my existing books in
digital format, and the price tag rockets skyward faster than the space
shuttle.  Making the transition from a physical music collection to a
digital one was easy, painless, and almost entirely free.  Making the
transition to ebooks will be none of those things.  
 
Until the consumer ebook market has something that functions as a
standard format, so that I can choose the device and the content service
separately, and so that I can be assured the content I'd purchase will
be readable on most devices, I'm not interested.  Until consumer ebook
readers cost $200 or less, I'm not interested.  Until converting my
physical library to digital format is as easy and cheap as converting my
music library was, I'm not interested.  Electronic paper displays and
"whispernet" do not solve any of these problems.  And that is why I
think Kindle is unlikely to succeed.  I certainly won't be buying one.
 
 
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Kyle Felker
Technology Coordinator
Washington and Lee University Library
Phone: 540-458-8653
Email: felkerk at wlu.edu 
Chat: geeklibrary (aol) techbookgeek (yahoo)
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