[Web4lib] Amazon's Kindle e-book reader

[Brian Gray]

I think were ebooks, kindle, and future readers will excel is not the
people that grew up on paper books and already have existing
locations. It is catching the newer generations now, so they grow up
in this style of information consumption.

I hate all these restrictive formats and lock down restrictions. But
does Amazon already have enough locked in customers that may consider
this alternative? If they already have enough potential customers, the
format restrictions probably gives them more power to negotiate with
publishers.

I have not seen it, but does the kindle and the format allow for
searching within a document? I am thinking does it have a use as
reference tool.

Brian Gray
mindspiral at gmail.com

On Nov 20, 2007 2:57 PM, Kyle Felker <FelkerK at wlu.edu> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
>
> **********************************************
> 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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-- 
Brian Gray
mindspiral at gmail.com